New Afro-Asiatic Branch in Southeast Europe

[The alchemist]

Very interesting thread! There’s actually some remains from the Neolithic Aegean region that are pretty North African shifted in there craniofacial form. They could be remnants of these folk.

Those people were Anatolian genetically. The skull shit is not always reliable when it comes to such groups. You might have ranging morphological plasticity among genetically similar groups. Sometimes the craniofacial metrics are telling. In the Aegean Neolithic case, definitely not North African. By the way, the Egyptians and northwest Africans had separate variations as well, given the heterogeneous sourcing.

 

[Himmler]

Those people were Anatolian genetically. The skull shit is not always reliable when it comes to such groups. You might have ranging morphological plasticity among genetically similar groups. Sometimes the craniofacial metrics are telling. In the Aegean Neolithic case, definitely not North African. By the way, the Egyptians and northwest Africans had separate variations as well, given the heterogeneous sourcing.

Not true, the “skull shit” is reliable if the proper measurements/variables are taken into account, and the samples I’m talking about are clearly atypical of the region, they aren’t typical Anatolians in theres measurements they are strongly North African influenced compared to most other samples from the same region and time period.

 

[The alchemist]

Not true, the “skull shit” is reliable if the proper measurements/variables are taken into account

I base my takes on evidence. If you can read my response thoroughly, I said, "Sometimes the craniofacial metrics are telling." This means there might be consistency in variation, but at other times, it's not easy to parse the insightful nuances within the complexity. Especially when observing "those groups," interrelated or deeply associated people, the outliers might overlap with other regional variations without local genetic distinctiveness.

All this is explained when you read into the methodological literature of said skull shit. I don't even mean this dismissively. This is good evidence if used right, mostly for enhancement, and inter-variational orientation.

The morphometric traits change differentially within groups. So no, you can't just hone in on a set of traits and expect it only to tell you of the consistency of genetic deviation. You're very lucky if that is the case, lol. Some groups with similar genetics might stay conservative about any given dental characteristics, while considerable selection shifts in other sets of cranial dimensions that are not consistently aligned between related groups, the deviation is complex and often non-aligned. Some changes can be rapid, others not. The structural morphometric changes are not automatically a case for mixing.

What the experts do is to account for as much data as possible to get a closer statistical reading on them. The more data you have, the better. Even with the ideal data conditions involved, there are uncertainties despite the somewhat inferred putative genetic relations (broad genetic associations can find ground through these, dealing with regional variation). You can have plastic deviations of a considerable degree based on a myriad of factors that do not entail genetic non-alignments, to iterate. The analytical framework will average out associations that will give broad results. What clusters are most likely genetically similar, but the within-cluster variation does not need to be genetics at all.

There is evidence of variation in skull morphology within the same broader populations. Have you seen the Elementeitan skulls from other Pastoral Neolithic, for example? All are genetically close, yet dissimilarities in skull metrics.

This is a crania from one variation of the Pastoral Neolithic cultural cluster and it looks very robust:

Genetically, that person is not far off from the average Horn of African individual today, existing within the genetically tight PN groups of which you find morphological variation. Here is another one classified as closer to "Mediterranean":

Another one:

All these are Elementeita SNP:

So here you have clear instances of within-clustered macro-cultural subsistence groups with a morphological discrepancy not explained by marked genetic differentiation.

But let's get to the nitty gritty. Post the actual study it is based upon, and we can scrutinize this. If it is in a Neolithic farmer material cultural context, then it is practically a shut case. If your theory is that these people are outsiders, then outside characteristics will have to show in their ways, picked up on by archeologists.

and the samples I’m talking about are clearly atypical of the region, they aren’t typical Anatolians in theres measurements they are strongly North African influenced compared to most other samples from the same region and time period.

It is correct that as far as we know, the mainland farmers had close variation. Potentially from the bottleneck. However, the pre-pottery Neolithic groups had way more heterogeneity. Genetically similar groups, mind you. If we stretch it, we can say that PPN groups had an extremely peripheral existence in the Aegean, but that would warrant evidence that shows material relations to the Levant, right?

Given the variational skeletal phenotype structure showing wide differences among PPN groups as well. There is speculation that some of the Aceramic cultures of the Aegean, such as Cyprus Neolithic material young Stone Age datings, point to Levantine origin. So whatever outliers you see might be a middle-range junction between Asia Minor and Levant, not North Africa proper. Neolithic Egyptians would resemble some variation of Levantine diversity too, all the way from the Epipaleolithic to the early Neolithic.

 

[Garaad Awal]

@The alchemist Those long ass heads really are a Cushitic trait

 

[Cognitive]

I know this thread has been going on for quite a while (and I’m late), but seriously what were these supposed Afrasians?
What fossils likely represent them and how would they behave on a genetic PCA (like Natufians, PPNB, modern Arabians…or something else)?

 

[Misil]

Very late but only got around to this recently. What do you make of this partial response by Suchard who is a Semiticist?

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/13/bjorn-old-european-afro-asiatic/

 

[The alchemist]

Very late but only got around to this recently. What do you make of this partial response by Suchard who is a Semiticist?

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/13/bjorn-old-european-afro-asiatic/

I read the text superficially looking for elaboration, commentary, and critiques around the time I made this thread. Re-reading it again with greater focus, I'm sure the narrow basis for the analysis serves as a convenient blindspot for comprehensive understanding. Nonetheless, irrespective of the directional influence, proto-IE had AA influence when Semitic was either in the proto stage or nascent development in the southern Levant. An AA language having characteristics of Boreafrasian plural cross-branch items portrays linguistic descent from an older offshoot, indicating greater antiquity in lands I will emphasize were far away from southwest Asia. The particularities cannot explain away these underlying, defining contexts.

I'm not a linguist, certainly. Whenever I hear opinions of individual linguists trying to disassociate Omotic from AA, I reluctantly question the professional's competency and/or biases. Omotic is by consensus through designation by linguist worth their salt an AA branch. The assertion that Omotic fails to meet demonstrative standards is from a lack of higher competency. Let me give you an example from the source this Suchard linked:

There is a massive error in this reasoning. The comparative method only works with reconstructions of language families and branches under a certain age, where the threshold is set at 10,000 years by Christopher Ehret, the primary linguist who reconstructed proto-Afro-Asiatic, who himself said through established evidence that the methodology fails to capture the true age of AA because the age is beyond the Neolithic, i.e, before agriculture was evinced.

Omotic alone is older than Indo-European, Uralic, and Algic. The age of Cushitic, too. So when we talk about AA, Omotic being the first and oldest diverged branch, it is right to say its time-depth is beyond the point where within the constraints of those settings that instrumentalizes a wrong scaling where the set defined statistical narrowness will not capture anything meaningful, recognizes a necessary comprehensive picture. It's frankly a senseless approach, not having real intuition for the landscape of the depth and grandness of understanding the great nuance and diversity of the signals of the data. But far more competent African historical linguists who defined the basis of all this have shown that Omotic fits right within AA in morphology, aspects of nouns, phonological features, etc. But as Omotic diverged before Cushitic, Egyptian, Chadic, Berber, and Semitic split from each other somewhere close to 10,000 years ago, its characteristics are understandably divergent at times

 

[Doctorabdi]

I read the text superficially looking for elaboration, commentary, and critiques around the time I made this thread. Re-reading it again with greater focus, I'm sure the narrow basis for the analysis serves as a convenient blindspot for comprehensive understanding. Nonetheless, irrespective of the directional influence, proto-IE had AA influence when Semitic was either in the proto stage or nascent development in the southern Levant. An AA language having characteristics of Boreafrasian plural cross-branch items portrays linguistic descent from an older offshoot, indicating greater antiquity in lands I will emphasize were far away from southwest Asia. The particularities cannot explain away these underlying, defining contexts.

I'm not a linguist, certainly. Whenever I hear opinions of individual linguists trying to disassociate Omotic from AA, I reluctantly question the professional's competency and/or biases. Omotic is by consensus through designation by linguist worth their salt an AA branch. The assertion that Omotic fails to meet demonstrative standards is from a lack of higher competency. Let me give you an example from the source this Suchard linked:

View attachment 325935

There is a massive error in this reasoning. The comparative method only works with reconstructions of language families and branches under a certain age, where the threshold is set at 10,000 years by Christopher Ehret, the primary linguist who reconstructed proto-Afro-Asiatic, who himself said through established evidence that the methodology fails to capture the true age of AA because the age is beyond the Neolithic, i.e, before agriculture was evinced.

Omotic alone is older than Indo-European, Uralic, and Algic. The age of Cushitic, too. So when we talk about AA, Omotic being the first and oldest diverged branch, it is right to say its time-depth is beyond the point where within the constraints of those settings that instrumentalizes a wrong scaling where the set defined statistical narrowness will not capture anything meaningful, recognizes a necessary comprehensive picture. It's frankly a senseless approach, not having real intuition for the landscape of the depth and grandness of understanding the great nuance and diversity of the signals of the data. But far more competent African historical linguists who defined the basis of all this have shown that Omotic fits right within AA in morphology, aspects of nouns, phonological features, etc. But as Omotic diverged before Cushitic, Egyptian, Chadic, Berber, and Semitic split from each other somewhere close to 10,000 years ago, its characteristics are understandably divergent at times

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[The alchemist]

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The split of Berber was not that young because Semitic, Chadic - effectively languages that it diverged from at some point had their age at 6 and 7 thousand years age. The proto-language of Berber could have had a later establishment, but it was certainly present.

It could have spread with the pastoralists from central northern Africa by the pastoralists who, I think, internalized AA, going from the central Sahara and Libya, westward from an eastern point, as you mentioned.