Again, stolen from a friend. He doesn't plan on actually posting it so why let it go to waste? You guys will enjoy, I think. He paired a paper we found that came out recently with like 5 other papers on dental and craniometric morphology of Nubians. The latest one was massive but many questions still worth asking. I have way, way more to say than what he details cos obviously twitter doesn't allow for >280 characters per tweet unless u give Yahuulon precious sheckles. Feel free to ask away.
1
At the turn of the 6th millennium BC, the demography of the Middle Nile Valley was undergoing rapid change. Within 500 years, foragers along the Middle Nile would be replaced by seemingly alien food-producing peoples.
A thread on the populations of a neolithicising Nubia:
In a 2024 study by Martin et al., abrupt changes were observed in the dental morphology between the Mesolithic and Neolithic people of the Middle Nile. These changes aligned with findings from previous dental and craniometric analyses on the populations of Nubia.
mention aDNA hard to find in Nubia bla bla bla;
This is why researchers turn to craniodental morphology. The structures analysed in the teeth of the specimens are genetically determined and remain stable over time - studies show they closely track genomic ancestry (r = 0.84 in Africa)
Still, the question of whether the changes were a result of in situ evolution or population replacement remained. Previous authors were inclined to believe it was the former - similar craniodental trends were observed elsewhere as a consequence of dietary shifts after all.
However, a new study by Martin et al. on enamel–dentine junction (EDJ) analysis from upper molars - structures formed in childhood and typically unaffected by diet or wear - would flip everything on its head.
His team examined 88 individuals spanning from 14,000BC to 2,700BC. Consistently, foragers from the Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic at Jebel Sahaba, El-Barga, Sphinx, and other early sites would show great affinity for each other and differ greatly from the Neolithic groups.
Neolithic individuals, too, exhibited close morphological relatedness Their traits emerged abruptly - in the matter of a few centuries - and with no transitional forms between forager and food-producing groups.
Accordingly, it was argued that the shift in morphology was too rapid for gradual evolution. The phenomenon couldn’t be explained by anything but population replacement on a grand scale. By 5000BC, very little remained of the native foragers on the Middle Nile.
What’s more, the new Neolithic population was internally homogeneous. Once established, the Neolithic population retained the same dental traits across successive generations. Dental non-metric analyses suggest this continuity would endure into the Bronze Age and beyond.
This paper is important for a few reasons: firstly, the replacement was more geographically widespread than previously assumed. Earlier interpretations restricted replacement to the more northerly parts of Nubia, but we now have reason to believe it occurred all along the Middle Nile.
Forager signatures do persist, but not in the Nubian river corridor. Individuals from the Western Desert, Wadi Halfa and South-Central Sudan do retain forager-like EDJ patterns and may represent remnant populations pushed to ecological margins.
But who were these people? We can’t be exactly sure, but we do have some idea. Paleolithic Jebel Sahaba - once thought ancestral to Nubians - was found to be phenetically most similar to sub-Saharan (West) African populations.
Does this mean that the foragers of Sudan were ancestors of West Africans? Not exactly. From what I can glean on proxies compared against GSA, pertinent SSA populations were not used. I suspect, for many reasons, that they were instead a Nilotic-adjacent population.
ALT: Modern Africans used in study; Kenya sample = Chaga - so CUSH-BANTU mix unrepresentative of Nilotic people
What was the genetic profile of these Neolithic Nubians? The only autosomal DNA we have from pre-Christian Nubia is very low yield - sequenced from the hair of a single 4000-year-old from Kadruka in Upper Nubia who clustered with Pastoral Neolithic (PN) samples.
Using PN samples as a 1-to-1 proxy, and assuming he didn’t carry ancestry from the forager populations local to Southeast Africa, he probably descended from two main populations: Levantine/Egyptian pastoralists and the Nilotic-related forager groups of the Nile.
Zooarchaeological evidence, too, supports a migration from the Near East into the Middle Nile. Not only did the cattle belonging to the Neolithic population arrive as an already-managed herd, but the DNA of the cows show that they originated further north.
Incl. Ghaba mtDNA: some African, but notably loads of non-African... what this means. (he's talking about the Morez paper here, cba to find it but it came out this year)
END OF THREAD
Cushitic ethnogenesis was literally at the exact same time. Why couldn't these people be our literal ancestors?
There's a lot he left out, lots more I have to say but crux of it is:
Nilotic-like people were completely assimilated along Middle Nile
Only remnant populations near Khartoum
Cushitic-like people in Nile with first cattle in Sudan
Cushitic ethnogenesis has been tied to pastoralism entering NEA
lots more implications (south cushites/ePN did NOT travel through White Nile but instead Blue Nile to reach Lake Turkana) but i cba rn
Some of the papers used:
Do cultural and biological variation correspond in the Middle Nile Valley Neolithic? Some insights from dental morphology (Irish, JD and Kabaciński, J)
Enamel–dentine junction morphology reveals population replacement and mobility in the late prehistoric Middle Nile Valley <-- special paper from March
From hunter-gatherers to food producers: New dental insights into the Nile Valley population history (Late Paleolithic - Neolithic)
The transition from hunting–gathering to agriculture in Nubia: dental evidence for and against selection, population continuity and discontinuity
@Shimbiris @The alchemist lads lads lads what do we think
1
At the turn of the 6th millennium BC, the demography of the Middle Nile Valley was undergoing rapid change. Within 500 years, foragers along the Middle Nile would be replaced by seemingly alien food-producing peoples.
A thread on the populations of a neolithicising Nubia:
In a 2024 study by Martin et al., abrupt changes were observed in the dental morphology between the Mesolithic and Neolithic people of the Middle Nile. These changes aligned with findings from previous dental and craniometric analyses on the populations of Nubia.
mention aDNA hard to find in Nubia bla bla bla;
This is why researchers turn to craniodental morphology. The structures analysed in the teeth of the specimens are genetically determined and remain stable over time - studies show they closely track genomic ancestry (r = 0.84 in Africa)
Still, the question of whether the changes were a result of in situ evolution or population replacement remained. Previous authors were inclined to believe it was the former - similar craniodental trends were observed elsewhere as a consequence of dietary shifts after all.
However, a new study by Martin et al. on enamel–dentine junction (EDJ) analysis from upper molars - structures formed in childhood and typically unaffected by diet or wear - would flip everything on its head.
His team examined 88 individuals spanning from 14,000BC to 2,700BC. Consistently, foragers from the Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic at Jebel Sahaba, El-Barga, Sphinx, and other early sites would show great affinity for each other and differ greatly from the Neolithic groups.
Neolithic individuals, too, exhibited close morphological relatedness Their traits emerged abruptly - in the matter of a few centuries - and with no transitional forms between forager and food-producing groups.
Accordingly, it was argued that the shift in morphology was too rapid for gradual evolution. The phenomenon couldn’t be explained by anything but population replacement on a grand scale. By 5000BC, very little remained of the native foragers on the Middle Nile.
What’s more, the new Neolithic population was internally homogeneous. Once established, the Neolithic population retained the same dental traits across successive generations. Dental non-metric analyses suggest this continuity would endure into the Bronze Age and beyond.
This paper is important for a few reasons: firstly, the replacement was more geographically widespread than previously assumed. Earlier interpretations restricted replacement to the more northerly parts of Nubia, but we now have reason to believe it occurred all along the Middle Nile.
Forager signatures do persist, but not in the Nubian river corridor. Individuals from the Western Desert, Wadi Halfa and South-Central Sudan do retain forager-like EDJ patterns and may represent remnant populations pushed to ecological margins.
But who were these people? We can’t be exactly sure, but we do have some idea. Paleolithic Jebel Sahaba - once thought ancestral to Nubians - was found to be phenetically most similar to sub-Saharan (West) African populations.
Does this mean that the foragers of Sudan were ancestors of West Africans? Not exactly. From what I can glean on proxies compared against GSA, pertinent SSA populations were not used. I suspect, for many reasons, that they were instead a Nilotic-adjacent population.
ALT: Modern Africans used in study; Kenya sample = Chaga - so CUSH-BANTU mix unrepresentative of Nilotic people
What was the genetic profile of these Neolithic Nubians? The only autosomal DNA we have from pre-Christian Nubia is very low yield - sequenced from the hair of a single 4000-year-old from Kadruka in Upper Nubia who clustered with Pastoral Neolithic (PN) samples.
Using PN samples as a 1-to-1 proxy, and assuming he didn’t carry ancestry from the forager populations local to Southeast Africa, he probably descended from two main populations: Levantine/Egyptian pastoralists and the Nilotic-related forager groups of the Nile.
Zooarchaeological evidence, too, supports a migration from the Near East into the Middle Nile. Not only did the cattle belonging to the Neolithic population arrive as an already-managed herd, but the DNA of the cows show that they originated further north.
Incl. Ghaba mtDNA: some African, but notably loads of non-African... what this means. (he's talking about the Morez paper here, cba to find it but it came out this year)
END OF THREAD
Cushitic ethnogenesis was literally at the exact same time. Why couldn't these people be our literal ancestors?
There's a lot he left out, lots more I have to say but crux of it is:
Nilotic-like people were completely assimilated along Middle Nile
Only remnant populations near Khartoum
Cushitic-like people in Nile with first cattle in Sudan
Cushitic ethnogenesis has been tied to pastoralism entering NEA
lots more implications (south cushites/ePN did NOT travel through White Nile but instead Blue Nile to reach Lake Turkana) but i cba rn
Some of the papers used:
Do cultural and biological variation correspond in the Middle Nile Valley Neolithic? Some insights from dental morphology (Irish, JD and Kabaciński, J)
Enamel–dentine junction morphology reveals population replacement and mobility in the late prehistoric Middle Nile Valley <-- special paper from March
From hunter-gatherers to food producers: New dental insights into the Nile Valley population history (Late Paleolithic - Neolithic)
The transition from hunting–gathering to agriculture in Nubia: dental evidence for and against selection, population continuity and discontinuity
2020 - Irish - Do dental nonmetric traits actually work as proxies for neutral genomic data
@Shimbiris @The alchemist lads lads lads what do we think
