Nomadic african pastoralists in the neolithic arabian peninsula ?

Maybe semites was the wrong term to emphasize.

None of the culutres of the Levant or mesptomia seemed to have developed a conception of the afterlife/underworld and they all seemed to have no interest in it.

Pastoralism seems to have been what allowed a pouplation expansion in the arabian penisula and not agriculture
It's established that pastoralism reached Arabia before agriculture. It was more like pastoral subsistence with hunting characteristics.
 
1) proto-Cushitic hunter gathers coming out from their refuge in the horn of africa slowly and then reaching lower nubia
There was no such thing. The hunter-gatherer existed in the Egyptian-Nubian region. The Cushitic genetic genesis happened right are the border of Egypt in northwest Nubia. What people today call South Western Egypt, in the Nabta-Kiseiba region.
 

NidarNidar

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@Midas how much coffee did you have? gonna enjoy the deep dive when I get some sleep, good stuff.

the rock yawn GIF
 
Very interesting after the invention of agriculture within 4,000 years it spread through all of Europe reaching north africa by 5000 b.c. yet in eygpt agriculture seems to be only possible after the invention of irrigation so it only first appears around 4500 b.c in the fayumm oasis.

So from the appearance of semi domesticated wild cattle in nabta playa around 8 thousand b.c to the appearance of agriculture in 4500 b.c we essentially have 4,000 years were their are pastoralists but no farmers in eygpt.


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Agriculture in the Fayum Neolithic came with Levantine settlers. They entered with wheat and barley (two winter-adapted grains) because the Levant was supposedly getting dry and cold or something.

Anyway, these people were Levantines altogether. The Fayum HGs were different. The cattle herders of the South Western Egypt were different and I think the lithics reflected the HGs of the first Fayum than the Neolithics. There was also a clear population replacement between the HG and Neolithics with a few centuries of no occupation in Fayum. I have written extensively about this but it was supposed to be part of a broader thread so I have not posted yet. I will say there were some continuity of lithics to some extent but that is definitely more to horizontal influence than lateral continuity.

To give you a sneak peak, the north have been a Levant second homeland since those Agriculturalist touched ground. Southern Egypt and Nubia were separate things. Along the Western Desert (the whole thing) was a nuance because some of those Levant Neolithic peoples resorted to mixed subsistence and then moved on to pastoralism, affecting the cattle herders and probably influenced som Neolithic Levant ancestry in those north and central Western Desert herder. But majority of their ancestry would be Fauym HG related.

Yes, I am basically saying that whatever was in those Fauym HG would be the bulk of the non-East African ancestry in Cushites. And they were replaced by Neolithic peoples in the north. The south and the north of Egypt were separate population history hot-spots since the Neolithic. The southern populations were where the prehistoric components of the civilization arose from, and they were within the same broader culture zone as these Cushitics, while the northern peoples were Levantines. Two universes that were not one.
 
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That is an interesting perspective. How do the other megalith sites look from that time and region?
Im not too sure it seems like this is around when the megaltihs start to emerge.

Although I just know made the connection that there emergence seems to be very close in time too the domestication of the donkey which happens around this time give or take a few centuries.
 
Agriculture in the Fayum Neolithic came with Levantine settlers. They entered with wheat and barley (two winter-adapted grains) because the Levant was supposedly getting dry and cold or something.

Anyway, these people were Levantines altogether. The Fayum HGs were different. The cattle herders of the South Western Egypt were different and I think the lithics reflected the HGs of the first Fayum than the Neolithics. There was also a clear population replacement between the HG and Neolithics with a few centuries of no occupation in Fayum. I have written extensively about this but it was supposed to be part of a broader thread so I have not posted yet. I will say there were some continuity of lithics to some extent but that is definitely more to horizontal influence than lateral continuity.
Yh i have no good grasp of the technical stuff but Its incredibly how quickly this change happens from 5000 b.c onwards
 

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Yh i have no good grasp of the technical stuff but Its incredibly how quickly this change happens from 5000 b.c onwards
Human migration, language shift, and dynamics are complex. Imagine a society in 4,000-5,000 years trying to research population movements in the future long after we are gone and all data stored in books and computers vanish; God help them.

Human society is complex, they found grain dating back to Anatolia being traded in the English Channel in pre-neolithic times, our story is more complex than what is spouted.
 
The idea that I really really want to emphasize is the connection between religion and architecture. This is the idea thats been buzzing in my head for days whose implication only grows the more I think about it.

  1. The people who built these megalithic tombs/temple in the arabian penisula where obviously very concerned with the afterlife .
  2. The farming civilizations of the middle east did not care about life after death and had no real conception of an afterlife. They only believed in God's who lived in the sky who came down to the small box shaped temples to communicate.
  3. The pastoralist civilizations of northeast Africa believed in an afterlife . But more than that they believed all their gods also lived in the underworld. The ancient eygptian deities all lived in Duat which is the underworld i.e ( the gods lived underground ).
The implications when you think about it are staggering. People stopped building megaltihs and tombs/cairns in the arabian penisula why ?

If you look at the beliefs and temples of the pagan Arabs and jews its exactly the same as that of the ancient mespotomias and levantines. No real afterlife. And temples that are "houses of god" in the form of small rectangle boxes like the kaaba and solmons temple .( even prophet Ibrahim who originally built the kaaba was from mespotomia )






There's more that could be said about the fact that the main ancient eygptian deities used to be human (osiris,horus, isis, etc) and became divine after their death. ( which seems to hint at pastoral relegion beginning as a cult of ancestor worship) while none of the main mespotomian deities were ever human .
 
I wanted to stop here for today. But I found this too tantalizing of a fact to pass up.

The quran mentions two prophets before Abraham. Hud and saleh. They were "Arabs " and were prophets sent to warn these "Arabs". Thamud and ad and these two people's built "tall stone buildings" and the "arabs of ad" had camels.

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