The alchemist
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Like one guy wrote on Anthrogenica, I hope they don't mean indistinguishable as in basal Nilotic-like and MENA intermediate ratio, similar to what we see in how Kulubnarti samples cluster with Near Eastern/North Africa/Peninsular Arabia-shifted Horners on PCA and not completely overlap compositionally on a strict autosome signature-specific basis. Lmao, that would seriously be a downer in not getting conclusive convenient informative precedent for once without getting choked from scarce data linked to pastoralists. If this individual is real Kenyan Early Pastoral Neolithic-like (minus the Omotic admixture, reasonably, of course) then we have a somewhat nice chronological migratory expansion on an epic proportion in a very short time span (relatively speaking from such a widespread rate, material culture heterogeneity, and different broad-based subsistence strategies), because around the same time as that Max Planck Insitute sample, there are archeological herding presence found in Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland approximately around 2000 BCE.
Another important aspect, we can conclude about the Savannah Pastoral Neolithic in Kenya and Tanzania is that they migrated relatively fast-paced through Ethiopia and/or Eritrea and Somali region, and did not stay a long time in that geographic region. We can visualize a general continuous movement until arrival in the Rift Valley. This is contrary to what many of us believed. Namely that Cushitics, ancestors of South Cushitic herders, before entering Kenya, lived at least a thousand years or more in the Horn, leaving Sudan around the same time as the Northern Cushitic divergence. Given the lack of extensive wide archeological coverage in the Horn of Africa, the date might be pushed back further upon future findings, but as it stands now, we don’t have any evidence of 6000-year-old herder culture residing in the region. All the data coincide earliest in the 3rd millennium BC and later.
Here is a nice paper summarizing the archeological record about the introduction and spread of herding in the Horn of Africa:
Either way, if not, and this is just a Nubian-type profile, it would mean that C-group and/or Kerma people had those highly MENA Nubians back in the early Middle-Kerma period and you can, at least, assume this goes back into earlier times. We then have to, either way, accept a situation where Sudan in that dynamic period, was more diverse, and probably housed power centralization that included several distinct cultural peoples, as it covered an interesting geographic area. We’re still left with the question of the missing link in how those Nubians, Kulubnarti, or modern Nubian/Sudanese Arabs carry substantial Cushitic ancestry. Somehow that geneflow happened sometime back and there must have been extensive contact, probably even if this Kadruka sample is not wholly Cushitic. I don't buy this idea that Cushites were constrained or limited only to the Eastern Desert while leaving that much stable genetic imprint on the interior demography.
Anyway, there was an abstract from what looked like an upcoming study drafted among many other abstracts in an International Symposium on Biomolecular Archeology of 2021. One of the drafts showed a Nubian presentation giving short introductory scope about the objective and findings. I wondered about that study a couple of months later, so I checked around and found a submission for a doctoral dissertation from 2019 that, lo and behold, contained the same questions and answers as the abstract from two years later. The dissertation I will post under gives millennia-spanning time-transect of mitogenomes of Nubians dating from the Napatan, Meroitic, and Christian eras, that revealed information of the mtDNA analysis that showcased 6 haplogroups recovered with clear archeological contexts and methodological approaches belonging to L2a1, L0a1a, H2a, H2a, T1, N1a1a3. All of these belonged to separate cemeteries of varying "cultural horizons" of Nubian history, with L0a1a being the oldest, residing well within Nubia in the Napatan period (ca. 800-300 BCE).
You can download the dissertation by clicking on this link:
Another important aspect, we can conclude about the Savannah Pastoral Neolithic in Kenya and Tanzania is that they migrated relatively fast-paced through Ethiopia and/or Eritrea and Somali region, and did not stay a long time in that geographic region. We can visualize a general continuous movement until arrival in the Rift Valley. This is contrary to what many of us believed. Namely that Cushitics, ancestors of South Cushitic herders, before entering Kenya, lived at least a thousand years or more in the Horn, leaving Sudan around the same time as the Northern Cushitic divergence. Given the lack of extensive wide archeological coverage in the Horn of Africa, the date might be pushed back further upon future findings, but as it stands now, we don’t have any evidence of 6000-year-old herder culture residing in the region. All the data coincide earliest in the 3rd millennium BC and later.
Here is a nice paper summarizing the archeological record about the introduction and spread of herding in the Horn of Africa:
Either way, if not, and this is just a Nubian-type profile, it would mean that C-group and/or Kerma people had those highly MENA Nubians back in the early Middle-Kerma period and you can, at least, assume this goes back into earlier times. We then have to, either way, accept a situation where Sudan in that dynamic period, was more diverse, and probably housed power centralization that included several distinct cultural peoples, as it covered an interesting geographic area. We’re still left with the question of the missing link in how those Nubians, Kulubnarti, or modern Nubian/Sudanese Arabs carry substantial Cushitic ancestry. Somehow that geneflow happened sometime back and there must have been extensive contact, probably even if this Kadruka sample is not wholly Cushitic. I don't buy this idea that Cushites were constrained or limited only to the Eastern Desert while leaving that much stable genetic imprint on the interior demography.
Anyway, there was an abstract from what looked like an upcoming study drafted among many other abstracts in an International Symposium on Biomolecular Archeology of 2021. One of the drafts showed a Nubian presentation giving short introductory scope about the objective and findings. I wondered about that study a couple of months later, so I checked around and found a submission for a doctoral dissertation from 2019 that, lo and behold, contained the same questions and answers as the abstract from two years later. The dissertation I will post under gives millennia-spanning time-transect of mitogenomes of Nubians dating from the Napatan, Meroitic, and Christian eras, that revealed information of the mtDNA analysis that showcased 6 haplogroups recovered with clear archeological contexts and methodological approaches belonging to L2a1, L0a1a, H2a, H2a, T1, N1a1a3. All of these belonged to separate cemeteries of varying "cultural horizons" of Nubian history, with L0a1a being the oldest, residing well within Nubia in the Napatan period (ca. 800-300 BCE).
You can download the dissertation by clicking on this link:
