Pharoah's Baboons

[Grant]

Gurey,

The only problem you and I have is semantic. Most of what you write is also what I'm reading. If you want to call the hunter/gatherer groups Cushitic and Somaloid, go for it. For sure they are E3b (x) and the pure "khoisan" are A. But.....

https://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordp ... ome-study/

The movement out of the Cushitic area in Egypt/Nubia began 24,000 BP. Part of the problem we face is in distinguishing between those groups that are Samaale and those that are just Somali. Prior to 1000 AD the Samaales were just part of an undifferentiated migration out of the Sahara and the Nile valley. Clearly something happened to distinguish among the groups.

"The data suggest that the male Somali population is a branch of the East African population – closely related to the Oromos in Ethiopia and North Kenya – with predominant E3b1 cluster lineages that were introduced into the Somali population 4000–5000 years ago, and that the Somali male population has approximately 15% Y chromosomes from Eurasia and approximately 5% from sub-Saharan Africa."

The Oromo/Samaale migration overlays previous migrations from the same area that are not culturally related and can be distinguished genetically.

http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v13/ ... 1390a.html

"A special branch of E3b1, cluster italic gamma, which was defined by the presence of the otherwise rare Y STR allele 11 in DYS19, was observed in high frequencies in small samples of male Boranas (Oromos) in North Kenya, Ethiopian Oromos and Somali males, while the E3b1 cluster italic gamma was found in low frequencies in non-Oromos from Ethiopia, Bantus from Kenya, North Egyptians10 and was almost absent in populations outside the Horn of Africa. Other clusters of haplogroup E3b1 (alpha, beta and delta) that are found in European, Arab, North and East African populations were not found in Oromos from North Kenya (Boranas) or Ethiopia, and found in only one of 23 Somali males.10"

I admit to going mostly on the basis of culture in applying the term "Khoisan", but it is in the literature and there is clearly some basis for it in fact.
The Eyle, Aweer and Midgan are included in several lists of Khoisan relatives. The Eyle sit on an archaeological record that goes back at least to the neolithic. And somehow the Khoe ended up with a 31% Eurasian component, which this study seems to explain:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/7/2632.long

"Based on these analyses, we can propose a model for the spread of west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa as follows. First, a large-scale movement of people from west Eurasia into Ethiopia around 3,000 y ago (perhaps from southern Arabia and associated with the D’mt kingdom and the arrival of Ethiosemitic languages) resulted in the dispersal of west Eurasian ancestry throughout eastern Africa. This was then followed by a migration of an admixed population (perhaps pastoralists related to speakers of Khoe–Kwadi languages) from eastern Africa to southern Africa, with admixture occurring ∼1,500 y ago. Advances in genotyping DNA from archaeological samples may allow aspects of this model to be directly tested."

The Afroasiatic is larger than just the Cushitic. And it clearly overlaid the Khoisan.

[Grant]

James,

Please see my response to Gurey. D'mt is associated with the movement of the Euroasiatic into East Africa, which could tie it to the Khoe.

Ancient Azania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azania

"The 1st century AD Greek travelogue the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea first describes Azania based on its author's intimate knowledge of the area. Chapter 15 of the Periplus suggests that Azania could be the littoral area south of present-day Somalia (the "Lesser and Greater Bluffs", the "Lesser and Greater Strands", and the "Seven Courses").[3] Chapter 16 clearly describes the emporium of Rhapta, located south of the Puralean Islands at the end of the Seven Courses of Azania, as the "southernmost market of Azania". The Periplus does not mention any dark-skinned "Ethiopians" among the area's inhabitants. They only later appear in Ptolemy's Geographia, but in a region far south, around the "Bantu nucleus" of northern Mozambique. According to John Donnelly Fage, these early Greek documents altogether suggest that the original inhabitants of the Azania coast, the "Azanians", were of the same ancestral stock as the Afro-Asiatic populations to the north of them along the Red Sea. Subsequently, by the 10th century AD, these original "Azanians" had been replaced by early waves of Bantu settlers.[4]

Later Western writers who mention Azania include Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 170 CE) and Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century CE).

Azania was known to the Chinese as Zésàn (澤散) by the 3rd century AD.[5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himyarite_Kingdom

"The Ḥimyarite Kingdom was the dominant polity in Arabia until 525. Its economy was based on agriculture, and foreign trade centered on the export of frankincense and myrrh. For many years, the kingdom was also the major intermediary linking East Africa and the Mediterranean world. This trade largely consisted of exporting ivory from Africa to be sold in the Roman Empire. Ships from Ḥimyar regularly travelled the East African coast, and the state also exerted a large amount of Influence both cultural, religious and political over the trading cities of East Africa whilst the cities of East Africa remained independent. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes the trading empire of Himyar and its ruler Charibael (Karab El Watar Yuhan'em II), who is said to have been on friendly terms with Rome:

"23. And after nine days more there is Saphar, the metropolis, in which lives Charibael, lawful king of two tribes, the Homerites and those living next to them, called the Sabaites; through continual embassies and gifts, he is a friend of the Emperors."
— Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, Paragraph 23.[3]"


The Periplus was written sometime in the first to third centuries. Baraawe was only established by about 800 AD, Merka in the 10th century. The Chinese visited in the 14th. So the Azania of the Periplus is the Swahilli coast to the south. If Mogadishu is the Serapion of the Periplus, as is usually represented, why would the author call the same area Azania?

[gurey25]

Grant we clearly have a problem with semantics.
The biggest is the use of khoisan because its a specific group.

secondly you are assuming that the Eurasian genes are from D'mt, when it is from the cushtic migration.
The Beja closely resemble groups that ranged from Sinai all the way to their current location massawa, the afar/saho preceded them in the migration south.
So your theory that punt was inhabited primarily by khoisanlike people is weakened greatly by the clear presence of pastoral cushites in the region of eritrea long before 1500 bc.
The las geel paintings also show camels, which arrived from arabia as early as 2000-1500 bc and their domestication is confirmed to be yemen.
Long horn cattle as depicted by las gaal paintings and camels are a mark of pastoral cushites,
The route of their spread is in an area inhabited by cushites i.e from sinai to western desert along the coast to eritrea down to somaliland.

There are no such things as wild camels in africa, and wild herds became extinct by the time of the Assyrians.
You can tell the difference between wild camels and domesticated ones by their genetic diversity,
Domesticated camels are very diverse compared to the wild ones, due to mixing along trade routes.

D'Mt was a development of semites from yemen setting up trading colonies and moving slightly inland, while mixing with the local
population, which would not be khoisan type hunter gatheres but pastoral cushites, there might have been khoisan like hunter gatherers in isolated groups in the interior, but the majority of the population would be cushites.

Now about Samaales, even though the phenotype is very close and indistinguishable from Beja and Afar/saho from northern somalis, but the language is very different.
Somali and oromo+sidama are much closer and must have comprised 1 group, this looks like a different migration wave along a different route most likely towards the Lake Tana into the highlands and down into the lowlands, and this is the last wave so its most recent.

in conclusion Punt were cushites not Khoisan, although they have mixed with the native hunter gatherers,
and not samaale because the samaale became a distinct group recently at least 1000 years after hatshetputs reign.

[Grant]

Gurey,

I am glad to see that we are hitting the same material and agree on the parts that we do.

The Eurasian genes come from the Levant, so there must have been multiple migrations to get them into both the Saharan Cushites and the Khoe-Kwadi that arrived in southern Africa with the asian sheep and goats. The first must have been early and the last especially late.

Note that what the significant D'mt article posits is "a large-scale movement of people from west Eurasia into Ethiopia around 3,000 y ago." These folks would not have been Cushitic.

The San migrated south 6,000 or more years ago, the Khoe only about 2,000. The Khoe are 31% Euroasiatic, so there is clearly some connection that would almost certainly have gone through the Horn. The years and the people appear to connect at D'mt.

[James Dahl]

Grant I am very puzzled as to how you decided Khoi people are the original inhabitants of Somalia. Is it the clicks in some south Cushitic languages?

There is no evidence of significant population replacement in Somalia in the last 8000 years.

[Grant]

James,

The Khoisan group was the only human group for 200,000 years. They were everywhere. They have only been non-dominant for the last 20,000. They were a huge group, with only about 100,000 left. Check this:

http://news.asiaone.com/news/world/no-i ... page=0%2C0

Tell me about the clicks in some south Cushitic languages. I have heard of several tribes speaking Cushitic languages without a genetic basis.

-----------

I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the population replacement.

The number of Somalis outside Somalia just about equals the number inside. The plantation system in the Shabelle valley brought in a slave population of Bantu that now number something over a million. One population estimate says a third of the population is "minority". Even given this, the Barwaaniis and Bajunis are all but gone. Politics and the weather have shifted a northern population into the South, further disrupting what was already a delicate balance.

I guess I may not understand what you mean by "significant".

[Xildiiid]

You're willing to divert your own thread just to prove a point you can't prove.

Give up white man.

Established Facts.

•Punt = the southern coast of the Red Sea and the gulf of Aden (Horn of Africa).
•Puntites = Proto Cushitic speaking groups who were culturally, biologically and linguistically similar to their Ancient Egyptians relatives as depicted by the Ancient Egyptians themselves.

James,

It's only Dahalo in East Africa (Kenya) that got click sounds and they shifted to a Cushitic language after coming into contact with southern Cushites.

[James Dahl]

The horn of Africa hasn't had population replacement, it's had culture replacement. Every invader or immigrant merchant just merged into the Islamic/Christian/Waaqafeena melting pot.

The reason why Tigrayans and Somali are weirdly close in terms of genetic heritage is because the Saho genes still dominate, 2000 years later.

There were probably 200 different tribes in the Horn during ancient Egyptian times, now there are 3 main ones, Habesh, Somali and Oromo. The people who make up those 3 groups are the same 200 tribes though, 2000 years of assimilation later.

[Grant]

Got Milk?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9714000676

"The G-13915 allele is most common in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, suggesting an origin from that region.17, 19 and 77 Its presence in populations from northern, central, and eastern Africa is consistent with historical gene flow from western Asia into those regions.14, 15, 17, 18 and 77 Within eastern Africa, the G-13915 variant was present only in Kenyan Nilo-Saharan pastoralists and Afroasiatic-speaking agropastoralists mainly from northern Kenya (Table S1; Figures 2 and 3). This variant was also found in the Afroasiatic-speaking Beja pastoralists (∼17%) from northern Sudan and in two other Afroasiatic-speaking populations, namely the Beta Israel from Ethiopia and the Arabic Baggara from Cameroon, at lower frequency (<3%). In addition, we observed this variant outside of Africa in the Temani (from Yemen) and Palestinians at low to moderate frequency (Table S1; Figures 2 and 3). It has been estimated that the G-13915 variant originated ∼4,095 (±2,045) years ago in the Arabian Peninsula, possibly as a result of the domestication of the Arabian camel ∼6,000 years ago,19 and it might have been introduced into eastern Africa within the last 1,400 years as a result of the Arab expansion that accompanied the spread of Islam.15 and 78 Our observation of the G-13915 polymorphism in the Beja from northern Sudan and the Arabic Baggara from Cameroon, both pastoralist populations with some Arab ancestry, is in agreement with the suggested geographic origin of the G-13915 allele in the Arabian Peninsula and the inferred age of this variant.17, 19, 29, 77, 79 and 80 Although most haplotypes containing the G-13915 variant were present predominantly in the northern Kenyan populations, we found that several of these haplotypes were shared with other populations from Sudan and the Arabian Peninsula, consistent with a scenario of gene flow between populations from these geographic regions (Figures 4B and 4C).

We observed the G-13907 allele mainly in Afroasiatic-speaking populations from northern Sudan, northern Kenya, and Ethiopia (the highest frequency occurred in the Beja from northern Sudan) but did not observe this variant in any of the populations outside of these geographic regions, consistent with other studies.14, 15, 16 and 19 Given that the G-13907 variant has been identified mainly in Cushitic Afroasiatic-speaking populations from Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia and that it is absent in southern Cushitic speakers from Tanzania, the most likely origin of the G-13907 allele might be within eastern Ethiopian Cushitic-speaking populations who migrated into northern Kenya and the Sudan within the last ∼5,000 years.29, 81 and 82 More extensive analysis of populations in northeastern Africa will be necessary for gaining further insight into the history of this variant."

[James Dahl]

The Somali brought that with them more than 8000 years ago

[gurey25]

Grant again the timeline..

Sheep and goats and cattle are near eastern and travelled into the horn with the back migration,
this was the cushites, the khaoisan admixture is much more recent .

Is it possible that the khoisans aquired their eurasian genes and lactose tolerance from semitic settlers?
yes its plausible but we need to confirm the genetics, there is no study confirming this yet.

but even with this the punt is khoisan theory doesnt add up when the region was choke full of pastoral cushites.

Now again lets look at cases of semetic settlers in the horn, like zeylac, down to moqadishu, brawa
did these settlers immedietly get off their ships, bring their livestock and takeup pastoralism??

no..
They established entreports and traded with the natives and established farms.
Did D'mt introduce near eastern livestock package to the hunter gatherer khoisans in the area?
implausible because there are already pastoral cushites preceding the semetic settlement by millennia.

Did the khoisans contribute to the genetics of the population?
yes , so did the semites, and it is highly likely that khoisan hunter gatherers persisted in the region, in isloted areas
like they have done throughout africa.


I know that the distances covered might be hard to imagine,
but remember even surviving somali nomadic clans range over 1000KM during the annual migrations.

The distance from the eastern desert in egypt, down to the nuba highlands and the beja triangle towards where d"mt was
is within the disntance traveled by small somali nomadic sub sub clans right now.

The distance from D'mt to Somaliland is much much shorter.

the back migration into africa from the near east was more ~ 7000BC
several thousands of years before hatshetputs journey,
before even the formation of semeitc language and identity.

[Grant]

Gurey,

None of the back migrations were Cushitic. They were all Eurasiatic, from the Western edge of the Levant. This area is associated with the origins of agriculture. The Natufians were the source of the grain seed grown in Egypt, both barley and wheat. The goats and sheep also came from this area no earlier than 6,000 years ago. The earliest known sheep remains in Somalia are from Qagiskabe rock shelter and date to 3,500 BC. The separate domestication of Bos Africanus is still debated.

Look at the Semitic corridor in this map of the Afroasiatic, that divides the Cushitic.

http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling ... iatic.html

Read the lactose article all the way through.

" It has been estimated that the G-13915 variant originated ∼4,095 (±2,045) years ago in the Arabian Peninsula, possibly as a result of the domestication of the Arabian camel ∼6,000 years ago,19 and it might have been introduced into eastern Africa within the last 1,400 years as a result of the Arab expansion that accompanied the spread of Islam."

I do not imagine that the camel peoples would have been able to travel those distances before they got the camel. If the camel came with Islam, that might explain a lot.

Yes Gurey, the timeline. The Samaales began to fill the plain of Somalia about the first century AD. The Khoe arrived in Southern Africa about the same time. They had sheep, goats and cattle and a pastoralist culture. They carry the Eurasian clades. By 300 AD Bantu had occupied most of Africa south of the Sahara. The Masai reached the Kenyan plains from the Sudan in 1400-1500. The Bantu and other migrations, and the subsequent colonial migrations and appropriations, decimated these people.

[Xildiiid]

Wishes and opinions are not facts.

The oldest rock art depicting goats, sheep and long horned cattle is from Dhambalin in Togdheer region of Somaliland. The cave paintings are estimated to be over 5000 years old and in these paintings wild animals such as giraffes, antelopes, turtles, wild dogs can be seen as well as a mounted hunter on what looks like a horse and the hunter has long hair thats hanging down on his shoulders. There's also painting of tall men dressed in white cloaks with their hands out as if they're praying.

A similar description has been given by ancient sources about the Cushites as being tall, red skinned and having long hair

[Grant]

Yes Hildiid, wishes and opinions are not facts. This is actual research, with radiocarabon dates.

The Cushites of the Sahara and the Sudan plains were cattle herders more than 6,000 years ago. The folks on the Red Sea plains were barely getting started two thousand years later. They ate a lot of fish. The area that later became Samaale controlled was actually retarded in the development of herding. The earliest evidence for sheep here is 2000 BC, and the development was likely independent and local.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... a_Djibouti

"The site of Wakrita is a small Neolithic establishment located on a wadi in the tectonic depression of Gobaad in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. The 2005 excavations yielded abundant ceramics that enabled us to define one Neolithic cultural facies of this region, which was also identified at the nearby site of Asa Koma. The faunal remains confirm the importance of fishing in Neolithic settlements close to Lake Abbé , but also the importance of bovine husbandry and, for the first time in this area, evidence for caprine herding practices. Radiocarbon dating places this occupation at the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C., similar in range to Asa Koma. These two sites represent the oldest evidence of herding in the region, and they provide a better understanding of the development of Neolithic societies in this region."

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... Somaliland

"Although early food production is not as well-studied in the Horn of Africa as in other regions of the world, recent archaeological and archaeozoological studies have yielded new data suggesting that pastoral societies emerged at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE – two millennia later than in the neighbouring regions of the Sahel, NW Kenya, and Yemen. Understanding the processes through which herding began in the Horn is a complex task due to region's geographic position between multiple possible sources areas for livestock, and its immense environmental diversity caused by variations in topography and rainfall. Considering new evidence from Djibouti, Somalia, and southwest Ethiopia in tandem with prior data from multiple parts of the Horn, this article proposes that the diffusion of herding occurred via different processes in different areas. Data from northern and western parts of the Horn suggest slow migration of Sudanese groups and/or dense contacts with transfer of techniques and practices, beginning in foothills near today's Sudan border and, at least in the North, slowly spreading deep into the highlands of the Horn. In the eastern part of the Horn of Africa, herding practices and pottery technology may have come from Yemen via contacts across the Red Sea, or from Sudan via contacts through the coastal plain of Eritrea and/or the northern highlands of the Horn; because ceramics are absent or of specific local design it is likely that herding began via selective adoption of domestic animals rather than through in-migration of pastoralists. In the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia, livestock and pottery (with no foreign influence) appear much later, at the end of the 1st millennium BCE. Several environmental factors may have helped maintain southwest Ethiopia as a cultural isolate where people had only a late interest in switching their subsistence to food production and where incorporation of livestock and ceramic production took place in longstanding, highly conservative, technological and economic systems."

This fits quite well with the current conventional beliefs with respect to the origin of the Samaales and the Cushitic migrations:

http://www.kubadda.com/News/Article/tab ... ement.aspx

"The Somalis form a subgroup of the Omo-Tana called Sam. Having split from the main stream of Cushite peoples about the first half of the first millennium B.C., the proto-Sam appear to have spread to the grazing plains of northern Kenya, where protoSam communities seem to have followed the Tana River and to have reached the Indian Ocean coast well before the first century A.D. On the coast, the proto-Sam splintered further; one group (the Boni) remained on the Lamu Archipelago, and the other moved northward to populate southern Somalia. There the group's members eventually developed a mixed economy based on farming and animal husbandry, a mode of life still common in southern Somalia. Members of the proto-Sam who came to occupy the Somali Peninsula were known as the so-called Samaale, or Somaal, a clear reference to the mythical father figure of the main Somali clan-families, whose name gave rise to the term Somali.

The Samaale again moved farther north in search of water and pasturelands. They swept into the vast Ogaden (Ogaadeen) plains, reaching the southern shore of the Red Sea by the first century A.D. German scholar Bernd Heine, who wrote in the 1970s on early Somali history, observed that the Samaale had occupied the entire Horn of Africa by approximately 100 A.D."

What now seems likely to me is that the proto-Sam moved north, encountered camels coming from Arabia, adapted them culturally and began moving south to fill the land. That would make both Samaale origin stories true.

[gurey25]

Grant the back migration ~7000 of a Eurasian population are the proto-afroasiatic speakers i.e Sudanic LAnguage and Cushites and what would be the population of lower egypt.

The radiocarbon dating of pottery to 2000BC along with caprids and bovines, suggests a settled society, engaged in fishing and marine trade, not purely nomadic pastoralists.
You will note that todays remaining nomads use hardly any ceramics, they use mostly wooden implements, bowls utensils
By relying on ceramics you will make the bulk of the population invisible.

for example look at the gulf coast of arabia.
you had dozens of fishing and trading villages e,g Manama, Dubai, Abudhabi, Rasalkhamia, Kuwait.
Fish provided a large part of the diet, so did livestock.
But they represented less than 10% of the total population that were pure Nomads ( Bedioun)
Bedioun do not use ceramic pottery either.

The presense of caprids and cattle suggests cushites, not khoisans
hunter gatheres do not decide to raise livestock overnight, it comes from cultural diffusion over a long period of time.
There would not be any camels because the beja introduced it after 2000BC.

You do not ship camels or livestock by sea, this is a highly peculiar activity,
why would yemeni traders bring camels on their ships?

They did not do it in later years during settlement of moqadishu.

but we are generally on the same page regards to migration of proto-somalis.

In regards to Punt, Somalis are a non issue, only entering the horn more than 1000 years later.
I also agree that the horn was retarded in development compared to Sudan.
Evidence strongly points to Eritrea as punt, with some small coastal settlements in somaliland a minor affilitaed culture.

I agree with the northern migration of samaales from the tana river,
I believe at this stage there was not much of a divergence between samaales and oromo +sidaama, and the languages were mutually inteligable.

The biggest point of divergence is when they met camel herding pro-saho/afar in the north and adapted camel herding.
The environmental changes and the lower rainfall, gave them a boost over the others, just like it did in Nrthern Kenya between 1870 and 1930.

To sum it up, traders do not transport camels on sea voyages, they transport trading goods.
Camels will diffuse through the easiest route, from Eritrea along with the cushite pastoralists.
archeological evidence cannot be used with purely nomadic pastrolaists because they dont use them.

Only evidence of bones and their dating will be effective..