Genetic studies on Moroccans
In prehistoric times, the Sahara desert to the south and the Mediterranean Sea to the north were important geographical barriers to influx from Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.
Though Northwest Africa has experienced gene flow from the surrounding regions, it has also undergone long periods of genetic isolation in some parts.
North Africa and Morocco were slowly drawn into the wider emerging Mediterranean world by the West Asian Semitic Phoenicians, who established trading colonies and settlements in the early Classical period.
In 670 AD, the first Arab conquest of the North African coastal plain took place under Uqba ibn Nafi, a general serving under the Umayyads of Damascus.
He convinced the Awraba Berber tribes to break their allegiance to the distant Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and he founded the Idrisid Dynasty in 788.
In the 13th and 14th centuries the Merinids held power in Morocco and strove to replicate the successes of the Almohads by military campaigns in Algeria and Iberia.
Under the Saadi Dynasty, the country repulsed Ottoman incursions and a Portuguese invasion at the battle of Ksar el Kebir in 1578.
The reign of Ahmad al-Mansur brought new wealth and prestige to the Sultanate, and a large expedition to West Africa inflicted a crushing defeat on the Songhay Empire in 1591.
The Almohads helped the Arab tribes to pass the barriers of Atlas mountains, and accelerated their expansion to Morocco to complete the nomadic Bedouin predominance over the lowlands of the Maghreb as far as the Atlantic coastal plains.
The Almohad ruler Abd al-Mu'min expected opposition from the Masmuda to whom he was a stranger, so he gained Arab support to secure the succession of his son.
With the decline of the Almohad army, the Arab Bedouins became the most powerful force in the Moroccan plains, and no ruler could have held authority there without their support.
[3] A genetic study published in January 2012 stated that the indigenous North West African ancestry appears most closely related to populations outside of Africa but "divergence between Moroccan people and Near Eastern/Europeans likely precedes the Holocene (>12,000 ya) and The Paleolithic (>40.000BC).
[3] Various population genetics studies along with historians such as Gabriel Camps and Charles-André Julien lend support to the idea that the bulk of the gene pool of modern Northwest Africans, irrespective of linguistic group, is of Neolithic origin.
[33] Its dominant subclade E-M35 is thought to have emerged in East-Africa about 22,400 years ago, and would have later dispersed into North Africa and from there into West Asia.
[4] This heavily implied gene flow and remodeled the genetic structure of the Maghreb, rather than being a mere cultural replacement as claimed by older studies.
Concerning E-M123 without checking for the E-M34 SNP is found at small frequencies in Morocco A Low regional percentages for E-M123 was reported in Moroccan Berbers around 3%.
A thorough study by Cruciani et al. (2004) which analyzed populations from Morocco concludes that the North African pattern of Y-chromosomal variation (including both J1 and R1b haplogroups) is largely of Neolithic origin, which suggests that the Neolithic transition in this part of the world was accompanied by demic diffusion of Berber-speaking pastoralists from the Algerian Desert into Eastern Morocco, although later papers have suggested that this date could have been as long as ten thousand years ago, with the transition from the Oranian to the Capsian culture in North Africa.
[54] The major components of Y-DNA haplogroups present in Moroccan Berbers (E3b ; 94%) are shared with European and neighboring North African and Near Eastern populations.
Some of the major percentages identified were: The prehistoric populations of Morocco, who were ancestral to Berbers, were related to the wider group of Paleo-Mediterranean peoples.
[64][65] DNA analysis has found commonalities between Berber Moroccan populations and those of the Sami people of Scandinavia showing a link dating from around 9,000 years ago.
[66] Around 5000 BC, the populations of North Africa were primarily descended from the makers of the Iberomaurusian and Capsian cultures, with a more recent intrusion associated with the Neolithic Revolution.
[68] DNA evidence suggests that during the Last Glacial Maximum, a period between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago, large ice sheets over a kilometer thick covered much of Northern Europe, making the region uninhabitable to humans.
Refugees during this period are believed to have been in Iberia, the Balkans and Italy and therefore was some gene flow from North Africa into Southern Europe.
This could explain the presence of genetic lineages in Eastern Europe and as far north as Russia, that appear to have prehistoric links to Northwest Africa, mainly Morocco (see mtDNA).
[71] According to the demic diffusion model, these Middle Eastern farmers either replaced or interbred with the local hunter-gather populations that had been living in Europe since the "out of Africa" migration.
[74] The first Agricultural societies in the Middle East are generally thought to have emerged from the Natufian Culture, which existed in Palestine from 12,000 BCE-10,000 BCE.
[75] In 2013, skeletons belonging to the makers of the Epipaleolithic Iberomaurusian culture, which were excavated at the prehistoric sites of Taforalt and Afalou, were analyzed for ancient DNA.
All of the specimens belonged to maternal clades associated with either North Africa or the northern and southern Mediterranean littoral, indicating gene flow between these areas since the Epipaleolithic.
[80] And according to Cherni et al. 2008 "the post-Last glacial maximum expansion originating in Iberia not only led to the resettlement of Europe but also of North Africa".
[82] However, in September 2010, a thorough study on Berber mtDNA by Sabeh Frigi concluded that some haplogroups such as L3* were much older and introduced by an ancient African gene flow around 20,000 years ago, while others such as L2a and L3b were having more recent origins.
