1st century Nubian mercenary genome from Serbia (Roman Empire)

[Shimbiris]

I am in contact with an academic in the know regarding some new aDNA papers on the way and I'm sorry to inform some of you that we have Old, Middle and New Kingdom samples on the way and, so far, they mostly don't look anymore proto-Nilotic than Copts, some even less so:

There is some upcoming data from Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt that I've seen, some of it has been discussed already on the forum. Basically the Old Kingdom samples look North African with a small amount of Seh_Gabi_C-type ancestry, and very little SSA, then during the Middle Kingdom there's a shift towards a SW Asian/Near Eastern profile which resembles that of the few ancient Egyptians we have and present-day Copts, this corresponds with the large influx of "Asiatics" starting from the 1st intermediate period. SSA ancestry also increases in time. Haplogroups so far are E-M35 and J1-P58 (wish there were more resolution, looks like we'll have to sift through the BAM files again).
​

The old kingdom people are probably the so far closest we're gonna get to Horners' non-Yemeni MENA ancestors. Some sort of intermediate in Egypt between Iberomaurusians and Natufians with a little bit of proto-Nilotic. Though I wager our ancestors lacked that Iran-Chalcolithic (Seh_Gabi) stuff. Now, I would never rule out that some ancient Masris on the border with Nubia like in Luxor were more proto-Nilotic for sure but the majority probably were mostly MENA with the only really significant "SSA" in them being "Ancestral North-African" that has mostly survived haplogroup wise in the form of their dominant Y-DNA E-M35.

 

[Nilotic]

You cannot automatically assume that Ancient Upper Egyptians are the same genetically/ethnically as today's Upper Egyptians with substantial Nubian admixture. A lot of Nubians moved further North into Egypt due to Lake Aswan.

A study sampled Copts originally from 18th century Upper Egypt who now live in Khartoum, shockingly they are equally or even more Eurasian than Delta Egyptian Muslims (see K=4 in figure 1).

Copts tend to not intermarry with Nubians compared to Muslim Egyptians.

Aren't you also assuming that the Copts represent the original population of Upper Egypt?

This is an old source but it still contains some valuable pieces of information:

Since early neolithic times there existed two distinct but closely related types, a northern in Middle Egypt and a southern in Upper Egypt. The southern Egyptians were distinguished from the northerners by a smaller cranial index, a larger nasal index and greater prognathism. The geographical distinction between the two groups continued during the Pre-Dynastic Period. The Upper Egyptians, however, spread into lower Nubia during that period. By the beginning of the Dynastic era the northern Egyptian type is encountered for the first time in the Thebaïd, i.e., in the southern territory. The incursion, however, seems to have been transitory and the effects of the co-existence of the two types in one locality remained very transient until the 18th Dynasty. From this time onwards the northern type prevailed all over Egypt, as far south as Denderah, till the end of the Roman period. In Lower Nubia a slight infiltration of negroid influence is observed during the Middle Kingdom times. In the New Empire period, however, the southern Egyptian type prevails again. After the New Empire a fresh and much stronger negro influence becomes discernable till the end of the Roman period.(A STUDY OF A FIRST DYNASTY SERIES OF EGYPTIAN SKULLS FROM SAKKARA AND OF AN ELEVENTH DYNASTY SERIES FROM THEBES A. BATRAWI, PH.D., G. M. MORANT, D.SC.)

The Copts very likely represent the Northern type that came to dominate and prevail all over Egypt after the 18th Dynasty; and based on the source Shimbiris has provided... they had already been subject to a great deal of additional Near Eastern introgression in the preceding Middle Kingdom.

There is no evidence for it. Their skulls are nearly the same as modern Egyptians (no real SSA tendencies). People mistake their appearance by the red ochre painting they standardized to depict themselves. This makes modern people think they must have looked like Horners, but if you look at the Faiyum portraits where they used more detailed methods to paint themselves, they don't look like Horners.

As for Delta vs Upper Egypt.. we have genomes from Upper Egyptian Copts who moved to Sudan. They are as Eurasian as Delta Egyptians. Copts are Ancient Egyptians before Islam arrived to Egypt frozen in time.

The Ptolemaic skulls [from Dendera in Upper Egypt] show a significant difference from each of the other three sets. The late Predynastic skulls, besides being significantly different from those of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, have differences from the Sixth to Twelfth [Old to Middle Kingdom Upper Egyptians] and Twelfth to Thirteenth Dynasty skulls [Kushites from Kerma] which just reach the 0.05 level of significance.
(Population Continuity or Population Change:
Formation of the Ancient Egyptian State Sonia R. Zakrzewski)

Judging from means reduced by Lee from Schmidt's individual measuremenits (see (6), p. 426), the modern Copts have diverged greatly from the type of the dynastic Egyptians and in no way more significantly than in their reduced length (L = 177-0) and greater cephalic index (100B/L = 77 3).But the modern natives of Northern Abyssinia measured by Sergio Sergi (26) are surprisingly similar to the type which predominated in Upper Egypt during the middle dynasties. The relationiship between one of the latter and the Abyssinians is decidedly closer than that between two series-the Whitechapel and Moorfields-of seventeenth century Londoners. This is a striking example of the persistence of a type with only slight modification for a period of at least 3000 years. There are two middle dynastic series which diverge slightly from the pure native population contemporaneous with them in the ways which were more accentuated in the later Abyssinians. (Morant, G. M. (1925). A Study of Egyptian Craniology from Prehistoric to Roman Times. Biometrika,17(1/2)

Risdon (1939) argued that the population of Upper Egypt underwent gradual change from the Badarian through to the 18th Dynasty, and that by the New Kingdom, one group had almost entirely replaced the other in Upper Egypt. Elliot- Smith (1915–1916) defined as a \Brown Race” the autochthonous population of the Nile Valley, although Giuffrida- Ruggeri (1922) considered this confusing as it blurred Caucasian and African \types”.Elliot-Smith considered the Brown Race to have been modified by \Negroes” in the south and by Near Eastern populations in the north. By contrast, Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1922) concluded that the Lower Egyptians were a Mediterranean white population while the Upper Egyptians were Ethiopians. (Population Continuity or Population Change:
Formation of the Ancient Egyptian State
Sonia R. Zakrzewski)

Most authors suggested that the Upper Egyptian type (i.e. southern) had more “Negroid” traits that were gradually lost through time (Morant, 1925, 1935; Risdon, 1939; Batrawi, 1946). These studies also found that the southern populations tended to cluster with more southerly groups, e.g. Crichton (1966) found Naqada crania to be more “Negroid” than a later period sample from Gizeh, while Bra¨uer (1976) found that Nubian and early Egyptian series tended to cluster with more southern African groups. Recent craniometric studies continue to note morphological differences between northern and southern Egyptian samples. Hillson (1978) referred to this as two distinct trends within his data set:
1. a northern and lower Egyptian tendency
2. a southern Egyptian and southern African trend.
(Population Continuity or Population Change:
Formation of the Ancient Egyptian State
Sonia R. Zakrzewski)

Apologies for the wall of text, mate.

 

[Nilotic]

I am in contact with an academic in the know regarding some new aDNA papers on the way and I'm sorry to inform some of you that we have Old, Middle and New Kingdom samples on the way and, so far, they mostly don't look anymore proto-Nilotic than Copts, some even less so:

There is some upcoming data from Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt that I've seen, some of it has been discussed already on the forum. Basically the Old Kingdom samples look North African with a small amount of Seh_Gabi_C-type ancestry, and very little SSA, then during the Middle Kingdom there's a shift towards a SW Asian/Near Eastern profile which resembles that of the few ancient Egyptians we have and present-day Copts, this corresponds with the large influx of "Asiatics" starting from the 1st intermediate period. SSA ancestry also increases in time. Haplogroups so far are E-M35 and J1-P58 (wish there were more resolution, looks like we'll have to sift through the BAM files again).
​

The old kingdom people are probably the so far closest we're gonna get to Horners' non-Yemeni MENA ancestors. Some sort of intermediate in Egypt between Iberomaurusians and Natufians with a little bit of proto-Nilotic. Though I wager our ancestors lacked that Iran-Chalcolithic (Seh_Gabi) stuff. Now, I would never rule out that some ancient Masris on the border with Nubia like in Luxor were more proto-Nilotic for sure but the majority probably were mostly MENA with the only really significant "SSA" in them being "Ancestral North-African" that has mostly survived haplogroup wise in the form of their dominant Y-DNA E-M35.

I appreciate the information you've shared with the forum, and I have sources of my own that I would like to present for analysis.

It is is immediately clear from Figure 2 that there is one skull that forms a distinct morphological outlier from the rest of the Hierakonpolis skulls. This specimen exhibits much greater facial prognathism (i.e., forward projection of the face, particularly in the region around the orbits) than all of the other samples. (Cranial variability and population diversity at Hierakonpolis)

The analyses, however, noted that the more recently excavated specimens from Hierakonpolis were more prognathic than either those in the Duckworth Collection sample or the comparative Predynastic sample. Facial prognathism has been described by non-specialists as being an ‘African’ trait (e.g., Gerasimov 1971). The crania sent to Britain tend to be less prognathic (and hence less ‘African-looking’) than those recently recovered from the site. It is possible that this was a subconscious decision, given the prevailing view at the time that the ancient Egyptians were more closely related to modern (Victorian) Europeans than to African populations. Further research using (and sourcing) the original collections documentation regarding the initial transportation of the crania to Britain is required to verify this hypothesis. (Cranial variability and population diversity at Hierakonpolis)

Forgive me if this sounds conspiratorial, but it seems pretty evident from the citation above that Western bioanthropologists source their ancient Egyptian samples from collections that were specifically and carefully selected to discard samples that were deemed to be too "Negro". I think there's been a great deal of tampering, omitting and deceit involved with the handling of African bioanthropology.

I expect that Old Kingdom 'Upper Egyptian' samples will come from the Kharga Oasis and the Dakhla Oasis.. areas where the Libyans were dominant.

In reality, it looks more like ancient "SSA" males in North-Africa mixed with West Asian women sometime within the last 10-20,000 years. Iberomaruusians are pretty much entirely E-M35 but have exclusively West Asian mtDNA markers. And I side more with the paper that posited that they're significantly part SSA (30-50%) given that this correlates well with their PCA positioning where they cluster near Habeshas like an intermediate SSA:Eurasian population and how their Y-DNA, E-M35 is, in the last 50,000 years, more tied to other groups in Africa like Mota type HGs and West-Africans.

So Iberomaurusians were 30-50% SSA? Is this in addition to their North African E-M35 derived lineages like Em-78?

How much of that Iberomaurusian ancestry do you suppose was retained in predynastic and Old Kingdom Egyptian populations? I think research into the Ancestral North African component will yield the greatest insights.

Here's my question on the Iberomaurusian DNA: What kind of population would we have if we parsed out Maghrebi-specific (e.g. Aterian) and European influences? I ask because such a population is likely ancestral to the founders of ancient Egypt.


Just how likely do you think we'll find L3, L3k and M1a1 lineages in Old Kingdom samples?

 

[Apollo]

Aren't you also assuming that the Copts represent the original population of Upper Egypt?

Copts represent the population of Egypt prior to the arrival of Islam because due to social, religious, and even legal restrictions they avoided intermixing with Arab rulers/invaders and later on the SSA slaves Arabs brought to Egypt. This is often massively overlooked, but most of the MENA world has or had big SSA slave origin minorities brought in the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Without a doubt, Muslim Egyptians are more SSA than the Ancient Egyptians, there is no other way around it, it wouldn't make any sense historically.

In Arabia those SSA minorities introduced in the Middle Ages survived and became the Arabian Afro-Arabs (e.g. the Al-Akhdam in Yemen) and in Somalia as Somali Bantus, but in Egypt they more or less disappeared into Muslim Egyptians and no longer exist as a minority group.

Forgive me if this sounds conspiratorial, but it seems pretty evident from the citation above that Western bioanthropologists source their ancient Egyptian samples from collections that were specifically and carefully selected to discard samples that were deemed to be too "Negro". I think there's been a great deal of tampering, omitting and deceit involved with the handling of African bioanthropology.

You need to use quality sources, not some fringe sources or of studies with a low amount of samples. Most quality anthropometric studies which measured Ancient Egyptian skulls do not state them being more SSA-like than current Egyptians.

PS. Craniometry is also a bit of pseudoscience. Nubians are more Eurasian by genetics than Somalis, but Somalis apparently have more Eurasian skulls. You can't go by it alone.

See this link:

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-8aa08adcc8409c0f64340b9f0d3347c6

 

[Nilotic]

Copts represent the population of Egypt prior to the arrival of Islam because due to social and legal restrictions they avoided intermixing with Arab rulers/invaders and later on the SSA slaves Arabs brought to Egypt. This is often massively overlooked, but most of the MENA world has or had big SSA slave origin minorities. Without a doubt, Muslim Egyptians are more SSA than the Ancient Egyptians, there is no other way around it, it wouldn't make any sense historically. In Arabia those SSA minorities survived as Afro-Arabs (e.g. the Al-Akhdam in Yemen) and in Somalia as Somali Bantus, but in Egypt they more or less disappeared into Muslim Egyptians and no longer exist as a minority group.

I don't dispute that the Copts represent the Egyptian population of that time-frame, but it's unlikely that they represent the founders of Egyptian civilization from the predynastic period.

I don't think that the Badarians, Naqada and Hierakonpolis predynastics were Coptic-like; the alluded SW Asian shift of the Middle Kingdom and the influx of Asiatics during the 1st Intermediate period... makes me think they don't represent the original founders of Egyptian civilization.

How much of the Iberomaurusian ancestry do you expect to find in predynastic Upper Egypt?

 

[Apollo]

I don't dispute that the Copts represent the Egyptian population of that time-frame, but it's unlikely that they represent the founders of Egyptian civilization from the predynaatic period.

I don't think that the Badarians, Naqada and Hierakonpolis were Coptic-like; the alluded SW Asian shift of the Middle Kingdom and the influx of Asiatics during the 1st Intermediate period... makes me think they don't represent the original founders of Egyptian civilization.

How much of the Iberomaurusian ancestry do you expect to find in predynastic Upper Egypt?

They copied a lot of their civilization from Mesopotamia.

IMO, I would not expect big changes between the earliest predynastic all the way to the Roman Period.

However, I think early Neolithic Egypt (~10,000 BCE) to about 5,000 BCE might have changed from something similar to the Iberomaurusians drifting more towards those AE samples we have seen so far. The big change likely happened between 10K BCE to 5K BCE, imo, not between predynastics to the roman period, but that's my guess.

 

[Nilotic]

They copied a lot of their civilization from Mesopotamia.

IMO, I would not expect big changes between the earliest predynastic all the way to the Roman Period.

However, I think early Neolithic Egypt (~10,000 BCE) to about 5,000 BCE might have changed from something similar to the Iberomaurusians drifting more towards those AE samples we have seen so far. The big change likely happened between 10K BCE to 5K BCE, imo, not between predynastics to the roman period, but that's my guess.

What element (s) of Egyptian civilization is derived from Mesopotamia?

The predynastic cultures of Egypt seem to be decidedly African. Ancestral North African, Taforalt and the Iberomaurusians seem to be biracial (Horner-like) populations that likely formed the cultures of dynastic Egypt.

Is there any evidence that they were replaced in the predynastic period?

 

[Apollo]

What element (s) of Egyptian civilization is derived from Mesopotamia?

The predynastic cultures of Egypt seem to be decidedly African. Ancestral North African, Taforalt and the Iberomaurusians seem to be biracial (Horner-like) populations that likely formed the cultures of dynastic Egypt.

Is there any evidence that they were replaced in the predynastic period?

Agriculture started in the Levant and from there spread into Northern Africa and since Mesopotamia was the older civilization of the two it would not surprise me if the basics of Ancient Egyptian civilization were spread from the Mesopotamian core.

Egypt is not that far from the Levant. I don't get why Africans get so attached to this ancient civilization when in reality Ancient Egypt was more in contact and had more cultural ties with the Western Asian world than with the rest of Africa.

Even today, Egypt considers itself the cultural leader of the Arab world and they are more focused with what's going on in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq etc and not with Nigeria or South Africa.

 

[Nilotic]

You need to use quality sources, not some fringe sources or of studies with a low amount of samples. Most quality anthropometric studies which measured Ancient Egyptian skulls do not state them being more SSA-like than current Egyptians.

PS. Craniometry is also a bit of pseudoscience. Nubians are more Eurasian by genetics than Somalis, but Somalis apparently have more Eurasian skulls. You can't go by it alone.

See this link:

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-

I don't expect intermediate populations to be "SSA"; I expect the aforementioned components to form their own cluster and to feature heavily in the ancestry of the ancient Egyptians -- especially predynastics and Old Kingdom Egyptians.

Thanks for the sources; I'll make sure to read them.

Agriculture started in the Levant and from there spread into Northern Africa and since Mesopotamia was the older civilization of the two it would not surprise me if the basics of Ancient Egyptian civilization were spread from the Mesopotamian core.

Egypt is not that far from the Levant. I don't get why Africans get so attached to this ancient civilization when in reality it was more in contact and had more cultural ties with the Western Asian world than with the rest of Africa.

Furthermore, the archaeology of northern Africa does not support demic diffusion of farming from the Near East. The evidence presented by Wetterstrom indicates that early African farmers in the Fayum initially incorporated Near Eastern domesticates into an indigenous foraging strategy, and only over time developed a dependence on horticulture. This is inconsistent with in-migrating farming settlers, who would have brought a more abrupt change in subsistence strategy. "The same archaeological pattern occurs west of Egypt, where domestic animals and, later, grains were gradually adopted after 8000 yr B.P. into the established pre-agricultural Capsian culture, present across the northern Sahara since 10,000 yr B.P. From this continuity, it has been argued that the pre-food-production Capsian peoples spoke languages ancestral to the Berber and/or Chadic branches of Afroasiatic, placing the proto-Afroasiatic period distinctly before 10,000 yr B.P."

Source: The Origins of Afroasiatic
Christopher Ehret, S. O. Y. Keita, Paul Newman;, and Peter Bellwood
Science 3 December 2004: Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1680

The culture of ancient Egypt was very distinct from Near Eastern cultures:

Egyptian contact in the 4th millennium B.C. with SW Asia is undeniable, but the effect of this contact on state formation is Egypt is less clear... The unified state which emerged in Egypt in the 3rd millenium B.C. however, was unlike the polities in Mesopotamia, the Levant, northern Syria, or Early Bronze Age Palestine- in sociopolitical organization, material culture, and belief system. There was undoubtedly heightened commercial contact with SW Asia in the 4th millennium B.C., but the Early Dynastic state which emerged in Egypt is unique and religious in character."
(Bard, Kathryn A. 1994 The Egyptian Predynastic: A Review of the Evidence. Journal of Field Archaeology 21(3):265-288.)

A large number of gods go back to prehistoric times. The images of a cow and star goddess (Hathor), the falcon (Horus), and the human-shaped figures of the fertility god (Min) can be traced back to that period. Some rites, such as the "running of the Apil-bull," the "hoeing of the ground," and other fertility and hunting rites (e.g., the hippopotamus hunt) presumably date from early times. Connections with the religions in southwest Asia cannot be traced with certainty."
"It is doubtful whether Osiris can be regarded as equal to Tammuz or Adonis, or whether Hathor is related to the "Great Mother." There are closer relations with northeast African religions. The numerous animal cults (especially bovine cults and panther gods) and details of ritual dresses (animal tails, masks, grass aprons, etc) probably are of African origin. The kinship in particular shows some African elements, such as the king as the head ritualist (i.e., medicine man), the limitations and renewal of the reign (jubilees, regicide), and the position of the king's mother (a matriarchal element). Some of them can be found among the Ethiopians in Napata and Meroe, others among the Prenilotic tribes (Shilluk)."
(Encyclopedia Britannica 1984 ed. Macropedia Article, Vol 6: "Egyptian Religion" , pg 506-508)

Some have argued that various early Egyptians like the Badarians probably migrated northward from Nubia, while others see a wide-ranging movement of peoples across the breadth of the Sahara before the onset of desiccation. Whatever may be the origins of any particular people or civilization, however, it seems reasonably certain that the predynastic communities of the Nile valley were essentially indigenous in culture, drawing little inspiration from sources outside the continent during the several centuries directly preceding the onset of historical times..." (Robert July, Pre-Colonial Africa, 1975, p. 60-61)

..the peoples of the steppes and grasslands to the immediate south of Egypt domesticated cattle, as early as 9000 to 8000 B.C. They included peoples from the Afroasiastic linguistic group and the second major African language family, Nilo-Saharan (Wendorf, Schild, Close 1984; Wendorf, et al. 1982). Thus the earliest domestic cattle may have come to Egypt from these southern neighbors, circa 6000 B.C., and not from the Middle East.[148] Pottery, another significant advance in material cultural may also have followed this pattern, initiatied "as early as 9000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharans and Afrasians who lived to the south of Egypt. Soon thereafter, pots spread to Egyptian sites, almost 2,000 years before the first pottery was made in the Middle East."
(Christopher Ehret, "Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture," in Egypt in Africa, Theodore Celenko (ed), Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 25-27)

Over the last two decades, numerous contemporary (Khartoum Neolithic) sites and cemeteries have been excavated in the Central Sudan. The most striking point to emerge is the overall similarity of early neolithic developments inhabitation, exchange, material culture and mortuary customs in the Khartoum region to those underway at the same time in the Egyptian Nile Valley, far to the north." (Wengrow, David (2003) "Landscapes of Knowledge, Idioms of Power: The African Foundations of Ancient Egyptian Civilization Reconsidered," in Ancient Egypt in Africa, David O'Connor and Andrew Reid, eds. Ancient Egypt in Africa. London: University College London Press, 2003, pp. 119-137)

 

[Automaton]

Agriculture started in the Levant and from there spread into Northern Africa and since Mesopotamia was the older civilization of the two it would not surprise me if the basics of Ancient Egyptian civilization were spread from the Mesopotamian core.

Egypt is not that far from the Levant. I don't get why Africans get so attached to this ancient civilization when in reality Ancient Egypt was more in contact and had more cultural ties with the Western Asian world than with the rest of Africa.

Even today, Egypt considers itself the cultural leader of the Arab world and they are more focused with what's going on in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq etc and not with Nigeria or South Africa.

Why did the Nubians shift to a Nilo-Saharan language? This is a puzzling history.

 

[Apollo]

Why did the Nubians shift to a Nilo-Saharan language? This is a puzzling history.

It's not that strange. It happened in many places all over the world.

Turks are mostly Greek-Armenian-like speaking Turkic. Yakuts in Siberia represents the original Turks.
Hungarians are Austrian-Serbian-like speaking Uralic. Nenets represent Uralic better.
In India there are Desi looking ethnicities speaking Austro-Asiatic languages (Vietnamese is Austro-Asiatic).

Nearer to Somalia, I think Samburus are more South Cushitic & East Cushitc by ancestry than true Nilotic, although their Nilotic ancestry is probably much higher than the Turkic or Uralic ancestry in Turks and Hungarians but definitely not their majority ancestry. Tutsis are also more Cushitic than Bantu in ancestry, but their language is a Bantu language.

 

[World]

It's not that strange. It happened in many places all over the world.

Turks are mostly Greek-Armenian-like speaking Turkic. Yakuts in Siberia represents the original Turks.
Hungarians are Austrian-Serbian-like speaking Uralic. Nenets represent Uralic better.
In India there are Desi looking ethnicities speaking Austro-Asiatic languages (Vietnamese is Austro-Asiatic).

Nearer to Somalia, I think Samburus are more South Cushitic & East Cushitc by ancestry than true Nilotic, although their Nilotic ancestry is probably much higher than the Turkic or Uralic ancestry in Turks and Hungarians but definitely not their majority ancestry. Tutsis are also more Cushitic than Bantu in ancestry, but their language is a Bantu language.

And Semitic languages in the Horn of Africa.

 

[Shimbiris]

I appreciate the information you've shared with the forum, and I have sources of my own that I would like to present for analysis.





Forgive me if this sounds conspiratorial, but it seems pretty evident from the citation above that Western bioanthropologists source their ancient Egyptian samples from collections that were specifically and carefully selected to discard samples that were deemed to be too "Negro". I think there's been a great deal of tampering, omitting and deceit involved with the handling of African bioanthropology.

I expect that Old Kingdom 'Upper Egyptian' samples will come from the Kharga Oasis and the Dakhla Oasis.. areas where the Libyans were dominant.




So Iberomaurusians were 30-50% SSA? Is this in addition to their North African E-M35 derived lineages like Em-78?

How much of that Iberomaurusian ancestry do you suppose was retained in predynastic and Old Kingdom Egyptian populations? I think research into the Ancestral North African component will yield the greatest insights.

Here's my question on the Iberomaurusian DNA: What kind of population would we have if we parsed out Maghrebi-specific (e.g. Aterian) and European influences? I ask because such a population is likely ancestral to the founders of ancient Egypt.


Just how likely do you think we'll find L3, L3k and M1a1 lineages in Old Kingdom samples?

You may have a point about the sampling bias, honestly. I find it hard to fathom that they're usually even finding people less proto-Nilotic than Copts. That makes no sense. Copts have no West-African ancestry. The non-Eurasian elements in them (excluding ANA) appear 100% proto-Nilotic like what's in Somalis and Habeshas so how does that jibe? They couldn't really have gotten that from the slave-trade. It would at least carry West-African admixture within it or they'd have West-African admixture outside of it like the Muslims do.

I think they probably are biasing their sampling toward more markedly non "Negroid" looking samples and sites and, as I've heard, maybe even dismissing anyone with too much of a "Negroid" slant as "Nubian". It is hard to fathom, even for some of the biggest anti-"SSA" racists in the anthro community that at least SOME people in places bordering Nubia like Luxorians didn't have at least some elevated proto-Nilotic like 10-20% or more.

So Iberomaurusians were 30-50% SSA? Is this in addition to their North African E-M35 derived lineages like Em-78?

Yes. Some believe in a later hypothesis that they are in fact Natufian admixed or what have you but that is anachronistic. If you observe their global PCA positioning it fits too well with the original paper's claim that they're about 40-50% non-Eurasian:

Just past Tigrinyas who are 50% Eurasian and 50% non-Eurasian according to formal stats. Fits too perfectly with the proposition that they are around 45% non-Eurasian. Then there's the smoking gun Y-DNA wise; E-M35. It's closest relatives are all in Africa like in Mota and West-Africans. E itself may have been a back-migration or a cut-off from the proto-Eurasians before they left Africa around 50kya but it's definitely been a mostly non-Eurasian lineage for the last 50,000 years at minimum. So 100% non-Eurasian Y-DNA and Eurasian maternal lineages + the PCA position and the original paper's stats modeling them as 45% non-Eurasian which fits with the PCA position perfectly? Works too well for me, saxiib.

I think future data will vindicate the following though I'm interested in seeing otherwise:

• ANA population exists along the Maghreb and maybe across North Africa
• This is an non-Eurasian group that did not participate in the Eurasian bottleneck
• Though their predecessors may have been early close relatives of the proto-Eurasians
• Sometime probably before the Kebaran, Dzudzuana (Anatolian) type HGs expand into North Africa and mix with ANAs
• A basically 50:50 population in terms of auDNA arises but ANA Y-DNA is dominant while Anatolian type mtDNA is dominant
• The descendants of this group, Iberomaurusians (IBMs) expand eastwards into the Levant and are why Natufians and the like have E-M35 lineages
• Then there is another migration out of the Levant due to the spreading of animal and plant domestication, and whatever, probably intermediate between IBMs and Natufians, group living in Egypt gets admixed into with new Anatolian and maybe a little bit of Iranian and Caucasus HG elements due to this and these are the core MENA ancestors of Egyptians, Sudanese, Horners and other East Africans

You have questions about some of the more nitty gritty details involving the archaeological cultures involved like in the Maghreb but I honestly can't go too much into that with any certainty until we have more data. But I do think the expansion into West Asia from North-Africa by IBM types is probably marked by the Kebaran.

Kebaran culture - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Shimbiris]

Why did the Nubians shift to a Nilo-Saharan language? This is a puzzling history.

Nilo-Saharans have been in Sudan for thousands of years. Nubians are just the latest, dominant iteration. There is evidence of linguistic contact between Proto-Sahelian, of which Nubian is a descendant, and North-Cushitic going back as far as 6500 BCE. That's 8,500 years ago:

The evidence that Proto-sahelian borrowed its words for “goat” from an already distinct ancestral beja language in the later seventh millennium6 supports the conclusion that the initial divergence of Proto-Cushitic into the Beja (North Cushitic) branch and Agäw-East-South-Cushitic branches began before 6500 BCE - History and the Testimony of Language by Christopher Ehret​

Not to mention the A-M13 found among Horners which was most likely passed onto our ancestors by Nilo-Saharans in Sudan, with even some very rare Somalis popping up with the Y-DNA or the fact that even Waqism seems to have ties with Nilo-Saharans:

According to Ehret, the religious beliefs of the proto-Cushites were a mixture of two distinct religious traditions. Probably as early as the seventh millennium BCE, the Cushites in parts of eastern Africa blended their traditional Afro-Asiatic religion with aspects of the religious tradition of their Sudanic neighbours. Specifically, they exchanged their belief in a clan deity with the Sudanic concept of "Divinity", expanding the use of the old Cushitic root for "sky" (waak'a) to also extend to "Divinity". However, they retained their older institution of a clan priest-chief (or *wap'er), with the *wap'er's religious duties now re-directed toward Divinity. The Cushites also retained the old Afrasian practice of ascribing unfortunate occurrences to maleficent spirits, but also sometimes viewed evil as Divine retribution. - The Civilizations of Africa: a History to 1800 by Christopher Ehret
​

I wouldn't even be surprised if the genetic "Proto-Nilotics" we are descended from actually spoke some form of Nilo-Saharan. Cushites and Nilo-Saharans have been intermingling for a long, long time.

 

[Automaton]

@Apollo @Shimbiris . From what I understand there has to be some kind of an elite cultural dominance that drives the linguistic replacement. So did the Nilo-Saharan speaking group take a hold of Nubia to cause this shift? I'm not that familiar with ancient Nubian history, but I don't remember seeing a Nilo-Saharan domination.

 

[Apollo]

• Sometime probably before the Kebaran, Dzudzuana (Anatolian) type HGs expand into North Africa and mix with ANAs
• A basically 50:50 population in terms of auDNA arises but ANA Y-DNA is dominant while Anatolian type mtDNA is dominant
• The descendants of this group, Iberomaurusians (IBMs) expand eastwards into the Levant and are why Natufians and the like have E-M35 lineages

Didn't the earliest backmigrations into Africa (excluding the E theory) happen more so around 30 to 20 K years ago with U6 and M1 being the strongest candidates of this? While M1 and U6 themselves are super old, they don't start to split meaningfully until about 20 KYA. What makes you think they were Dzudzuana related specifically and not just something else or an unknown ghost group?

~20 KYA seems pre-Neolithic. So there could have been pre-Neolithic populations with a Southwest Eurasian origin in Northern Africa around 20 KYA explaining the Taforalt people.

These timeframes also coincide with when E-M35 starts to split up and starts creating successful sub-lineages around 20 KYA (E-Z830 and E-L539). E-M35 itself is ~25 KYA old in TMRCAs, but between 25 and 20 KYA there is a dead zone with no successful sub-lineages.

 

[madaxweyne]

I don't expect intermediate populations to be "SSA"; I expect the aforementioned components to form their own cluster and to feature heavily in the ancestry of the ancient Egyptians -- especially predynastics and Old Kingdom Egyptians.

Thanks for the sources; I'll make sure to read them.





The culture of ancient Egypt was very distinct from Near Eastern cultures:

The culture of ancient Egypt was very distinct from Near Eastern cultures:

are you sure you do know egypt had more contacts with the levant then anywhere else in the world especially in its early years the first recorded battle the egyptians had was with the Canaanites and it happened in the Levant, as well as the invasions by the Hittites and the hyksos from the levant and later persian invasions etc the hyksos brought new technology that later turned Egypt into a regional powerhouse

Ancient Egypt is mostly connected to the history of the middle east then anywhere else in the world apart from Europe through the influence of the roman and greek invasions

 

[Nilotic]

@Shimbiris

You may have a point about the sampling bias, honestly. I find it hard to fathom that they're usually even finding people less proto-Nilotic than Copts. That makes no sense. Copts have no West-African ancestry. The non-Eurasian elements in them (excluding ANA) appear 100% proto-Nilotic like what's in Somalis and Habeshas so how does that jibe? They couldn't really have gotten that from the slave-trade. It would at least carry West-African admixture within it or they'd have West-African admixture outside of it like the Muslims do.

I think they probably are biasing their sampling toward more markedly non "Negroid" looking samples and sites and, as I've heard, maybe even dismissing anyone with too much of a "Negroid" slant as "Nubian". It is hard to fathom, even for some of the biggest anti-"SSA" racists in the anthro community that at least SOME people in places bordering Nubia like Luxorians didn't have at least some elevated proto-Nilotic like 10-20% or more.

I honestly do believe that there is a great deal of anti-African bias in the bioanthropological field that has defined the arena since the colonial period.

• Then there is another migration out of the Levant due to the spreading of animal and plant domestication, and whatever, probably intermediate between IBMs and Natufians, group living in Egypt gets admixed into with new Anatolian and maybe a little bit of Iranian and Caucasus HG elements due to this and these are the core MENA ancestors of Egyptians, Sudanese, Horners and other East Africans

Does this Levantine intrusion into Egypt relate to EEF ancestry (e.g. R-V88, E-V13 and Y-DNA G) in modern Egypt? Are you saying that the biracial Iberomaurusians and the like became majority Eurasian at that point?

 

[Nilotic]

are you sure you do know egypt had more contacts with the levant then anywhere else in the world especially in its early years the first recorded battle the egyptians had was with the Canaanites and it happened in the Levant, as well as the invasions by the Hittites and the hyksos from the levant and later persian invasions etc the hyksos brought new technology that later turned Egypt into a regional powerhouse

Ancient Egypt is mostly connected to the history of the middle east then anywhere else in the world apart from Europe through the influence of the roman and greek invasions

I don't deny those historical contacts but the actual culture of ancient Egypt seems very different to Near Eastern cultures.

The formation of the Egyptian civilization started in the South and was intimated with mesolithic and neolithic cultures in Sudan.

 

[Apollo]

I honestly do believe that there is a great deal of anti-African bias in the bioanthropological field that has defined the arena since the colonial period.

This is not true man, especially not in the 2010s, 2020s with rampant left wokeism in academia. This may have been true for the 1800s/early 1900s only.

Many of the major population geneticists either focused on Africa or on ancient genetics are Jews (Sarah Tishkoff and David Reich most prominently) or are white liberals. Nearly all ancient genome studies about Egypt consult with them and let their papers be peer-reviewed by them.

I don't think there is any bias in the ancient Egyptian samples they have collected so far. These guys just want to know the truth about the ancient past. Biased theories like the Anatolian hypothesis of Indo-European (to debunk Nazi mythology) or Indian nationalist theories refuting that Indo-Europeans came from the Steppes quickly get exposed as false. You can't really uphold false theories for long.