1-Basic Database of Nile Valley Studies

[zarahan]

Before the pyramids- the origin of Egyptian civilization. Univ of Chicago 2011-Emily Teeter ed
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The phrase “ancient Egypt” almost automatically evokes the Sphinx, the pyramids, and the golden sar -cophagus of Tutankhamun. However, these iconic images represent Egypt when it was already a fully formed, powerful, and highly centralized state in the third and second millennia bc — the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. We need to remind ourselves that Egyptian civilization was not a static, timeless culture, and it did not spring into being ex nihilo.

For Egyptologists and archaeologists, much of the fascinating complexity of Egypt derives from precisely the fact that it was a rich, vibrant, living culture that was constantly evolving, while at the same time grounding itself in a set of deeply rooted core elements and symbols that make it unique among the civilizations of the ancient world. How did the Egyptian state begin? This is the fundamental question addressed by the Oriental Institute’s special exhibit Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization. It is especially challenging for us to understand and reconstruct the Predynastic origins of Egypt because so many of the key developments took place before the invention of writing, about 3300 bc.

Without texts, researchers are forced to rely heavily on purely archaeological evidence and the interpretation of the relatively small number of artistic depictions of key events and processes. Our exhibit presents some of the objects that are uniquely important pieces in this wordless puzzle. Drawing on both the most current research and on excavations done more than a century ago, Before the Pyramids allows us to examine the Egyptian state at the historical moment of its birth. As volume editor and exhibit curator Emily Teeter notes, Egypt existed as a unified kingdom under pharaonic rule for more than 500 years before the construction of the pyramids in the Old Kingdom. The 120 objects in our exhibit eloquently tell the story of the emergence of Egyptian civilization from its earliest beginnings about 4000 bc down to 2600 bc.

Most derive from the pioneering excavations in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century excavations at Hierakonpolis, Abydos, and Naqada — the most important sites for understanding the late Predynastic period. Before the Pyramids highlights the many threads that combined to form the tapestry of an ancient state society or civilization — kingship or centralized political power, social stratification, elite groups, economic specialization, warfare, writing, and trade, to name just a few. The beautifully crafted stone and ceramic vessels show the extraordinary skill and aesthetics of the master artisans in the late Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods. The presence of imported objects shows us the far-flung trading connections of the earliest Egyptian state. We are especially fortunate to have as centerpieces of our exhibit two priceless loan objects from the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University — the Battlefield Palette and a unique limestone statue of King Khasekhem. These extraordinary objects have never before been on display in the United States. This catalog is a remarkable volume that pulls together the most recent research by the world’s leading scholars on Predynastic Egypt. It outlines the fascinating story of Sir Flinders Petrie’s initial discovery of the Predynastic period and explains the ways that art, political organization, craft production, burial practices, international trade, and the invention of writing served as key elements that defined the emerging Egyptian state in the fourth and early third millennia bc.

By bringing together the actual artifacts and the theoretical frameworks used to interpret them, the chapters presented here will have lasting value for both the museum visitor and the professional researcher. Before the Pyramids does a wonderful job highlighting the ways that earliest Egypt differed from, and gave rise to, the later, better known magnificence of the Old Kingdom. At the same time we can see unmistakable continuities in the symbolism of kingship and in the core values that flourished for millennia at the heart of Egyptian civilization. By showing us the origins of the Egyptian state, this exhibit only enhances our sense of wonder at the later achievements of this civilization when it reached its zenith.

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pdf
oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/oimp33.pdf

[zarahan]

Nilo-Saharan language links with ancient Egyptian

[zarahan]

In some eras, Europeans practiced cannibalism, by consuming the dead flesh of Egyptian mummies.

[zarahan]

The FORDISC computer program, widely used by some Forensic Scientists to identify "race" is rather limited and often does not yield accurate results. One study of ancient Nubians for example linked them with distant Japanese and Easter islanders- yielding false impressions of population affinity. SOme critics of forensic use of FORDISC hold that it distorts a true picture of Africa's rich diversity and variability, in favor of stereotyped categories



"Determining the ancestry of unidentified human remains is a major task for bioarchaeologists and forensic anthropologists. Here, we report an assessment of the computer program that has become the main tool for accomplishing this task.

Called Fordisc, the program determines ancestry through discriminant function analysis of cranial measurements. We evaluated the utility of Fordisc with 200 specimens of known ancestry. We ran the analyses with and without the test specimen's source population included in the program's reference sample, and with and without specifying the sex of the test specimen. We also controlled for the possibility that the number of variables employed affects the program's ability to attribute ancestry.

The results of the analyses suggest that Fordisc's utility in research and medico-legal contexts is limited.

Fordisc will only return a correct ancestry attribution when an unidentified specimen is more or less complete, and belongs to one of the populations represented in the program's reference samples. Even then Fordisc can be expected to classify no more than 1 per cent of specimens with confidence."
--Elliott and Collard. 2009. FORDISC and the determination of ancestry from cranial measurements. Biol Lett. 2009 Dec 23;5(6):849-52.

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: "If Fordisc 2.0 is revealing genetic admixture of Late Period Dynastic Egypt and Meroitic Nubia, then one must also consider these ancient Meroitic Nubians to be part of Hungarian, part Easter Islander, part Norse, and part Australian Aborigine... In fact, all human groups are essentially heterogeneous, including samples within Fordisc 2.0. Howells’s cranial samples exhibit far more variation within than between skeletal series...”
-- Williams, Belcher, Armelagos , Forensic Misclassification of Ancient Nubian Crania: Implications for Assumptions about Human Variation, Current Anthropology 46, no. 2, 340-346.


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"The biological affinity of the peoples of the Nile Valley is currently a topic of debate. The identity of the Meroitic Nubians plays a crucial role in understanding the peopling of the Nile Valley, and the interrelationships of populations that form the core of ancient Nubia. To address this issue, we examined a sample of 47 adult Meroitic Nubian crania (0-350 B.C.E.) from Wadi Halfa within the program Fordisc 2.0 (a forensic computer application that uses weighted discriminant functions and reference populations to ascribe unknown individuals’ biological affinity and sex). Meroitic Nubians were compared to two populations within Fordisc 2.0: Howells’ worldwide data set and the Forensic Data Bank series from Ousley and Jantz (1996) Fordisc 2.0. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Our results indicate that Fordisc 2.0 identifies gracile individuals (either male or female) as female, and robust individuals (either male or female) as male unless the sex is constrained by the program. Howells’ data attribute the Nubian specimens to populations on several continents, whereas the Forensic Data Bank series provides no explainable pattern of population attribution. These results suggest that Fordisc 2.0 cannot accurately identify the biological affinity of ancient Nubian crania. We question the utility of any forensic application that attempts to constrain worldwide human cranial variability into discrete biological groupings, or races."

--Program of the Seventy-First Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. 2002. Misidentification of Meroitic Nubians using Fordisc 2.0. R. Belcher1, F. Williams1, G.J. Armelagos2. 1Dept. of Anthropology and Geography, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA, 2Dept. of Anthropology, Emory University.

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Some research problems in African anthro or bio studies include skewed sampling, use of stereotypical "true negro" categories, misleading or distorted labeling or categories, and selective exclusions or "splittism" of African data to maintain desired race models



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Some forensic types also rely heavily on SKEWED DATASETS. For example the widely used "CRANID" program uses samples drawn from the far north of Egypt near the Mediterranean as its reference point, a skewed and unrepresentative picture of ancient Egypt's population that excludes much of the historic south, from which the dynastic civilization sprung. The allegedly "representative" dataset is skewed towards a region with more foreign influx and influence, and skewed towards the late period era. Credible Egyptologists have noted this false picture being presented by some forensic types- QUOTE:

"..collected by Petrie in 1907 from a cemetery on a desert ridge to the south of Giza and dating from the 26th to the 30th Dynasties.. If, on the other hand, CRANID had used one of the Elephantine populations of the same period, the geographic association would be much more with the African groups to the south. It is dangerous to take one set of skeletons and use them to characterize the population of the whole of Egypt."
--Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt Anatomy of a Civilisation: 2005, p. 55)



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---RECAP--from ES- why the touted "85% accuracy" on race classification by some Forensic
scientists, is simplistic and less than advertised. The race categories themselves are not rigorous
biological entities but local social constructed categories that data is mashed into. In the US
for example, data is shoehorned into 3 or 4 "approved" government or European defined race categories.


The context where a sample is taken and the local labels attached or
announced influences a great deal. Hence the much touted "85% accuracy"
is less than advertised. Many forensic anthropologists rely
heavily on reference databases and well known modern
populations, in well known time ranges, in well known locations, to
achieve the claimed degree of accuracy with modern analyses.
Sure, if you take say a big US city like Chicago in the 1980s
you are (on average) going to mostly have 3 well known government
labeled categories- known in advance of various crime scene analyses-
Black, White, Hispanic. Other cities like LA in California, for a
particular span of time may add a fourth like Asians, but
the basic categories and labels are well known in advance. They know
its mostly those 4 groups on average migrating into the area,
during a particular time period. So samples can
be shoehorned or mashed into one of the preset categories
without heavy difficulty. The contexts are well known.

But in ultra diverse Africa, and other parts of the world,
it is not so simple as the claimed "85%" degree of accuracy.
This is why the widely used FORDISC program has failed so much
on ancient crania.




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"Bureaucratic races" and Forensic science

"The fundamental pattern of human biological diversity was widely held in premodern anthropology and contemporary folk ideologies to be principally “racial”—that is, largely homogeneous within groups and heterogeneous between them. The groups in question were often presumed to represent entire continents or subcontinents. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, this view had come under considerable scrutiny (Montagu 1941, Livingstone 1962, Washburn 1963, Lewontin 1972). Modern physical anthropology recognizes the major features of human biological diversity as polymorphic (within group variation being quantitatively predominant), clinal (i.e., structured as gradients), and culturally mediated (as both the largely arbitrary agglomeration of physically diverse peoples into “races” and the response of the body itself to the cultural conditions under which it develops). Forensic anthropology has been much more reluctant to divorce itself from the pre-modern partitioning of human biological variation into races (Smay and Armelagos 2000), despite the fact that human biological variation in genetic markers (Lewontin 1972, Stoneking 1993) and cranial morphology (Relethford 1994) is quantitatively greater within than between major geographic regions or races. Pressure from local law enforcement officials who insist on “knowing” the social race of unknowns may prompt some forensic anthropologists to designate racial affinity (provided that the sex of the individual can be determined), producing classifications that some have called “bureaucratic races.”

--Williams et all 2005. Forensic Misclassification of Nubian Crania..

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Forensic science can tell geographic extremes using social construct categories- Northern European Irish from West African Nigerians for example, or US whites (typically from northern Europe) from US Blacks (typically from West Africa). If races are discrete entities then some scientists show that a huge number of "races" can be produced- depending on how labels and categories are manipulated

"American forensic anthropologists uncritically accepted the biological race concept from classic physical anthropology and applied it to methods of human identification. Why and how the biological race concept might work in forensic anthropology was contemplated by Sauer (Soc Sci Med 34 [1992] 107–111), who hypothesized that American forensic anthropologists are good at what they do because of a concordance between social race and skeletal morphology in American whites and blacks. However, Sauer also stressed that this concordance did not validate the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology that there are a relatively small number of discrete types of human beings. Results from Howells (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 67 [1973] 1–259; Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 79 [1989] 1–189; Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 82 [1995] 1–108) and others using craniometric and molecular data show strong geographic patterning of human variation despite overlap in their distributions. However, Williams et al. (Curr Anthropol 46 [2005] 340– 346) concluded that skeletal morphology cannot be used to accurately classify individuals. Williams et al. cited additional support from Lewontin (Evol Biol 6 [1972] 381– 398), who analyzed classic genetic markers. In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer’s hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology."
--Ousley, et al 2009. Understanding Race and Human Variation.

[zarahan]

"The use of nsibidi is that of ordinary writing. I have in my possession a copy of the record of a court case from a town of Enion [Enyong] taken down in it, and every detail, except the evidence, is most graphically described- the parties in the case, the witnesses, the dilemma of the chief who tried it, his sending out messengers to call other chiefs to help him, the finding of the court and the joy of the successful litigants and of their friends.."
--J. K., Macgregor (January-June 1909). "Some Notes on Nsibidi.". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 39: 209-219.

“Elphinstone Daryell, however argues that "many of the signs reproduced are connected with one another and form short stories. He gives several examples of how this is done and one folktale in particular is worthy of mention- the story of the miracle child, born from his mother's knee, who is disowned by his father. In this version the child kills his father with a spear and disappears up a long rope into the sky. This is all skilfullly narrated by the clever assembling of four geometrically patterned symbols, each one representing a section of the story.. As has been shown, writing existed- writing that was not unrelated to literature, and that was pictographic. Side by side with this existed highly developed forms of writing which were in some cases applied to literature.“
-- The Black Mind: A History of African Literature. 1974. O.R. Dathorne, Professor of English, University of Kentucky, University of Minnesota Press. Cite- [Dayrell, Elphinstone (July-December 1911). "Further Notes on 'Nsibidi Signs with Their Meanings from the Ikom District, Southern Nigeria". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 41: 521-540]

"Nsidibi was a script found among a number of Cross River peoples which owed nothing to foreign exemplars- each symbol is an ideograph, as in Chinese. Because each symbol represented a concept, it could be used between peopes speaking different anguages; over 500 signs are recorded, and there is reason to believe that they were only a small partof the whole. There are suggestions that it was used by the Ekpe society but there is a record of a school where children were taught signs. A curious aspect of Nsibidi, as recorded by three separate observers in the early twentieth century, was that many of the signs dealth with love affairs! It seems likely that ideographs dealing with religion and war were kept secret- and that the choice of signs to explain to European officials were an elaborate joke, as well as a way of protecting the realm of the secret/sacred from outsiders."
--A History of African Societies to 1870. Elizabeth Isichei, 1997. Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand. Cambridge University Press.

“The Nsibidi signs used by secret societies in various language groups in southern Nigeria, e.g. the Igbo, Efik, and Ekoi have been considered by some to be of a similar pictographic nature, but others have maintained it to be true writing, based on a logographic or syllabary system."
-- Gregersen, Edgar A. (1977). Language in Africa: An introductory survey. p. 176.

"However, such systems are also found in areas where Muslim influence has been less strong or is unlikely. Thus, among the Ashanti and other Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana and Cote D'Ivorie, where gold was of great political, economic and symbolic significance, many goldweights bore signs that indicated their precise ponderal value; other signs corresponded to proverbs, while others represented concepts (for example, certain aspects of the Supreme Being). The nsibidi system of the Ekoi, Igbo and Ibibio peoples of the Cross River area of present-day Nigeria used over a thousand signs to represent a considerable number of concepts as well as some sounds. Nsibidi was used to record court cases and convey complex messages, including warnings in wartime, and for summarizing folktales and personal narratives; its pictograms thus constituted a true writing system. As with the Malian systems of graphic signs, knowledge of nsibidi was often acquired within the initiation societies, but unlike the Malian ones, nsibidi signs were often tattooed on the body or dramatically enacted through gestures."
--Kevin Shllingford (2004) "Literacy and Indigenous Scripts: Pre-colonial West Africa" - Encyclopedia of African History

[zarahan]

Nsibidi is linked not with some Arabs that showed up, but with ancient cultural artifacts and traditions in place for millennia.



The Ikom monoliths in Nigeria for example, frequently show several nsibidi designs such as carefully rendered concentric circles, spirals, lozenges, and other discrete figures. These have been dated by some scholars to 120-220 AD. (Source: Alok and Emangabe stone monoliths: Ikom, Cross River State of Nigeria,-Ezio Bassani, Arte in Africa (Modena: Edizioni Panini, 1986), 103. )


Stone monoliths with Nsibidi designs- Nigeria- From Ross Archive-Yale University.
raai.library.yale.edu/site/index.php?globalnav=image_detail&image_id=1162


Other objects such as terra cotta carvings and pottery yield similarly early date ranges corresponding to the monoliths- stretching from 450AD- showing a long thread of ancient continuity into the modern era- again pointing to their ancient indigenous West African provenance long before any Europeans or Arabs appeared.

"The Calabar terracottas, found at the other end of the Cross River basin, offer additional early evidence of nsibidi... there are now five radiocarbon dates from Calabar and two from the nearby village of Okang Mbang that generally corroborate each other, and which are associated with hundreds of terracottas that display a considerable range of designs. Combined, the dates encompass the period ca. 450 A.D - 1440 A.D (Fig. 1.5)... When considered together, the individual Calabar results overlap significantly. For example, all five urban Calabar dates overlap in the eighth century, while two of them extend into the eleventh century, where the two Okang Mbang dates begin. Both Okang Mbang dates then correspond until the turn of the fourteenth century.

Thus, if what the archaeological evidence strongly suggests-that nsibidi is indeed a modern iteration of the iconography found on the terracottas-then nsibidi is much older, even more complex, and was distributed over a broader area than previously considered. In short, there is now physical evidence that nsibidi was already a sophisticated phenomenon fifteen hundred years ago! This is remarkable in light of what is currently known about indigenous scripts in sub-Saharan Africa and, therefore, these objects further (and strongly) refute the idea that Africans had no writing until the arrival of Europeans. If modern practices are anything to go by, these signs were not just found on ceramics, but also appeared on wood sculptures, calabashes, textiles, earthen architecture, and the human body, to name just a few examples that would not be expected to survive in the archaeological record of a tropical area such as Calabar.. it is telling that Amanda Carlson, [2003- Nsibiri, gender, and literacy] in her doctoral dissertation on the implications of nsibidi usage among the Ejagham, describes fluency with such signs as literacy."
--Slogar C. 2005. ICONOGRAPHY AND CONTINUITY IN WEST AFRICA- CALABAR TERRACOTTAS AND THE ARTS OF THE CROSS RIVER REGION OF NIGERIA/CAMEROON. University of Maryland. 2005.





Africa's Nile Valley shares in creation of the historic alphabet

"Discoveries by Gunter Dreyer of the German Archaeological Institute suggest that the origin of Egyptian writing needs to be reexamined, offering the possibility that the idea of writing was developed in Egypt several centuries before it occurred in the Near East. Inscriptions from hundreds of pots and labels found at the royal cemetery at Abydos show some hieroglyphic writing as far back as 3400 BCE, with most occurring about 3200 BCE. Sumerian writing seems to have begun about 3100 BCE. The Egyptians formed and used writing in a different way than the Asians. The linguistic pictographs of Sumer were rudimentary were used primarily used for commerce. Those of Egypt were more representational of real objects and were primarily employed to identify kings, tombs and the like.

A remarkable find involving early experiments with alphabetic writing in Egypt has been recently made by John C. Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, and his wife Deborah. Inscriptions discovered in the limestone cliffs on an ancient road between Thebes and Abydos, a route once heavily traveled by Asian traders and mercenaries in the Egyptian desert, are in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences. Dated between 1900 and 1000 BCE, they are two or three centuries older than previous evidence of an alphabet in the Semitic-speaking territory of the Sinai Peninsula or in the Syria-Palestine region occupied by the Canaanites. While there have always been indications that Semites were inventors of the alphabet, researchers had heretofore assumed that it was developed in their own lands by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead Darnell's discovery now suggests that, working with Semitic speakers in Egypt, native scribes simplified formal pictographic Egyptian writing and modified the symbols into an early alphabet using a semi-cursive form commonly used in the Middle Kingdom."

--Martin Isler (2001). Sticks, stones, and shadows: building the Egyptian pyramids. Univ of Oklahoma PRess. p. 56



The Egyptian Western Desert- location of Egyptian military scripts adopted by both Egyptian
scribes and Semitic speakers into alphabetic forms
www.codex99.com/typography/11.html

"However, now with the recovery of alphabetic writing from the Egyptian Western Desert, the fairly high degree of literacy in Egyptian (knowledge of hieratic, and a hybrid of hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts as well) presumed by these texts, and the well known Asiatic pres-ence within Egypt proper from the early Dynastic periods onwards, strongly suggest that it is to Egypt itself that we must look for the geographi-cal home of alphabetic writing. More specifically, the Bebi inscription and its immediate neighbors offer tantalizing clues about the context in which Semitic-speaking Asiatics adopted and adapted certain aspects of the Egyptian writing system for the needs of their own language(s). The Egyptian military, known both to have employed Asiatics (as the Bebi inscription so wonderfully attests) and to have included scribes, would provide one likely context in which Western Asiatic Semitic language speakers could have learned and eventually adapted the Egyptian writing system. Indeed, the prominence of lapidary hieratic, the form of hieratic utilized by army scribes, as models for alphabetic forms at the Wadi el-Hõl (and at Serabit).."
--J. Darnell et al. 2005. Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hol: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western Desert of Egypt, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2005.

[anansi]

Zarahan damn good foot work on the finding the Agba stones or monoliths which can be dated and set the issue of the Nsibidi script as going back almost 2000yrs into the past.
Be warned though, that thieves are stealing and selling these artifacts for $50.000 a piece.
originalpeople.org/alok-ikom-nigeria/

[zarahan]

New mtDNA study shows movement from Africa into Spain in Early Holocene- some 10,000 years ago- long before any Phonecian, Roman, Arab or colonial era

"Determining the timing, identity and direction of migrations in the Mediterranean Basin, the role of “migratory routes” in and among regions of Africa, Europe and Asia, and the effects of sex-specific behaviors of population movements have important implications for our understanding of the present human genetic diversity. A crucial component of the Mediterranean world is its westernmost region. Clear features of transcontinental ancient contacts between North African and Iberian populations surrounding the maritime region of Gibraltar Strait have been identified from archeological data. The attempt to discern origin and dates of migration between close geographically related regions has been a challenge in the field of uniparental-based population genetics..

To this end, in the present work we have screened entire mtDNA sequences belonging to U6, M1 and L haplogroups in Andalusians —from Huelva and Granada provinces—and Moroccan Berbers. We present here pioneer data and interpretations on the role of NW Africa and the Iberian Peninsula regarding the time of origin, number of founders and expansion directions of these specific markers. The estimated entrance of the North African U6 lineages into Iberia at 10 ky correlates well with other L African clades, indicating that U6 and some L lineages moved together from Africa to Iberia in the Early Holocene. Still, founder analysis highlights that the high sharing of lineages between North Africa and Iberia results from a complex process continued through time, impairing simplistic interpretations. In particular, our work supports the existence of an ancient, frequently denied, bridge connecting the Maghreb and Andalusia."
--Hernández et al 2015. Early Holocenic and Historic mtDNA African Signatures in the Iberian Peninsula: The Andalusian Region as a Paradigm. PLoS ONE 10(10)




Most visible ancient African influences in Spain seem more to the west in some mtDNA studies. Waterborne migrations across the Mediterranean was quite possible and documented long before any Arab or Moorish appearance

"The attractive prehistory and history of Andalusia, the widest and most populated region of Spain, makes its present-day human population a prominent objective to detect scenarios of population substructure and to examine the expected impact of African and other Mediterranean populations on the Iberian gene pool. Consistently with the geographical proximity between southern Spain and Africa, previous published studies have obtained results that show evidences of African-linked mtDNA lineages among Andalusians as well as high levels of diversity,either analyzing regional general samples [22, 23, 24] or focusing on other inland territories within the region [16]. Our mitochondrial data presented here will give stronger evidences for a more visible African influence in the west than in the east of Andalusia.. Western Andalusians (from Huelva, present study) register the highest frequencies (14.6%) of African lineages reported until now in the Iberian Peninsula and all over the European continent.

"Some researchers (e.g. [53, 54], among others) have proposed a sea route as the most probable way for Neolithic entrance in Iberia. This process was phased, using sea navigation and boats big enough to transport men, women, and the ‘Neolithic package’ in a movement probably originated in the Gulf of Genoa. Similar methods may have been used between Andalusia and Morocco. Altogether, these events suggest that the interactions between Moroccan and Andalusian populations have been old, continuous, in both ways and with different origins... In the sub-Saharan L macrohaplogroup network (Figure 4B), lineage L1b is characterized by the relevant case number contained in the core. According to [50], its estimated coalescence time is 9.7 kya, so its expansion out of Africa should have taken place during or after Neolithic age. The L1b star-like shape indicates a population expansion, and those migrations which contributed to shape it were not so recent, thus Muslim expansion or more recent migrations accounting for this would not be the main causal reason."
--Hernández et al 2014. Human maternal heritage in Andalusia (Spain.. BMC Genetics 15:11

[zarahan]

Originally posted by Ish Gebor:
[QB] Also interesting.


www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=116957&partId=1&people=99185&peoA=99185-3-17&page=1


The Pitt-Rivers Knife

Date 3200 BC

FindspotExcavated/Findspot: Sheikh Hamadeh(Africa,Egypt,Upper Egypt,Sohag,Sheikh Hamadeh)

Bourriau, J, JEA Vol. 62, 1976, p.145, pl. XXIV,1.
Spencer, Early Egypt, 43, pl. 26

S. Quirke and A.J. Spencer, The British Museum book of ancient Egypt (London, The British Museum Press, 1992), fig.114

T.G.H. James, An introduction to ancient Egypt (London, 1979), fig. 9;

N. Strudwick, Masterpieces of Ancient Egypt, London 2006, pp. 32-3.Strudwick N 2006

One of the greatest achievements of the Naqada II culture was the production of some of the finest flint knives ever made. They exhibit a remarkable development from the roughly flaked implements produced in the fifth-millennium BC Badarian culture; their quality is such that it is unlikely that the finest examples - such as this - were ever used for anything other than ostentatious display or a 'ceremonial' function. The same is true of the contemporary slate palettes. The blades were prepared by grinding a piece of good-quality flint to the form required. A flat edge was created at the back of the blade to provide a suitable surface from which small flakes of flint could be detached by pressure, a technique employed with such skill that each flake was the same size and shape, creating a rippled pattern along the length of the knife. This pressure flaking was restricted to only one face, the other being left as a smooth ground surface. Finally, the knife's edge was worked into a series of very fine serrations.

[/QB]

[zarahan]

THE GOURARA- A BERBER PEOPLE OF ALGERIA

Originally posted by Ish Gebor:
[qb]
Gourara or Ghurara Berbers of southwestern Algeria are considered Zenata

youtu.be/HaEYYX89SzI

www.medmem.eu/en/notice/EPT00020

Zenata (Berber: Ijenaden) are a major old Berber ethnic group of North Africa. They were an umbrella-group encompassing probably hundreds of large linguistically or genealogically related Berber tribes in the north, center and east of Berber North Africa (excluding the Nile valley of Egypt). Zenata Berbers were the founders of several Berber empires, kingdoms and princedoms in North Africa.

research.omicsgroup.org/index.php/Zenata [/qb]

====================================================================


THE SIWA- A BERBER PEOPLE OF EGYPT

[zarahan]

DATA RECAP:
2010 Berber mtDNA study finds Berber roots foundational in Africa - frigi 2010


Ancient Local Evolution of African mtDNA Haplogroups in Tunisian Berber Populations

Frigi et al.

Human Biology

August 2010 (82:4)

Discussion
In this study we attempted to better elucidate the ancient African genetic
background in the northwest African area, particularly in Tunisia. To this aim, we
focused our study on Berber populations that are considered representative of the
ancient North African populations that probably derived from Neolithic Capsians.
During historic times, Berbers experienced a long and complicated history with
many invasions, conquests, and migrations by Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals,
Byzantines, Arabs, Bedouins, Spanish, Turks, Andalusians, sub-Saharans (communities
settled in Jerba and Gabes in the 16th–19th centuries), and French (Brett
and Fentress 1996). During these invasions, Berbers were forced back to the mountains
and to certain villages in southern Tunisia (Fadhlaoui-Zid et al. 2004).
At present, they are restricted to some isolates in the south who maintain the Berber
language and to some populations in the north who lack an origin language.
Many genetic studies on Tunisian Berber populations demonstrate the heterogeneity
of Berbers with respect to European and sub-Saharan African contributions
and the mosaic structure of Tunisian Berber populations with an absence of ethnic,
linguistic, and geographic effects (Cherni et al. 2010).

In the present work, mtDNA data show a diversified distribution of African
haplogroups. However, a question remains concerning the date of the sub-Saharan
African inputs. Our results demonstrate an ancient local evolution in Tunisia of
some African haplogroups (L2a, L3*, and L3b). The most ancient haplogroup is
L3*, which would have been introduced from eastern sub-Saharan populations to
North Africa about 20,000 years ago. The Siwa oasis sample studied by Coudray
et al. (2009) contains sub-Saharan haplogroups L0a1, L3i, L4*, and L4b2, which
are different from our Tunisian samples, in agreement with the heterogeneity of
Berbers already shown in Tunisia.

Stevanovitch et al. (2004) suggested that the Gurna population in Egypt has
conserved the trace of an ancestral genetic structure from an ancestral East African
population characterized by a high haplogroup M1 frequency. This haplogroup is
also present in three Berber populations (Kesra, Matmata, and Sned) with variable
frequencies. In each of these populations, haplogroup L3* is also present.
The association of both eastern African haplogroups in the Berber populations is
a strong argument in favor of eastern African gene flow in Berbers. Other genetic
and archaeological studies confirmed the crucial idea that an ancient population in
East Africa constituted the basis of the ancestors of all African Upper Paleolithic
populations—and their subsequent present-day descendants (Bengtson 2008; Keita
2004; Relethford 2000; Zakrzewski 2003, 2007).



Moreover, Berber languages spoken exclusively by North African populations
belong to the Afro-Asiatic language. Diakonoff (1998) showed an exclusively
African origin (Diakonoff, 1981, 1988) for the family. He explicitly described
proto-Afro-Asiatic vocabulary as consistent with non-food-producing vocabulary
and linked it to pre-Neolithic cultures in the Levant and in Africa south of Egypt.
Moreover, Ehret. (2003) suggested that early Afro-Asiatic languages were spread
by Mesolithic foragers from Africa into the Levant. On the contrary, Diamond
and Bellwood (2003) suggested that food production and the Afro-Asiatic
language family were brought simultaneously from the Near East to Africa by demic
diffusion—in other words, by a migration of food-producing peoples. The evidence
presented by Wetterstrom (1993) does not support this latter suggestion,
however, and indicates that early African farmers in the Fayum initially incorporated
Near Eastern domesticates into an existing indigenous foraging strategy and
only over time developed a dependence on horticulture.

In conclusion, the crucial linguistic finding is that the three deepest clades
of the Afro-Asiatic family are localized in Eritrea and Ethiopia. All the other languages
of the family outside that region belong to subclades of just one of those
deep clades. This kind of cladistic distribution is a basic criterion of the
genetic argument for the genetic lineage origins well understood by geneticists. It applies
to linguistic history as well.

Our results also point to a less ancient western African gene flow to Tunisia
involving haplogroups L2a and L3b. Thus the sub-Saharan contribution to northern
Africa starting from the east would have taken place before the Neolithic. The
western African contribution to North Africa should have occurred before the Sahara’s
formation (15,000 years BP). It seems likely that an expansion would have
taken place in the Sahel zone starting about the time of a gradual climatic return
to wetter conditions, when the Senegal River cut through the dunes (Burke et al.
1971). For subhaplogroup L2a1 (data not shown) we found some haplotypes that
the Tunisian Berbers shared with Mauritanians and western sub-Saharan populations
speaking a Niger-Congo language (studied by Salas et al. 2002).

This suggests that the people who brought these markers to the Berber populations most
likely came from West African populations that spoke languages belonging to the
Niger-Congo family when the Sahara became drier. However, this contribution
of West African haplotypes and of other haplotypes, such as those belonging to
haplogroup L1b1, could have been introduced to North Africa more recently.

Indeed, this West African contribution was difficult to date, because few
haplotypes belonging to western African haplogroups have been observed, most
of them being divergent. This result can be interpreted in different ways. Ancient
western African mtDNA contributions could have disappeared from North Africa
as a result of recent flows, or the situation observed now could be the result of a
strong drift effect on ancient western African lineages, particularly those belonging
to haplogroups L2a and L3b. A strong Iberian gene flow may have contributed
to the decrease in African haplogroups. Indeed, most of the older hypotheses
about North African population settlement used to suppose an Iberian or an eastern
origin. The dates for subhaplogroups H1 and H3 (13,000 and 10,000 years,
respectively) in Iberian and North African populations allow for this possibility.
Kefi et al.’s (2005) data on ancient DNA could be viewed as being in agreement
with such a presence in North Africa in ancient times (about 15,000–6,000 years
ago) and with the fact that the North African populations are considered by most
scholars as having their closest relations with European and Asian populations
(Cherni et al. 2008; Ennafaa et al. 2009; Kefi et al. 2005; Rando et al. 1998).

However, considering the general understanding nowadays that human settlement of
the rest of the world emerged from eastern northern Africa less than 50,000 years
ago, a better explanation of these haplogroups might be that their frequencies reflect
the original modern human population of these parts of Africa as much as or
more than intrusions from outside the continent. The ways that gene frequencies
may increase or decrease based on adaptive selection, gene flow, and/or social
processes is under study and would benefit from the results of studies on autosomal
and Y-chromosome markers.

Since the end of the extreme Saharan desiccation, lasting from before
25,000 years ago up to about 15,000 years ago, the Sahara has had post- and pre-
Holocene cyclical climatic changes (Street and Grove 1976), and corresponding increases
and decreases in population are probable. Wetter phases with better habitats
perhaps allowed for increased colonization and gene and cultural exchange.
Desiccation would have encouraged the emigration and segmentation of populations,
with resultant genetic consequences secondary to drift producing more
variation. During the last glacial period, the Sahara was even bigger than it is
today, extending south beyond its current boundaries (Ehret 2002). About 13,000
years ago, large parts of the Sahara were as dry as the desert is now (White and
Mattingly 2006). The end of the glacial period brought more rain to the Sahara,
especially from about 8500 to 6000 BC (Fezzan Project 2006). By around 3400
BC, the monsoon retreated south to approximately where it is today, leading to the
gradual desertification of the region (Kröpelin 2008). Thus the Sahara, through its
cyclical environmental changes, might be seen as a microevolutionary “processor”
and/or “pump” of African people that “ejected” groups to the circum-Saharan
regions in times of increasing aridity.

Indeed, it must be noted that the high frequencies of cDe, P, and V antigens
and low frequencies of FY antigens in some Berber-speaking groups (Chamla
1980; Mourant et al. 1976) indicate affinities with tropical Africans. These data
may indicate recent or ancient gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa, a common immediate
pre-Holocene ancestral group, or chance resemblance.

Our findings are in accordance with other studies on Y-chromosome markers
that have shown that the predominant Y-chromosome lineage in Berber communities
is the subhaplogroup E1b1b1b (E-M81), which emerged in Africa, is
specific to North African populations, and is almost absent in Europe, except in
Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and Sicily. Molecular studies on the Y chromosome in
North Africa are interpreted as indicating that the southern part of Africa, namely,
the Horn/East Africa, was a major source of population in the Nile Valley and
northwest Africa after the Last Glacial Maximum, with some migration into the
Near East and southern Europe (Bosch et al. 2001; Underhill et al. 2001).
Hence, contrary to the suggestion that mtDNA haplogroups were introduced
mostly from Iberia, it seems that Y-chromosome markers have an eastern
African origin with an ancient local evolution in North Africa. These observations
are in agreement with the proposal that the ancient communities ancestral
in language to more recent Berber communities absorbed a lot of females from
the existing pre-Holocene populations. This would indicate that the North African
populations arose from admixture rather than from local evolution, leading
to an intermediate genetic structure between eastern sub-Saharan Africans and
Eurasians. Rock paintings in North Africa that show people of different phenotypes
living together are a strong argument for our hypothesis (Hachid 1982,
1992, 1998).

In conclusion, our findings parallel the more recent findings of both archaeology
and linguistics on the prehistory of Africa. The present study suggests that
sub-Saharan contributions to North Africa have experienced several complex population
processes after the occupation of the region by anatomically modern humans.
Our results reveal that Berber speakers have a foundational biogeographic root in
Africa and that deep African lineages have continued to evolve in supra-Saharan Africa.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Originally posted by Ish Gebor:



Berbers of Libya, Ghadamès.







Nafusa, of Jebel Nafusa in Tripolitania.

"The Berber-Abidiya region is situated just south of the fifth Nile cataract in Sudan. This project, a joint mission with the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), is focussed on the late Kushite city of Dangeil (third century BC – fourth century AD) and associated cemeteries."

www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/sudan/berber-abidiya_project.aspx


www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/berber-abidiya_project/the_berber-adiya_region.aspx
-------------------------

[zarahan]

KEITA ON EUROCENTRIC DOUBLE STANDARDS IN STUDYING AFRICA



"“Black Africa,” as usually presented, also is a problematic cultural and biological construct, and a product of philosophical idealism, with an associated set of fixed ideas about phenotypes, culture, and geography. “Black African,” biologically speaking, has been frequently restricted to the extreme “Negro” morphotype, as though this were a biological unit, and below a certain latitude; this would be analogous to “White European” being restricted to the “Nordic” or “East Baltic” phenotype above a certain latitude.

Modern biology, ancient Saharan art and remains, classical European writers and artifacts, and ancient Maghrebian and Nile Valley remains and archaeology make problematic the boundaries of a “Black African” entity in terms of geography, culture, or biological characteristics in the ancient period (see reviews in Snowden, 1970; Hiernaux, 1975; Keita, 1990). “Subsaharan” is not a terminological improvement, since “Blacks” were not confined below any particular latitude. For example, there is morphological continuity of Negroid traits from the later Paleolithic through early dynastic periods in southern Egypt & Nubia (see descriptions in Thoma, 1984; Stewart, 1985; Anderson, 1968; Stoessiger, 1927; Strouhal, 1968; Morant, 1925). Moreover, as Snowden (1970) notes, “Blacks” were described in ancient Carthage and on the southern slopes of the Atlas mountains, all at the latitude of northern Egypt."
--Keita 1992. Further studies of ancient crania from North Africa. AJPA 87:245-254


"Another example of the use of a socially constructed typological paradigm is in studies of the Nile Valley populations in which the concept of a biological African is restricted to those with a particular craniometric pattern (called in the past the 'True Negro' though no 'True White' was ever defined). Early Nubians, Egyptians, and even Somalians are viewed essentially as non-Africans, when in fact numerous lines of evidence and an evolutionary model make them a part of African biocultural/biogeographical history. The diversity of 'authentic' Africans is a reality. This diversity prevents biogeographical/biohistorical Africans from clustering into a single unit, no matter the kind of data."
-- (The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544)


"..presents all tropical Africans with narrower noses and faces as being related to or descended from external, ultimately non-African peoples. However, narrow-faced, narrow-nosed populations have long been resident in Saharo-tropical Africa... and their origin need not be sought elsewhere. These traits are also indigenous. The variability in tropical Africa is expectedly naturally high. Given their longstanding presence, narrow noses and faces cannot be deemed `non-African."
--(S.O.Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993), page 134 )



"Another example of the use of a socially constructed typological paradigm is in studies of the Nile Valley populations in which the concept of a biological African is restricted to those with a particular craniometric pattern (called in the past the 'True African' though no 'True White' was ever defined). Early Nubians, Egyptians, and even Somalians are viewed essentially as non-Africans, when in fact numerous lines of evidence and an evolutionary model make them a part of African biocultural/biogeographical history. The diversity of 'authentic' Africans is a reality. This diversity prevents biogeographical/biohistorical Africans from clustering into a single unit, no matter the kind of data."
---Keita and Kittles. "The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence." American Anthropologist 99, no. 3 (September 1997): 534-544


"This gene-language study is further compro-mised by poor representation of the members of some language families and the use of the race constructs, which force boundaries onto a seamless biocultural and historical matrix with extensive geographical parame-ters. Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues (1988) do not ac-curately represent the Afro-Asiatic family because they exclude Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic speakers, thereby giving the illusion that Ethiopians are an anomaly, being genetically Africans (but mixed) who also speak the lan-guages of Caucasians (Afro-Asiatic!?) (Armstrong 1990). An evolutionary model explains the geographical range of Afro-Asiatic speakers as one overlaying gradients of genetic differentiation, which a racial model breaks into discrete units that cannot be shown to have ever existed.

Another example of ambiguous branching patterns and clusters within inferred phylogenies is seen in the work of Masatoshi Nei and K. Roychoudhury (1993). Their study, which utilized gene-frequency data from samples derived from the traditional racial constructs, revealed poor support from bootstrap tests for a cluster designated Caucasian and consisting of European and Middle Eastern populations. Although this poor support is more reflective of the inadequacy of typological con-structs and racial thinking, the investigators excluded the non-European samples and subsequently obtained results more satisfying to them. The data in effect were tailored to fit into the traditional racial schema. Other examples of the persistence of racial think-ing may easily be identified. The examples cited above illustrate this problem in otherwise interesting work. The issue is not simply one of terminology. The racial approach clearly does not contribute to an under-standing of biohistorical processes, especially in Africa, which cannot be defined by one trait or cluster of traits, on any level: serogenetic, mtDNA, Y chromosome, nu-clear DNA, odontometric, odontomorphological, craniometrie, craniomorphological, hair form, or skin color."
--The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544



In older work, the same pattern of Eurocentric manipulation emerges.
Reports from the field exclude or downplay "negroid" samples

"Nutter (1958), using the Penrose statistic,
demonstrated that Nagada I and Badari crania,
both regarded as Negroid, were almost identical
and that these were most similar to the Negroid
Nubian series from Kerma studied by Collett
(1933). [Collett, not accepting variability,
excluded "clear negro" crania found in the Kerma
series from her analysis, as did Morant (1925),
implying that they were foreign.]..
--Keita, S. O. Y, 1995. "A brief review of studies and
comments on ancient Egyptian biological relationships,

Another method of Eurocentric manipulation is
to mislabel the negro data as "Mediterranean"

"Analyses of Egyptian crania are numerous.
Vercoutter (1978) notes that ancient Egyptian
crania have frequently all been "lumped
(implicitly or explicitly) as Mediterranean,
although Negroid remains are recorded in
substantial numbers by many workers...
--S.O.Y Keita, 1990. "Studies of Ancient Crania From Northern Africa

[zarahan]

“Archaeological and genetic evidence indicate that anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe from an African source at least 45,000 years ago, following the initial dispersal out of Africa [1], [2]. However, it is known that Southern Europeans and Levantines (people from modern day Palestine, Israel, Syria and Jordan) have also inherited genetic material of African origin due to subsequent migrations. One line of evidence comes from Y-chromosome [3] and mitochondrial DNA analyses [4]–[6]. These have identified haplogroups that are characteristic of sub-Saharan Africans in Southern Europeans and Levantines but not in Northern Europeans [7]. Auton et al. [8] presented nuclear genome-based evidence for sharing of sub-Saharan African ancestry in some West Eurasians, by identifying a North-South gradient of haplotype sharing between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans, with the highest proportion of haplotype sharing observed in south/southwestern Europe… we use “African mixture” to refer to gene flow into West Eurasians since the divergence of the latter from East Asians; thus, we are not referring to the much older dispersal out of Africa ∼45,000 years ago but instead to migrations that have occurred since that time.
The finding of sub-Saharan African ancestry in West Eurasians predicts that there will be a signature of admixture LD in the populations that experienced this mixture. That is, there will be LD between all markers that are highly differentiated between the two ancestral populations and the allele will be strongly correlated to the local ancestry [23]. Hence, there will be chromosomal segments of African ancestry with lengths that reflect the number of recombination events that have occurred since mixture, and thus can be used to estimate an admixture date. Figure 3 shows that this expected pattern is observed empirically in the decay of LD in four example West Eurasian populations, where we enhance the effects of admixture LD by weighting the SNP comparisons by frequency difference between the ancestral Africans (YRI) and ancestral West Eurasians (CEU). In the Southern European, Jewish and Levantine populations, this procedure produces clear evidence of admixture LD (Figure 3)..
“We also detect 3%–5% sub-Saharan African ancestry in all eight of the diverse Jewish populations that we analyzed. For the Jewish admixture, we obtain an average estimated date of about 72 generations. This may reflect descent of these groups from a common ancestral population that already had some African ancestry prior to the Jewish Diasporas.”
--- Moorjani, et al. 2011. The history of African gene flow into southern Europeans, Levantines, and Jews. PLoS Genet. 7, e1001373

[zarahan]

Foraging/fishing/pastoralism in some areas of Africa important
in producing stable settlements before the adoption of agriculture

Three points are of major relevance for understanding late foragers in North Africa: first, fishing, sustained by reduced mobility, was a common practice at sites located along perennial rivers, such as the Nile, or seasonal watercourses (wadis); second, the successive shift to a food-producing economy implied the acquisition of nomadic pastoralism; third, agriculture has never been a feasible economic practice in desert and peri-desert environments. The practice of fishing and the scarcity of moist lands away from watercourses encouraged more permanent settlement of sites by the water, which offered nutritional resources to plants, animals, as well as humans. The combination of these economic adjustments and environmental conditions favoured social organizations based on continual occupations of semi-permanent settlements and led to a population increase, which – in turn – triggered the rise of sociocultural complexity and new technological productions, such as pottery and groundstone, before the adoption of any form of food production."

--Garcea 2006. Semi-permanent foragers in semi-arid environments of North Africa
World Archaeology , Volume 38, Issue 2, 2006


--------------------------------------------------------------------





Early agriculture in the Nile Valley


Excerpt from Africa: A Biography of the Continent,
by John Reader, Penguin Books, 1998, pp. 120-173


"Deliberate control of plant productivity dates back to 70,000 years ago in southern Africa, and the world's earliest known centrally organized food production system was established along the Nile 15,000 years ago, long before the Pharaohs, then swept away by calamitous changes in the river's flow pattern."

"Agriculture is essentially a process of manipulating the distribution and growth of plants so that greater quantities of their edible parts are available for harvesting and consumption. The world's earliest known evidence of natural resources having been manipulated in this way comes from archaeological excavations at the Klasies River cave site in South Africa.."

“The human populations of Africa which have survived the bad times of the last glacial maximum were well adapted to take advantage of the good times that followed. Their archaeological visibility increased rapidly, and a steady proliferation of rock engraving, painting, and decorative items in the record points to cultural systems of heightening sophistication. As for food-production systems underpinning this population growth and burgeoning cultural sophistication, two innovations are particularly relevant, in that each represents an important stage of technological development and both are clues to the future of humanity.”

“The first is the digging-stick weight, which is simply a large stone with a hole bored through the middle. The stone fits on the stick and its weight lends added force as the point is thrust into the ground. Digging-stick weights appear in the African archaeological record during the last glacial maximum, and their invention suggests that food-gathering technology had been improved in response to the greater importance of subterranean foods-roots, tubers, and corms- during the period of climatic stress. The second innovation is the projectile point, made for use on the spear or the bow and arrow….. the evidence of projectile-point technology in Africa pre-dates that from any other part of the world…..and there can be no doubt that the spear and the bow would have made hunting a more reliable source of protein and fat during bad times.”
“The digging-stick represents the beginnings of agriculture and the trend towards a sedentary way of life. The projectile point represents a refinement of human capacity for taking life.”

“Agriculture supported life, and the projectile point denied it. Both factors were evident during the millennia which followed the last glacial maximum. In climatic terms, the good times continued uninterruptedly, and the human population increased exponentially. The attempts to manipulate food production which mark the beginnings of agriculture encouraged extended use of areas that previously would have been visited only temporarily. Successful attempts raised population size above the carrying capacity of the land.“

“In the course of the 2,000 years immediately prior to the last glacial maximum 18,000 years ago, the number of sites in the Nile valley increased four-fold; during the following 2,000 years (18,000 to 16,000 years ago) the number almost doubled again, and it increased by yet another one-third between 16,000 and 14,000 years ago. By 12,000 years ago, the number of occupation sites along the Nile valley was more than ten times the number known from before the last glacial maximum, 6,000 years earlier.”

“Throughout this period the majority of sites had covered an area about 400 m (the home base for a group of perhaps forty people), but the size of the largest rose from 800 m 18,000 years ago to more than 10,000 m 6,000 years later – large enough to constitute a village.”
“During the 1960’s, an international team of archaeologists discovered a burial ground about three kilometers north of Wadi Halfa in the Sudan….Excavations uncovered the skeletons of fifty-nine men, women and children, who had been buried in shallow graves under thin slabs of sandstones sometime between 14,000 and 12,000 years ago….Points were found wedged in the spine, and embedded in the skull, the pelvis, and the limb bons”

"The mainstays of the system were catfish and wetland (and possible wild grass grains), which were abundantly available at certain times of the year – catfish in summer, wetland tubers in winter – when surpluses were harvested and stored for consumption during the months of the year when food was less readily available.”

“Harvesting and storage mark the beginning of organized food production: agriculture. But at that stage of its development in the Nile valley organized food production was a high-risk strategy. Output was likely to vary unpredictably, and any increase in population size resulting from a succession of good years would inevitably lead to competition in less favorable times. The burials at Jebel Sahaba (Wadi Halfa) probably record one such episode of violent competition, or warfare, for limited resources of a less than luxuriant Nile valley that was surrounded by an utterly inhospitable desert.”

“The adoption of this broad adaptive strategy provided the large food supply needed by a growing population, but achieving maximum production called for a good deal of planning and the management of labour. This marks the beginning of an organized food-producing system: agriculture.”

“Dating from more than 15,000 years ago, the evidence from the Nile valley is arguably the earliest comprehensive instance of an organized food-producing system known anywhere on Earth. Given time, this pioneering system might have developed into the stupendous civilizations that ruled ancient Egypt for two and a half millennia from about 5,000 years ago. But it could never be. Disaster struck the Nile valley as its population reached a peak, and by 10,000 years ago occupation density had plunged to a level only slightly above that known for the time of the Wadi Kubbaniya site.”

[zarahan]

DNA study of ancient Iran shows sample lacking the skin pigmentation variant common in Europeans
and does not have the most common European variant of the gene associated with the ability to digest raw milk.



"Based on diagnostic SNPs, she had dark, black hair and brown eyes (see Supplementary). She lacked the derived variant (rs16891982) of the SLC45A2 gene associated with light skin pigmentation but had at least one copy of the derived SLC24A5 allele (rs1426654) associated with the same trait. The derived SLC24A5 variant has been found in both Neolithic farmer and Caucasus hunter)gatherer groups (5, 21, 26)suggesting that it was already at appreciable frequency before these populations diverged. Finally, she did not have the most common European variant of the LCT gene (rs4988235) associated with the ability to digest raw milk, consistent with the later emergence of this adaptation (5, 21, 23). "

--Llorente et al 2016. The genetics of an early Neolithic pastoralist from the Zagros.
Biorxiv preprint 2016