| DEBUNK | Eritrea is Punt Baboon Study

[enda_el]

I decided to read the baboon study from 2023 that people claim supports that Punt was Eritrea and not Somali, and its complete garbage. Firstly, people will say the 2023 study used isotopes when it did not. In 2020, there was a study that used concentrations of certain chemicals in remains of Baboons, and it was concluded to be the Horn of Africa in general, obviously including Somalia. The 2023 study instead used mitochondrial dna harvested from specimens.
The craziest issue I have is at the end if you dont wanna read this.

Issue 1 - Only 1 mummy baboon was used in the study, they tried to use 10, but 9 didnt have usuable DNA. This whole study rests on ONE baboon

Issue 2- They didnt sample baboons themselves to compare to the egyptian mummy one, they used old preserved ones kept at museums taken in the 19th and 20 centuries. This introduces sampling bias, they were not evenly distributed.
Only two historic Somali baboon samples were compared to the single Egyptian mummy baboon, and only one was even a real contender. From both ancient egyptian art and other studies we know the baboons imported were mainly Hamadryas baboons, and to represent Somali they used the DNA of only one of those from upper sheikh. The other was a Yellow baboon from the South.

The csv spreadsheet from the study shows the locations

Issue 3- It was based on MTDNA, not autosomal, so even if the baboons were related, if they didnt come from the same lineage of mothers it wouldnt show up. It is just taken for granted that baboon females never moved or migrated for 3000 years, and they didnt even go and test actual baboons in those lands today. Just tested basically one somali baboon

Those are just some of the issues that I had with the study, but this is by far the worst

THERES A MAJOR TWIST

One of the closest ones to the Mummy sample was actually a sample of "unknown provenance" said to be Somali, but because the people running the study doubted the official origin given to them, or the information given to them by the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart was not specific enough for their taste, they did not use it.
Here is the sample

You see the † annotation? It leads to this under the table

So they say that this sample, which is labelled as "Somaliland" was unclear and so did not use it as a Somali sample like the other two.

But they did map it. and guess what... the sample was just as closely related to the mummy as the Eritrean one

There it is. Ignoring the fact that the closest Baboon was Sudanese, the Eritrean one is just as closely related to the mummy as the "unknown" one that was clearly labelled as Somali but they didn't accept it.

I'm not the type of guy thats into conspiracies but it just seems like gaalo jump at the chance to give christians the edge concerning anything historical. Feel free to look for yourself. https://elifesciences.org/articles/87513#content

 

[enda_el]

@Step a side @Emir of Zayla @Cartan Boos

 

[Step a side]

You nailed it with the research. I liked the way you looked at it and how you brought together all the bits and pieces and sniffed out the biases lol. The question now arises is, where we in Somaliland at the time or could we still have been further up north? Punt appears in historical records as early as the 4th dynasty old kingdom era which is almost 5k years ago. Hatshepsut time was a bit later during the new kingdom era 3.5k years ago.

 

[enda_el]

You nailed it with the research. I liked the way you looked at it and how you brought together all the bits and pieces and sniffed out the biases lol. The question now arises is, where we in Somaliland at the time or could we still have been further up north? Punt appears in historical records as early as the 4th dynasty old kingdom era which is almost 5k years ago. Hatshepsut time was a bit later during the new kingdom era 3.5k years ago.

bro seeing that one of the closest samples is literally labelled somali but they said nah lets not use it pissed me off to no end. but even if it wasnt there this whole thing is garbage. i definitely think that when you go that far back our ancestors would have been further north.

 

[Step a side]

bro seeing that one of the closest samples is literally labelled somali but they said nah lets not use it pissed me off to no end. but even if it wasnt there this whole thing is garbage. i definitely think that when you go that far back our ancestors would have been further north.

They hate anything to do with Somali. Even the Egyptian mummies with elevated SSA ancestry get sidle lined unfortunately. The good thing is that we have many young anthropologist in the diaspora. Once Somalia becomes stable enough we will have to do our own reeearch and publish it to the world.

 

[enda_el]

They hate anything to do with Somali. Even the Egyptian mummies with elevated SSA ancestry get sidle lined unfortunately. The good thing is that we have many young anthropologist in the diaspora. Once Somalia becomes stable enough we will have to do our own reeearch and publish it to the world.

inshaallah amiin

 

[Idilinaa]

I don't think there is any gaalo or Somali hate involved, i believe the bias is that they believe it would make more sense for it to be closer to Egypt and in an area around Gash Group. I don't agree with it personally as i believe they would happily go far distances to get the products they found valuable and we saw Romans/Greeks in egypt reach out to Somalia.

I actually pointed out some of the problems with study in another thread but you dug into a little bit further and found that it matched a likely specimen from Northern Somalia but left it

Interestingly they ended up only using the specimen originating from Southern Somalia. That's a big sampling bias, you are right.

The DNA was fragile and at they only had 1 usable baboon mummy sample out of the 10.

The team that did the study said this afterwards:
Because the study is based on a single mummy, the research team would like to sample more baboons and get more information from more time periods, Kopp said. This is one of the first ancient DNA studies on a non-human primate, she added, and more work on other species could reveal more about other ancient Egyptian imports and their impact on wild populations

So we'll have to wait and see when they make more tests on imports. For now it's inconclusive

My prediction is that it might reveal they were speaking about multiple locations at different times when sourcing products from. That Punt covered a wider umbrella geography from Eastern Sudan to Somalia.

I am more inclined to believe that Punt was a trading emporium and cultural geography that ecompassed eastern sudan, eritrea djibouti and northern somalia.

 

[enda_el]

I don't think there is any gaalo or Somali hate involved, i believe the bias is that they believe it would make more sense for it to be closer to Egypt and in an area around Gash Group. I don't agree with personally as i believe they would happily go far distances to get the products they found valuable.

I actually pointed some of the studies problems with study in another thread but you dug into a little bit further




I am more inclined to believe that Punt trading emporium and cultural geography that ecompassed eastern sudan, eritrea djibouti and northern somalia.

I agree with it encompassing a lot of the horn, and that was the conclusion of the 2020 study. But I still have an issue with them pushing eritrea and especially Adulis as the likely location of Punt before they were even close to having robust data. You cant start making specific conclusions based off of a single baboon and then say "oh yea but we still need to know more".

This went semi-viral in the world of science news not too long ago I think they purposely leaned into the idea that they uncovered the "lost civilization" for their own gain all the while they were far from it and thats just dirty science. They needed to have saved that analysis for later and remained with a more neutral view

also btw they did use the upper sheikh somaliland sample, but still this sampling strategy is awful

 

[Idilinaa]

I agree with it encompassing a lot of the horn, and that was the conclusion of the 2020 study. But I still have an issue with them pushing eritrea and especially Adulis as the likely location of Punt before they were even close to having robust data. You cant start making specific conclusions based off of a single baboon and then say "oh yea but we still need to know more".

This went semi-viral in the world of science news not too long ago I think they purposely leaned into the idea that they uncovered the "lost civilization" for their own gain all the while they were far from it and thats just dirty science. They needed to have saved that analysis for later and remained with a more neutral view

Click-bait science is really lool

 

[TheLand]

I think if you dig into a lot of studies in general you will find similar issues but nobody ever really looks at the details. Pretty stupid.

 

[Shimbiris]

I think if you dig into a lot of studies in general you will find similar issues but nobody ever really looks at the details. Pretty stupid.

I practically hold back intense laughter whenever people dick-ride PhDs or go "It's in a study" to me. Most science is junk science. I realized that when I was 17 and debunked Hodgson et al. then blogged about it like 1-2 years later on Anthromadness. 17... I could understand their data better than them. PhD holders probably 10 years my seniors at least... scientists are just people like anyone else. Biases, massaged stats, absurdly foolish interpretations; dime a dozen.

In almost any field now I don't even bother reading their conclusions and other such sections much or at all. I skip to the materials and results sections, look at the supplementary materials, take any raw data they make available and just look at the charts. I can read that stuff for myself and form my own conclusions, thank you very much.

 

[Midas]

It's not really anti somali. But just pro ethiopia bias. I also on some level get it. I mean from the outisde looking in you have this civilization with
1) a written lanaguge stretching back 2 millenia. 2)One of the first christan nations in the world .
3)Ancient lost biblical texts.
4) It's located in africa.
5) if you squint it seems like there is a traceable continuity from aksum to the solomonjc dynasty
6) anicnet stele and those anicnet churches.

The hype around it makes sense . If you were not from the horn wouldn't this place also catch your eye?

 

[Keep it a boqol]

Seems like there’s a lot of research historical bias against Somalia imo