How Geography Turned the Sahara Green

[EDsomali]

This is very exciting. I wonder if they will be like Mota or more pure ancient East African or this ANA stuff wihtout the San/Mbuti-related ancestry in Mota. I haven't seen any Somali with E-M329, so I think they will be distinct, unless early Cushitic populations basically killed off all the men.

How do you know they are testing these ancient pre-Cushitic samples from Somalia?

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[Asrafael]

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Wow. Although it'll be a wait with the Reich lab, at least they'll have the most in depth analysis on these samples, with the added bonus that whatever the Reich lab puts out is the settled law of the land. I think Reich will be confronted with clear evidence that paleo-Horn Africans don't make up 50-60% of our ancestry, and there wasn't some migration of Afroasiatic speaking Eurasians into the Horn.

Did you know south Cushites split together with east Cushitic? alot of linguists even argue that south Cushitic is simply east Cushitic, lol.

I'm pinning my hopes on a fully ancient East African population with some basal E lineage, but we'll be damned if there ends up being no ydna sample.

Good news is if there is a male sample, we'll get to put it up on yfull.

 

[EDsomali]

Wow. Although it'll be a wait with the Reich lab, at least they'll have the most in depth analysis on these samples, with the added bonus that whatever the Reich lab puts out is the settled law of the land. I think Reich will be confronted with clear evidence that paleo-Horn Africans don't make up 50-60% of our ancestry, and there wasn't some migration of Afroasiatic speaking Eurasians into the Horn.

Did you know south Cushites split together with east Cushitic? alot of linguists even argue that south Cushitic is simply east Cushitic, lol.

I'm pinning my hopes on a fully ancient East African population with some basal E lineage, but we'll be damned if there ends up being no ydna sample.

Good news is if there is a male sample, we'll get to put it up on yfull.

South Cushites don't descend from East Cushites.

They split very early on from Proto-Cushitic ~300 years +or- and had much higher levels of Eurasian Ancestry then Eastern Cushities with the original population likely being 65-70% Eurasian. Here for the study.

The reason linguists used to group South Cushitic with Eastern Cushitic is that there was so much influence from the latter into the former which then creates a false connection between the two.

 

[Apollo]

South Cushites don't descend from East Cushites.

They split very early on from Proto-Cushitic ~300 years +or- and had much higher levels of Eurasian Ancestry then Eastern Cushities with the original population likely being 65-70% Eurasian. Here for the study.

The reason linguists used to group South Cushitic with Eastern Cushitic is that there was so much influence from the latter into the former which then creates a false connection between the two.

I am starting to believe that the West Cushitic hypothesis of Omotic was the correct one and that the linguistic weirdness of Omotic is mainly caused by a language isolate substratum (Mota's language probably) while in South Cushitic and East Cushitic this happened much less.

Afro-Asiatic intrusion into the Horn was likely in this order Omotic (West Cushitic) > South Cushitic > East Cushitic > Agaw branch? > Ethiosemitic.

 

[EDsomali]

I am starting to believe that the West Cushitic hypothesis of Omotic was the correct one and that the linguistic weirdness of Omotic is mainly caused by a language isolate substratum (Mota's language probably) while in South Cushitic and East Cushitic this happened much less.

Afro-Asiatic intrusion into the Horn was likely in this order Omotic (West Cushitic) > South Cushitic > East Cushitic > Agaw branch? > Ethiosemitic.

I'm not sure about this.

Omotic is very different from not only Cushitic but all other Afro-Asiatic languages. Some linguists are starting to doubt its membership as an afro-Asiatic language.

Also when could Proto-Cushitic speakers have reached the Omo river?

 

[Apollo]

I'm not sure about this.

Omotic is very different from not only Cushitic but all other Afro-Asiatic languages. Some linguists are starting to doubt its membership as an afro-Asiatic language.

I'm not deep into linguistics, but can it not be explained by it being some kind of ancient creole with Mota's language causing the linguistic distance vs Cushitic and AA in general. Many linguists used to think it was West Cushitic in the past.

Ethiosemitic languages have an Agaw substratum.. why wouldn't Omotic have one and its substratum is simply unidentifiable due to lack of living counterparts of the substratum.

Also when could Proto-Cushitic speakers have reached the Omo river?

They probably used to live all over Highland Ethiopia and were consecutively pushed into the Southwest corner by the East Cushites who may have had better technology.

The E-M34 and E-V1515/E-CTS10880 subclades in Omotics is likely the ancestral signal of their AA ancestors. I don't know how J1 got there (in North Omotics), most likely Ethiosemitic but more research is needed on that.

 

[Asrafael]

South Cushites don't descend from East Cushites.

They split very early on from Proto-Cushitic ~300 years +or- and had much higher levels of Eurasian Ancestry then Eastern Cushities with the original population likely being 65-70% Eurasian. Here for the study.

The reason linguists used to group South Cushitic with Eastern Cushitic is that there was so much influence from the latter into the former which then creates a false connection between the two.

Don't mistake me, I don't believe they were east Cushitic, only that they share a branch with east Cushitic. But they are certianly not like north Cushitic. Iraqw is much much more related to Somali, and Oromo then Beja. They share far too many a series of innovations and developments, not to mention cognates to the exclusion of central Cushitic and north Cushitic. Linguistics is more a science than you take it to be, and does not suffer from the inane arbitrariness of the humanities. Want evidence? look at how the proto-Indo-Europeans were constructed merely from the languages of it's descendants thousands of years later. Their entire society, where they lived, their social relationships, their technologies, subsistence patterns, social contracts, and kinship systems. With the advent of systemic archeology and ancient DNA, and linguistics was proven right over and over again, down to the fact that they were a patriarchal society that revolved around patrilineal kinship. Just take a look at all those Beaker, Afansievo, Yamnaya, and Corded Ware finds, all the product of recent ychromomal bottlenecks of a single lineage.

You most sorely need to recognize that there is a total difference between genetic relationships and language contact. An example of a what we mean by a genetic relationship in linguistics - you and your sibling share a genetic relationship, you share the same single ancestral origin, but through evolution came to be different entities. For language contact, imagine you and your sibling engaged with each other extensively, and thus came to influence each other, and because of this became more similar in many aspects (words and phrases, ideas, dress). These two discrete things can be with ease distinguished from one another with no reasonable chance of mixing the two in any case. It is very unreasonable to suggest that linguists cannot distinguish extensive contact from genetic relationships. Humans behave in a specific set of universal ways, and for it to be otherwise is an extreme case. This can be applied to linguistics.

I also think you place too much on the lexical basis of a genetic relationship of south and east Cushitic, when we are speaking about morphology. Lexical and morphological influences (when particularly heavy) are quite clear when south Cushitic -> east Cushitic (and the reverse) is concerned. There are east Cushitic languages showing south Cushitic influences, especially in the Samic group including Gabbra and Rendille, and with some extant south Cushitic languages showing east Cushitic influences. Boon also shows clear south Cushitic influences. I think Oromoid language do as well.

Beyond the lexical stuff, if east or south Cushitic had influenced each other to the degree the entire phonological and morphological aspects of their languages cannot be isolated or the direction of influence cannot be ascertained, what we are saying is that east/south Cushitic are essentially mixed languages - a very, very rare occurrence in history. While not being similar at all - I am bot against the possibility of very early dialectal leveling between embryonic south Cushitic and east Cushitic. But post divergence and collapse of mutual intelligibility and then a leveling, and we are close to be suggesting proto-east and proto-south Cushitic were pidgins/creoles, which the evidence by the longest stretch does not support. You are also extremely overblowing the actual degree of contact between east and south Cushitic.

For a few decades now, linguists have shown they can competently tell apart south Cushitic vs east Cushitic influences quite easily in Nilotic and Bantu languages. One of the most interesting byproduct of this research was the that an entire extinct and unrecorded east Cushitic language is postulated to have existed somewhere in lake Turkana within the borders of south Sudan (named Baz), it's entire existence hinging on it's influences on various Nilotic languages.

The DNA side of things, the early pastoral samples were unlikely to be South Cushitic, and even if they were Cushitic, the fact remains that they have very heavy to predominate non-Cushitic admixture. They belonged to an unknown, and isolated population. Their autosomals were very weird and unexpected, with a ydna that was also very out of place. And most critically, they didn't share recent ancestry with the south Cushitic samples. They were clearly a distinct, isolated population that didn't even contribute to the south Cushitic samples.

On the Eurasian %, while I don't agree, all I predict is that the proto-Afroasiatic pop most likely didn't have the same amount of Eurasian ancestry that it's daughter neolithic populations did. I predict an increase in Eurasian ancestry to be one of the critical differences between the proto-Afroasiatic pop and the many neolithic post-breakup Afroasiatic groups. For some groups, additional ancient East African/ANA occurs, as it probably did with early Cushitic, Chadic, and Egyptian groups.

I think also it is very suggestive that proto-Afroasiatic has a strong possibility that it had a significant degree of langauge contact with the other major African langauge families, and not with the extant language families of Eurasia.

Omotic is 100% Afroasiatic. Anyone who doubts this pretty much is hiding behind racial apologia. It has the largest time depth only because of its genetic relationship with the other languages. Their E-M34 subclade hasn't been tested yet, but it is probably very old and split very early on from Semitic and later Afroasiatic E-M34.

I prefer we focus on the actual evidence instead of our emotions here. Omotic is Afroasiatic, and it is here to stay.

 

[Asrafael]

I'm not deep into linguistics, but can it not be explained by it being some kind of ancient creole with Mota's language causing the linguistic distance vs Cushitic and AA in general. Many linguists used to think it was West Cushitic in the past.

Ethiosemitic languages have an Agaw substratum.. why wouldn't Omotic have one and its substratum is simply unidentifiable due to lack of living counterparts of the substratum.



They probably used to live all over Highland Ethiopia and were consecutively pushed into the Southwest corner by the East Cushites who may have had better technology.

The E-M34 and E-V1515/E-CTS10880 subclades in Omotics is likely the ancestral signal of their AA ancestors. I don't know how J1 got there (in North Omotics), most likely Ethiosemitic but more research is needed on that.

I would say E-M34. E-V1515 is very Cushitic and almost solid in this regard. It does not seem in any way to have a connection to proto-Omotics. Its also much younger than when proto-Omotic broke off from Afroasiatic.

And yeah, you explained the common arguement I see against Omotics inclusion to Afroasiatic. Its divergent nature is not a result of anything but its genetic relationship to other Afroasiatic languages. It is a 2nd cousin where the others are 1st cousins and siblings.

 

[Timo Jareer and proud]

So we wuz not kangz?

 

[The alchemist]

A research paper I read stated that the East African Haplogroup L2 came from West Africa but expanded East in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition (around 10 to 12 ka) because of conditions for migration facilitated by climate oscillation.

 

[Apollo]

A research paper I read stated that the East African Haplogroup L2 came from West Africa but expanded East in the Pleistocene/Holocene transition (around 10 to 12 ka) because of conditions for migration facilitated by climate oscillation.

I've read that paper. I think they made some minor errors into assuming it was spread to East Africa naturally with foragers and not more recently with mobile agricultural/pastoral populations (Nilotes and Proto-Nilote-admixed Cushites). Eastern foragers were more based on L0-L6-L4-L3. I don't think it is West African proper but more likely from the Paleolithic Central Sahel and then spread into separate directions. It is found all over Africa now.