What's interesting is that the population remained isolated for tens of thousands of years.

Generally speaking, people move around and are promiscuous. Staying isolated for that long implies a physical barrier, because cultures generally don't survive for 40,000 years. But an isolated population means genetic issues - but if the population is big then they should have spread at least somewhat.

I’ve been enjoying a podcast called Our Prehistory. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, the first few episodes get really into this, and it’s definitely sunk some misconceptions I had about evolution (that other species groups lived among the Homo Sapiens), why they died out, more branches than originally thought etc.

Paper @ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08793-7

"Our admixture dating analysis points to events far back in time, suggesting a more heterogeneous spread of pastoralism and food production in the Sahara compared to Morocco and East Africa"

Curious how this post says '5 Hours ago' but if you search or click 'smithsonianmag.com' up there, you see this as a post that says 3 days ago?

oh my god they were roommates