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Africa during the late Palaeolithic/early Neolithic period
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@The alchemist @Shimbiris any thoughts?
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On the map the Khoisan cluster reaches as far as Kenya.
How comes we don’t have any mota dna
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I think Mota was confined to the Ethiopian highlands. Proto-Somalis must have used to the coastal low land route to get to where we are now.
Northern Swordsman
Tawxiid Alle lahaw, Talo na Alle saaro.
I guess at that time frame we were Natufians, right?
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Difficult to say but a mix of Natufian related and Nilo-Saharan related would be my best geuss
People give too much damn weight to Mota. Mota represents an Ethiopian mulatto race of a SAHG and AEA mix, somewhat closer to AEA on the cline where SAHG increases the further south one is. This kinda reflects in the tool kits of the mid-Holocene HG populations of East Africa. Nilo-Saharan, whatever that is, should be way more central than east, and most definitely shouldn't penetrate the Nile into Eastern Desert. Pygmies should extend past Bight of Biafra. ANA population separate to IBM should be present to some extent too depending on when exactly this is.
Not ideal.
what is mota
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You are mixing up different time frames by using terms such as ANA and AEA. These components in their pure form seized to exist by the time of the early Neolithic. Mota most certainly did exist as a separate distinct component during the early Neolithic period. Before the migrations associated with the spread of agriculture and animal husbandry the majority of East Africa was inhabited by a diverse set of populations that combined layers of variable proportions of ancestry linked to Central African hunter-gatherers (“pygmies”), Southern African hunter-gatherers (“Khoisans”), East African hunter-gatherers (“Mota Cave-related”) and the Nilotic/Nilo-Saharan-related East Africans.
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East African hunter-gatherers
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Different groups of people that inhabited Africa during the Early Neolithic/Late Palaeolithic by using all the ancient samples we have so far.
The alchemist
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There was a hunter-gatherer cline in sub-Saharan Africa (using this term strictly geographical). It goes from Mota to southern Eastern Africa, centra Africa has central African cline, and from Ethiopia all the way to southeastern Africa to South Africa, you have a gradient.
The Natufian only existed in the Levant and pockets in Arabia, not Africa. In the Nile Valley, you had separate arrangements. The Old Kingdom samples were Levantine mixed. Now if they looked Natufian with a heavy Levantine mix, what did they look prior to the farming ancestry? Lesser than what the Iberoarusian had but more than Natufian.
I think the Nilo-Saharan is quite accurate, but the expansion of AEA peoples across the Nile was probably not just Nilo-Saharan speakers. Nilo-Saharan was merely the most successful language family amongst those that survived post-Mesolithic, but I would imagine a linguistic diversity existed amidst those Halfan or whatever culture you found across the Middle Nile. However, the western expansion was likely pure Nilo-Saharan.
The Niger Congos during the early Neolithic would not inhabit the West Africa-rpoper. They would rather reside somewhere northeast of that. Probably the Sahel-Sahara, northwest Africa, but they expanded into West African tropics probably around 7-8 kya.
In realty there would be a central African West African hunter-gatherer cline as you see with the Shum Laka peoples rather than we see with the Niger Congos who came later.
Here is Lipson et al. 2022, showing the genetic distribution for some of the diversity on PCA quite superimposed on the real map:
You see the Bantus are very distinct from Shum-Laka. They are way more proximal to Nilo-Saharans. Why is that? Because 60-80% of Niger-Congo ancestry is of a deep sibling branch of the broader East African cluster.
The Natufian only existed in the Levant and pockets in Arabia, not Africa. In the Nile Valley, you had separate arrangements. The Old Kingdom samples were Levantine mixed. Now if they looked Natufian with a heavy Levantine mix, what did they look prior to the farming ancestry? Lesser than what the Iberoarusian had but more than Natufian.
I think the Nilo-Saharan is quite accurate, but the expansion of AEA peoples across the Nile was probably not just Nilo-Saharan speakers. Nilo-Saharan was merely the most successful language family amongst those that survived post-Mesolithic, but I would imagine a linguistic diversity existed amidst those Halfan or whatever culture you found across the Middle Nile. However, the western expansion was likely pure Nilo-Saharan.
The Niger Congos during the early Neolithic would not inhabit the West Africa-rpoper. They would rather reside somewhere northeast of that. Probably the Sahel-Sahara, northwest Africa, but they expanded into West African tropics probably around 7-8 kya.
In realty there would be a central African West African hunter-gatherer cline as you see with the Shum Laka peoples rather than we see with the Niger Congos who came later.
Here is Lipson et al. 2022, showing the genetic distribution for some of the diversity on PCA quite superimposed on the real map:
You see the Bantus are very distinct from Shum-Laka. They are way more proximal to Nilo-Saharans. Why is that? Because 60-80% of Niger-Congo ancestry is of a deep sibling branch of the broader East African cluster.
The alchemist
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Yes. We passed Eritrea and Djibouti and did not venture into the northern Ethiopian highlands.
