Buur Heybe Ancients

In the 1980s, an excavation was done at the Buur Heybe which yielded multiple specimens and two full skeletons.

Photos of the excavation.

I emailed the man who conducted the excavation out of curiosity of what happened to the samples and if DNA could be extracted from them.

Turns out the Riech lab at Harvard have the specimens so hopefully we can get some ancient DNA from the sites which should be ready if all goes well in October.

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Sophisticate

~Gallantly Gadabuursi~
Staff Member
In the 1980s, an excavation was done at the Buur Heybe which yielded multiple specimens and two full skeletons.

Photos of the excavation.

I emailed the man who conducted the excavation out of curiosity of what happened to the samples and if DNA could be extracted from them.

Turns out the Riech lab at Harvard have the specimens so hopefully we can get some ancient DNA from the sites which should be ready if all goes well in October.

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Sounds interesting. Keep us posted. Also, how old are the remains?
 

Apollo

VIP
Are you sure David Reich actually has them or they are at some Western archives? The latter is more likely.
 

Apollo

VIP
I think their mtDNA will be L6, L4, or L3a.

Y-DNA, some ancient form of E1b1b (excluding M35), if there are male samples.

@EDsomali usually they announce it a year in advance in an abstract. This is kind of unusual.
 

World

VIP
I agree.

I'm more interested with their autosomal DNA and the amount (if any) Somalis carry from them.
Do we know how old the samples are?

It’s such a shame they went extinct in the lowlands. I would love to see how they looked like. How comes the highland HG’s survived and ours didn’t?
 

Apollo

VIP
I agree.

I'm more interested with their autosomal DNA and the amount (if any) Somalis carry from them.

I predict that they will make the mistake in assuming that modern Bejas are the same as proto-Cushites from 4,000 years ago. I hope they won't make that stupid assumption.
 
Do we know how old the samples are?

It’s such a shame they went extinct in the lowlands. I would love to see how they looked like. How comes the highland HG’s survived and ours didn’t?


I'm not sure how old the samples are.

I came across this excavation when I was looking into Somalia climate during the last 20,000 years.

If I can find the age then I will update this post. @sophisticate

As for what they looked like,

upload_2019-7-28_0-8-17.png


Here is the climate they would have been evolved for so.
 

Apollo

VIP
They lived all over Somalia, at the Buur Heybe site there was a higher concentration of them.

Perhaps like the WHG, SHG, and EHG there existed a genetic cline between them inside of Somalia. But asking for a North Somali HG is too much to ask for.
 

World

VIP
They lived all over Somalia, at the Buur Heybe site there was a higher concentration of them.

Perhaps like the WHG, SHG, and EHG there existed a genetic cline between them inside of Somalia. But asking for a North Somali HG is too much to ask for.
Southern omalia would have been way more habitable so I’m surprised that southern Somalis don’t have more HG ancestry. Unless of course Somalis originate from the south and migrated into the relatively empty north after the introduction of camels.
 
Southern omalia would have been way more habitable so I’m surprised that southern Somalis don’t have more HG ancestry. Unless of course Somalis originate from the south and migrated into the relatively empty north after the introduction of camels.


Hunter-gatherers lived in the North and were related to other hunter-gatherers that lived all across Somaliweyn.
upload_2019-5-17_0-38-21-png.72445


To the best of my understanding, the HG that came from the Buur Heybe site and those than lived across Somaliweyn were different and unrelated.

So perhaps we may need additional samples from the North as well.
 

Apollo

VIP
Southern omalia would have been way more habitable so I’m surprised that southern Somalis don’t have more HG ancestry. Unless of course Somalis originate from the south and migrated into the relatively empty north after the introduction of camels.

During the Green Sahara period as proto-Cushites were pushing southwards much of North Somalia was temporarily green. They may have encountered them in North Somalia first and when it dried up the Cushitic proto-Somalis migrated to South Somalia and made the entire Somali peninsula Somaloid (no more HGs).

Or another likely scenario:

South Cushites with local HG admixture first lived in Somalia who cleared them out, and then later on East Cushites replaced the South Cushites (PN population) of Prehistoric Somalia.
 

Apollo

VIP
@sophisticate

The Eyle are not the same as those 10,000 year old samples. They are Garre (Cushites) who absorbed maroon (Niger-Congo and Ethiopian Oromo) former slaves.

Almost nowhere on the planet is there a 10,000 year population continuation. Not even in the South African San who got 6-9% East African Pastoral Neolithic admixture from 3,000 years ago and the Khoe/Nama even more (20% PN) + variable Bantu admixture.
 

Apollo

VIP
I hope they will sample the modern Eyle along with those samples. Their scam will be exposed, just like Isaaq-Darood oral history was fake.
 

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