Berbers or the Berber peoples, also called by their contemporary self-name Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs in the Arab migrations to the Maghreb.
The Berbers are and have been of great interest me primarily due to initially hearing the claim that 40% of an Ait Haddidu Berber population examined in the 1950s was Rh-.
This has now been questioned, though not ruled out.
The Maghreb region in northwestern Africa is believed to have been inhabited by Berbers from at least 10,000 BC. Cave paintings, which have been dated to twelve millennia before present, have been found in the Tassili n’Ajjer region of southeastern Algeria. Other rock art has been discovered at Tadrart Acacus in the Libyan desert. A Neolithic society, marked by domestication and subsistence agriculture and richly depicted in the Tassili n’Ajjer paintings, developed and predominated in the Saharan and Mediterranean region (the Maghreb) of northern Africa between 6000 and 2000 BC (until the classical period).
The areas of North Africa that have retained the Berber language and traditions best have been, in general, Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. Much of Berber culture is still celebrated among the cultural elite in Morocco and Algeria, the Kabylia, the Aurès, etc. The Kabyles were one of the few peoples in North Africa who remained independent during successive rule by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Ottoman Turks and the Carthaginians. Even after the Arab conquest of North Africa, the Kabyle people still maintained possession of their mountains.