Somalia's paleolithic hunter-gatherers

[Grant]

They are not traditional hunter-gatherers, they are modernized people who only occasionally hunt as a some sort of local tradition. This is like calling Americans who go to woods and hunt deer as paleolithic peoples.

Also, there is strong evidence that they are Somali Bantus rather than anything else. They are frequently listed along with Somali Bantus in journal articles. And there are many anthropological similarities between them and the Maroon communities of South-Central America.

You don't think populations, habitats and methods changed over time? Read the abstract for the second article. Just what wild game is left in Somalia?

If you are claiming the remains on Buur Heybe are Samaale, it won't work. You will also have to give up your northeast Sudan origin theory. The human remains date to 11 K + and the habitation to 20K. The pottery is typical and consistent clear back to the mid-Holocene. No one in the academic community has suggested these people are anything but Eyle.

https://usm.maine.edu/sites/default...Range Site, Buur Hakaba, southern Somalia.pdf

https://www.jstor.org/stable/124524?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

"Abstract
Recent archaeological excavations of a large rockshelter at Buur Heybe, southern Somalia, resulted in the discovery of fourteen human burials of early Holocene age. The Gogoshiis Qabe burials represent: 1) the first primary context prehistoric skeletal remains from Somalia; 2) the earliest chronometrically dated burials from the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti); and 3) the earliest definitive evidence in eastern Africa for grave goods (lesser kudu horns). The mortuary data are examined in light of an ecological model of hunter/gatherer socio/territorial organization which predicts that when critical human resources are spatio/temporally unpredictable and scarce, hunter/gatherers are unlikely to bury their dead in formal burial areas or build grave monuments. Conversely, when resources are abundant and predictable across time and space, conditions will arise that favour the construction of grave monuments and/or formal burial areas, possibly as a means of ritualizing corporate lineal descent."

 

[Apollo]

Clown,

I never claimed such a thing. I said that ethnic Somalis carry more of such ancestry than Somali Bantus. The Madowweyne have absolutely nothing to do with the paleolithic hunter-gatherers of Somalia. They carry less ancestry from those hunter-gatherers than ethnic Somalis do.

They are LESS native to ancient Somalia than ACTUAL Somalis.

 

[Grant]

Clown,

I never claimed such a thing. Somali Bantus have absolutely nothing to do with the paleolithic hunter-gatherers of Somalia. They carry less ancestry from those hunter-gatherers than ethnic Somalis do.

They are LESS native to ancient Somalia than ACTUAL Somalis.

Quoting you. The quote is right there in the same post you are denying.




"Also, there is strong evidence that they are Somali Bantus rather than anything else. They are frequently listed along with Somali Bantus in journal articles. And there are many anthropological similarities between them and the Maroon communities of South-Central America."

 

[Apollo]

Quoting you. The quote is right there in the same post you are denying.




"Also, there is strong evidence that they are Somali Bantus rather than anything else. They are frequently listed along with Somali Bantus in journal articles. And there are many anthropological similarities between them and the Maroon communities of South-Central America."

Yes, I stand by what I said about the Eyle as I believe they are NOT predominantly of paleolithic Somalian origin.

I believe they will be a majority Neolithic Cushitic population with substantial Neolithic Niger-Congo (read Bantu) admixture with less Paleolithic related ancestry than random ''Samaale'' Somalis.

Similar to how an Afro-Caribbean mixed Briton will be much less Paleolithic British than a full British individual.

I have provided you my reasoning many times before based on the results of the Boni/B0on and seing genome results from individuals from Buur Hakaba who had substantial post-Neolithic Niger-Congo Bantu admixture.

 

[MI]

Grant, just so I am understanding you correctly, are you claiming that these ancient hunter-gatherers dating back 20ky are “Negroid” in the sense that they are similar to ancient East African inhabitants meaning Nilotes, Mota-like/Omo-valley and to a lesser degree ancient click speaker populations or Bantus?

 

[Apollo]

Grant, just so I am understanding you correctly, are you claiming that these ancient hunter-gatherers dating back 20ky are “Negroid” in the sense that they are similar to ancient East African inhabitants meaning Nilotes, Mota-like/Omo-valley and to a lesser degree ancient click speaker populations or Bantus?

The Eyle are mixed with Bantus like the Boni, where they get their Negroid looks from.

Secondly, the hunter-gatherers who were native to the Eastern Horn of Africa should not look too Negroid as Somalia has been extremely arid for tens of thousands of years. The extreme Negroid phenotype is a tropical jungle phenotype, not a phenotype native to arid or semi-arid regions.

There have never been any decent craniometric studies on them. Most of the remains they have are fragments rather than full skeletons. Lastly, craniometrics/reconstructing ancient remains is highly pseudo-scientific and unreliable as they change quite often (e.g. see the Chedar man change). Soft tissue appearance can never be truly known from bones.

 

[Grant]

Grant, just so I am understanding you correctly, are you claiming that these ancient hunter-gatherers dating back 20ky are “Negroid” in the sense that they are similar to ancient East African inhabitants meaning Nilotes, Mota-like/Omo-valley and to a lesser degree ancient click speaker populations or Bantus?

The Eyle are usually described as negroid, but I have not been able to place them definitively. They can't be Bantu, which is why I keep going back to the Ari, the blacksmith group of which goes back 13+ K in Ethiopia. Apollo won't supply the genetic data. He makes big claims, but won;t talk because he says it hasn't gelled yet. He says "they will be a majority Neolithic Cushitic population with substantial Neolithic Niger-Congo (read Bantu) admixture with less Paleolithic related ancestry than random ''Samaale'' Somalis." But he won't provide the evidence.

 

[Apollo]

Grant, just so I am understanding you correctly, are you claiming that these ancient hunter-gatherers dating back 20ky are “Negroid” in the sense that they are similar to ancient East African inhabitants meaning Nilotes, Mota-like/Omo-valley and to a lesser degree ancient click speaker populations or Bantus?

They were not closely related to Nilotes nor Omotic populations and have been isolated from them for over 20,000 years based on the paleolithic lineages found in Somalis but not found in Sudan or Ethiopians. Their relationship to Bantus? Only a deluded person would think they were. That makes zero sense if one just knows basic level African history.

These people are extinct and only remain as a fragment / ghost population in ethnic Somalis.

@MusIbr beware, he has zero interest in who these ancients were and only is trying to use this knowledge to further claim that Somalia does not belong to Somalis. He has an agenda here.

 

[Grant]

They are not closesly related to Nilotes nor Omotic populations and have been isolated from them for over 20,000 years based on the paleolithic lineages found in Somalis not found in Sudan or Ethiopians. Their relationship to Bantus? Only a deluded person would think they were. That makes zero sense if one just knows basic level African history.

These people are extinct and only remain as a fragment / ghost population in ethnic Somalis.

They can't be Bantus. That's what I said.

Mota at 4.5, Ari blacksmith at 13, and Gogoshiis Qabe at 20 K are none of them Samaale.

 

[Apollo]

They can't be Bantus. That's what I said.

Mota at 4.5, Ari blacksmith at 13, and Gogoshiis Qabe at 20 K are none of them Samaale.

Omotics are native to Southwest Ethiopia, not Somalia. It also has a completely different climate from Somalia and is more humid. These people were not closely related to the ancients of Somalia. In Paleolithic times, people didn't travel far and often stayed restricted to a small region for tens of thousands of years.

Secondly, paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived all over Somaliweyn when proto-Somalis arrived. So hunter-gatherer admixture is present in all ethnic Somalis and is not restricted to the Buur Hakaba area.

Samaales are their descendants in part and probably carry more of their ancestry than anybody else.

 

[MI]

The Eyle are mixed with Bantus like the Boni, where they get their Negroid looks from.

Secondly, the hunter-gatherers who were native to the Eastern Horn of Africa should not look too Negroid as Somalia has been extremely arid for tens of thousands of years. The extreme Negroid phenotype is a tropical jungle phenotype, not a phenotype native to arid or semi-arid regions.

There have never been any decent craniometric studies on them. Most of the remains they have are fragments rather than full skeletons. Lastly, craniometrics/reconstructing ancient remains is highly pseudo-scientific and unreliable as they change quite often (e.g. see the Chedar man change). Soft tissue appearance can never be truly known from bones.

What you said about facial reconstruction reminds me of when the artist behind Kostenki14 man thought ancient samples looked like subsaharan Africans because of OoA and the massive difference in the updated version when he learned that wasn’t the case. Suugo science indeed.

The Eyle are usually described as negroid, but I have not been able to place them definitively. They can't be Bantu, which is why I keep going back to the Ari, the blacksmith group of which goes back 13+ K in Ethiopia. Apollo won't supply the genetic data. He makes big claims, but won;t talk because he says it hasn't gelled yet. He says "they will be a majority Neolithic Cushitic population with substantial Neolithic Niger-Congo (read Bantu) admixture with less Paleolithic related ancestry than random ''Samaale'' Somalis." But he won't provide the evidence.

Just from eyeballing them on google images they don’t look very much like the Ari. It will be interesting to see what their ancestry looks like. I see that there’s some speculation they might have ancient San ancestry, which is also interesting because a recent study proved that there was a Mota-San cline running the entire length of Southeastern Africa. Maybe that’s where they came from, the southern Rift Valley?

 

[Grant]

Omotics are native to Southwest Ethiopia, not Somalia. It also has a completely different climate from Somalia and is more humid. These people were not closely related to the ancients of Somalia.

Secondly, hunter-gathers lived all over Somaliweyn when Somalis arrived. So hunter-gatherer admixture is present in all ethnic Somalis and is not restricted to the Buur Hakaba area.

Samaales are their descendants in part and probably carry more of their ancestry than anybody else.

Finally!!! We are getting somewhere.

The HGs were all over and Samaales have 12 % !. That has been vehemently denied on this site since I have been here. (Canuck and others claimed the Khoisan were only in South Africa....)

The pottery, Man. It goes back to the mid-Holocene on Buur Heybe, and the Eyle are still making the same stuff.

 

[Grant]

What you said about facial reconstruction reminds me of when the artist behind Kostenki14 man thought ancient samples looked like subsaharan Africans because of OoA and the massive difference in the updated version when he learned that wasn’t the case. Suugo science indeed.
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Just from eyeballing them on google images they don’t look very much like the Ari. It will be interesting to see what their ancestry looks like. I see that there’s some speculation they might have ancient San ancestry, which is also interesting because a recent study proved that there was a Mota-San cline rubbing the entire length of Southeastern Africa. Maybe that’s where they came from, the southern Rift Valley?

Aha! Finally, now, after all the claims, it is time to do a study. Yeah!

 

[Apollo]

Finally!!! We are getting somewhere.

The HGs were all over and Samaales have 12 % !. That has been vehemently denied on this site since I have been here. (Canuck and others claimed the Khoisan were only in South Africa....)

The pottery, Man. It goes back to the mid-Holocene on Buur Heybe, and the Eyle are still making the same stuff.

''Samaale'' Somalis are not full Cushites. Actually, no group alive today is full-blood Cushitic, but they are still one of the most Cushitic groups out there with 85-90% descent from Bronze Age Northeast Sudan and the remainder being whatever lived in paleolithic Somalia.

Also, it's possibly that South Cushites got to Somalia first and they completely absorbed the hunter-gatherers first (explaining those bovine cave paintings predating proto-Somalis in Somaliland) and later on East Cushites entered the Eastern Horn (from Eritrea/Northeast Sudan) and admixed with these South Cushites of Somalia.

 

[Grant]

''Samaale'' Somalis are not full Cushites. Actually, no group alive today is full-blood Cushitic, but they are still one of the most Cushitic groups out there with 85-90% descent from Bronze Age Northeast Sudan and the remainder being whatever lived in paleolithic Somalia.

Also, it's possibly that South Cushites got to Somalia first and they completely absorbed the hunter-gatherers first (explaining those bovine cave paintings predating proto-Somalis in Somaliland) and later on East Cushites entered the Eastern Horn and admixed with these South Cushites of Somalia.

None of which explains the 11-20 K dates at Buur Heybe. or the Ethio-Arabian paintings in Somaliland.

 

[Apollo]

Just from eyeballing them on google images they don’t look very much like the Ari. It will be interesting to see what their ancestry looks like. I see that there’s some speculation they might have ancient San ancestry, which is also interesting because a recent study proved that there was a Mota-San cline running the entire length of Southeastern Africa. Maybe that’s where they came from, the southern Rift Valley?

They always lived in Somalia and were highly differentiated from other Africans.

They have little to do with whatever lived elsewhere in East Africa.

None of which explains the 11-20 K dates at Buur Heybe. or the Ethio-Arabian paintings in Somaliland.

Archaeology in Somalia is in its infancy and the country is a war-zone. Knowledge about the oldest sites is bound to change.

 

[Grant]

(Post does not respond to "reply")

Grant said:
↑
'None of which explains the 11-20 K dates at Buur Heybe. or the Ethio-Arabian paintings in Somaliland."

Apollo said:

'Archaeology in Somalia is in its infancy.'

So why ignore the archaeology you have ? Just because the results don't agree with your preconceptions does not mean they are wrong. Even Sada Mire (http://www.somaliheritage.org/) gets ignored and pilloried. What's with that?

 

[Apollo]

You realize that the Denisova subspecies was discovered on a pinky bone alone and predates practically all other hominids of Siberia and was only discovered recently?

Discoveries like that will be made in the future. Again, archaeology in Somalia is not a serious field and funds for it are practically zero. Oldest site is meaningless.

 

[MI]

What languages do the Eyle speak? Has a substratum of any other language been detected? Have they been sampled genetically? I feel like a lot of this discussion is an argument from ignorance.

But between your claim that Bantu farmers predate Somalis in the South & the Eyle, I am personally becoming a bit suspicious of your intentions Grant. I’ve asked if you were a missionary because I suspected that maybe you had some success converting non-Somali populations and grew a soft spot for them.

Now though I’m starting to doubt your whole narrative about that one-time trip to Somalia that launched your obsession with attempting to prove Somalis not to be natives. It seems very personal for you. Are you possibly a Somali Bantu or Mohamed Eno in disguise?

 

[Grant]

You realize that the Denisova subspecies was discovered on a pinky bone alone and predates practically all other hominids of Siberia and was only discovered recently?

Discoveries like that will be made in the future. Again, archaeology in Somalia is not a serious field and funds for it are practically zero. Oldest site is meaningless.

The Gogoshiis Qabe material is far from meaningless- if you bother reading it. The same can be said for Chittick's and Brandt's work, as well as Sada Mire's. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.

There are many more than just these.

1. Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland: Religion, Art, Script ...
   
   
   www.horndiplomat.com/2016/08/17/mapping-the...
   Maritime archaeology is on its way but terrestrial coastal material shows that the people of this region were part of the Silk Road trade. The archaeological evidence from the Somali region shows material from Tang Dynasty to Ming Dynasty China.
   
   
2. Brandt SA (1997) Horn of Africa: History of Archaeology. In ...
   
   
   www.oalib.com/references/4907945
   The Ethio-Somali ancestry is found in all admixed HOA ethnic groups, shows little inter-individual variance within these ethnic groups, is estimated to have diverged from all other non-African ancestries by at least 23 ka, and does not carry the unique Arabian lactase persistence allele that arose about 4 ka.
   
   
3. Preserving Knowledge, not Objects: A Somali ... - SpringerLink
   
   
   link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10437-007-9016-7
   Brandt, S. A. (1992). The importance of Somalia for understanding African and world prehistory. In C. Greshekter & H. Adam (Ed.), Proceedings of the first international congress of Somali studies .
   
   
4. (PDF) The Discovery of Dhambalin Rock Art Site, Somaliland ...
   
   
   www.academia.edu/4080948/The_Discovery_of...
   Furthermore, in the context of Somali archaeology itself, the bovine style of scene from the lower panel, as pictured by Brandt and Carder (1987: 203), shows polychrome painted cow and human figure with similar head and body shapes to those of the head of a decorated cow and human figure on the central shelter of the upper level as seen in Laas Geel (Gutherz et al. 2003: 231).
   
   
5. The Forgotten Horn: Rock Art and Archaeology in Somalia
   
   
   www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZSFt82c4_A
   Dr Jorge De Torres gives insight into rock art and archaeology in Somalia emphasising the importance of preserving heritage in the Horn of Africa.