The mixed genetic origin of the first farmers of Europe

[Granary]

Chadic speakers carry and are strongly associated with R1b-V88 which is a West Eurasian haplogroup indicating ancient Migration from North of Sahara or the levant.
Omotic speakers do carry Haplogroup E1b1b in smaller percentage compared to Cushites.. the "Purest" speakers like the Ari carry West Eurasian ancestry about 15% the Wolayta also carry higher percentage.

Sure but for the autosomal aspect we don't know much about modern or ancient Chadics and for all we know Omotic people could have West Eurasian ancestry just through Cushitic admixture, not from the original migratory group. The gaps in knowledge are just too big.

[vasil]

I fully agree with one exception: We still can't tell where the more West Eurasian and probably Basal Eurasian centre really was. The most likely places are Nile Valley/Egypt or Southern Near East/Levante. So there is the possibility that a population which was closer to West Eurasians and not like modern Subsaharans lived in the Nile valley, so being technically speaking more West Eurasian-like genetically, but still African geographically, since the Nile Valley is obviously in Africa.
We don't know, but my hunch is that the Nile Valley was highly important for the evolution of humanity as a whole and served as an early centre throughout most of pre-Neolithic human prehistory. When the branch which led to Basal Eurasian and E left the region for the Near East is unknown. It might have happened earlier or later and there was actually forth and back migration, which further complicates things. I think there wasn't even a clearly defined borderline between these Nile Valley people and the Near East, but they moved over the "continental border" quite often. What was therefore the centre first for Basal Eurasian and E, later for E1b1b and AA is very hard to determine.
I guess most of Arabia and the Levante was for quite some time closr connected to the Nile Valley than to the regions up to the North. Its like a chain of metapopulations from Nile Valley <-> Southern Near East <-> Northern Near East-Anatolia <-> Europe and Central Asia. I guess there was gene flow between these groups. Regardless what was the original centre, from the Nile Valley the more West Eurasian shifted ancestral element of IM moved West, mixing with local ANA people from an earlier dispersion which in turn mixed with Basal human lineages in SSA.
Therefore there would have been a continuous gradient from Africa/West to Eurasia/East. The more clear cut borderline came up when the Sahara went dry and a massive replacement from the Near East/Nile Valley did change all of North Africa for a more West Eurasian genetic ancestry. Even the mixed IM is now much lower than it was originally, when the first West Eurasian migration took place.

I think that a middle eastern branch of haplogroup D was found and was the most basal D so it seems DE probably split in the middle east and for that matter its parrent CT which is also the parrent of the other Eurasian haplogroup CF now the parrent of CT - BE which includes B is for sure from Africa. As for the Afro Asiatic language i am sure its Natufian related how would it even spread from East Africa we dont know of any culture from there that would be powerful enough to force themself on the locals which at a point had the most developed culture and technology in the world the haplgroup E and Afro Asiatic Languages in East Africa must be from migrations from the Middle East and the reason they are both archaic is because they are not recent but happened long ago.

[Megalophias]

I think that a middle eastern branch of haplogroup D was found and was the most basal D so it seems DE probably split in the middle east

There is also DE* from West Africa which has not been properly sequenced, but may well be the same kind of basal D. At any rate it is some kind of basal DE, so that is not specific to the Middle East.

[Granary]

There was some minor CHG/Iran input in PPN Levant but most of the foreign ancestry came from Anatolia. Either AA comes from this (iirc north Africans too have some neolithic Anatolian ancestry) OR AA is much older than most estimates and a branch of it already arrived in Levant with the earliest Natufians (who have north African admixture). Personally I think that the latter is closer to the truth, though IDK how old AA would need to be for a single major branch of AA to be as old as the oldest Natufians.

The problem is the degree of separation between Semitic and the closest branches to it within Afro-Asiatic ultimately will require something crossing the Sinai in either direction relatively recently(meaning at the tail end of the African Humid period I believe) but maybe I'm misunderstanding the chronology.

[Ramses]

Sure but for the autosomal aspect we don't know much about modern or ancient Chadics and for all we know Omotic people could have West Eurasian ancestry just through Cushitic admixture, not from the original migratory group. The gaps in knowledge are just too big.

Of course Omotic speakers would have been admixed through Cushitic admixture since the Eurasian-admixed population who migrated to horn africa were Cushitic ,or do you mean later admixture ?
The WEurasian admixture found in the "Ari" is the same one found in Cushites not later or earlier. Others like the Wolayta carry later cushitic admixtures...I don't think there's a gap at all we already know the Pre-Neolithic Horn africans aka Mota hunter gatherers and we know who introduced the eurasian ancestry in horn Africa "SVPN"

There's no "Ancient Culture" associated with Chadic speakers anyway but we do have Eurasian Mtdna N from Green sahara , indicating the presence of West Eurasians in the Green sahara.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39802-1

, also this study inferred Eurasian admixture event that was likely associated with R1b-V88 expansion with Chadic languages spread into the central sahara.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5142112/

We found evidence of early Eurasian backflow to Africa in people speaking the unclassified isolate Laal language in southern Chad and estimate from linkage-disequilibrium decay that this occurred 4,750–7,200 years ago. It brought to Africa a Y chromosome lineage (R1b-V88) whose closest relatives are widespread in present-day Eurasia; we estimate from sequence data that the Chad R1b-V88 Y chromosomes coalesced 5,700–7,300 years ago. This migration could thus have originated among Near Eastern farmers during the African Humid Period.

We detected the earliest Eurasian migrations to Africa in the Laal-speaking people, an isolated language group of fewer than 800 speakers who inhabit southern Chad. We estimate that mixture occurred 4,750–7,200 ya, thus after the Neolithic transition in the Near East, a period characterized by exponential growth in human population size. Environmental changes during this period [which possibly triggered the Neolithic transition] also facilitated human migrations. The African Humid Period, for example, was a humid phase across North Africa that peaked 6,000–9,000 ya37 and biogeographically connected Africa to Eurasia, facilitating human movement across these regions.38 In Chad, we found a Y chromosome lineage [R1b-V88] that we estimate emerged during the same period 5,700–7,300 ya [Figure 3B]. The closest related Y chromosome groups today are widespread in Eurasia and have been previously associated with human expansions to Europe.39 and 40 We estimate that the Eurasian R1b lineages initially diverged 7,300–9,400 ya, at the time of the Neolithic expansions. However, we found that the African and Eurasian R1b lineages diverged 17,900–23,000 ya, suggesting that genetic structure was already established between the groups who expanded to Europe and Africa. R1b-V88 was previously found in Central and West Africa and was associated with a mid-Holocene migration of Afro-asiatic speakers through the central Sahara into the Lake Chad Basin.8 In the populations we examined, we found R1b in the Toubou and Sara, who speak Nilo-Saharan languages, and also in the Laal people, who speak an unclassified language. This suggests that R1b penetrated Africa independently of the Afro-asiatic language spread or passed to other groups through admixture.

The study suggest that this admixture event is independent from the admixture found in East africans.

Thus Chadic speakers are associated with West Eurasian migration of people carrying the R1b-V88 ..the inference of the WEurasian admixture event found in Laal group from chad , and its compatibility with the time of the R1b-V88 coalescence , and the Eurasian Mtdna found in Tarakaori from the Green sahara is the same period R1b-V88 thought to have appeared in africa.

that's regardless of how much modern chadic speakers carry West eurasian ancestry since its possible that this ancient Weurasian ancestry was diluted with time. Because there Y-DNA indicate there relationship with this admixture event.

[Keneki20]

This is the scientific method.
What do we know about Afro-asiatic languages so far?

1-All of its modern speakers Carry West Eurasian ancestry + Not all of them Carry African ancestry ( or either recently admixed)

- All Afro-Asiatic communities do appear to carry African ancestry (specifically Eastern African), but at varying degrees. With Berber and Semitic-speaking peoples, that percentage is indeed low, but the presence of African ancestry is likely not new (i.e., not entirely attributable to the Trans-Saharan/Arab Slave Trade).

2-Most of them Carry Haplogroup E1b1b lineages (Some carry R1b)

- R1b-V88 spread into Afro-Asiatic-speaking communities rather early (c. 7.5-8 kya), but it couldn't have characterized the speakers of Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Additionally, it spread from Southern Europe into Africa during the Neolithic, not from the Levant as was previously posited. Additionally, the appearance of that lineage was concomitant with a substantial increase in Early European Farmer ancestry in Northwestern Africa, which itself still characterizes a very large share of the ancestry of modern Maghrebis across the board.

3-What Ancient cultures "linguists" used to associate with Afro-asiatic? (Capsians and Natufians) ..not Iberomaurosians or Sudanese hunter gatherers.

- The Natufian culture was the nearest identifiable culture in Eurasia to Africa that was proto-agricultural while still having distinct signs of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So, those facts would naturally have identified this culture as an important, but not proven, candidate for the Afro-Asiatic homeland given what is known about Afro-Asiatic.

As you're aware, archaeogenetic studies of the Natufians have helped to show that Natufians had high frequencies of haplogroup E and that Natufian-like ancestry is indeed widespread throughout the Afro-Asiatic-speaking domain. However, that does not change the fact that, and as Agamemnon has routinely and correctly pointed out, linguistic data takes primacy over genetic data when identifying a family's Urheimat. Genetic data can and often does complement the existing linguistic data, but it does not have to. There are many examples, for instance, of genetic and linguistic data being very much so at odds when determining the identity and/or homeland of a language or language family's earliest speakers.

Beyond this, as Agamemnon has pointed out, Afro-Asiatic appears to have largely unrecognized ties to "Niger-Congo" languages, with some similarities being morphological in nature. One may comfortably say that there's been a long tradition of linking Afro-Asiatic to "Nostratic" and thus to West Eurasia, but that is not without its detractions. For example, a 2012 study titled Abstract Profiles of Structural Stability Point to Universal Tendencies, Family-Specific Factors, and Ancient Connections between Languages says the following:

Probably the best known proposal for a macro-family is represented by the various versions of Nostratic (see [44] for a critical assessment) covering several Eurasian and North African language families. We found no evidence for a version of Nostratic comprising Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Dravidian and Uralic (“Nostratic v2” in Table 1; p = 0.24, 0 methods, and p = 0.77, 0 methods, when controlling for geography), but there is a positive indication for another version of Nostratic comprising Altaic (or Mongolic + Turkic), Indo-European and Uralic (“Nostratic v1” in Table 1; p = 0.011, 5 methods, and p = 0.13, 3 methods, when controlling for geography).

Likewise, the study also posits a link between Afro-Asiatic and African phyla, and not, as the quote above contends, to Eurasian ones. This is seen in Figure 2 of the study. This is important to consider, since, with respect to Afro-Asiatic and its ties to other phyla, attempts to demonstrate its ties to African phyla have generally constituted an "empty quarter" if you will, much like with the aforementioned understanding of archaeogenetics in Africa at large.



As for the Capsian culture, it was both too late to be associated with the earliest Afro-Asiatic speakers and was too far west. Additionally, the Capsian lifestyle did not show signs of wild grain collection, which is a readily identifiable and very important activity to consider when looking at core Afro-Asiatic lexical data. The Capsians appear to have shared a greater phenotypic similarity to contemporaneous Near Easterners than earlier Iberomaurusians did, but that doesn't say much of anything about the identity of the Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers, since neither their lifestyles nor age of existence would have seamlessly aligned with those of Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers.


Additionally, for these so-called Sudanese hunter-gatherers, nothing is known about them genetically, even though their remains have been identified. Generally, this matches the reality of archaeogenetics in Africa. The field moves at a snail's pace relative to West Eurasia. Take, for example, how much is known about the genetic identity of the Natufians, Anatolian agriculturalists and their Anatolian hunter-gatherer ancestors, Iranian agriculturalists, Levantine Neolithic peoples, Levantine Chalcolithic peoples, Levantine Bronze age peoples, Iranian Chalcolithic peoples, and the like. The picture of that subregion of West Eurasia is still somewhat opaque, but that picture is immeasurably clearer than Africa's, let alone northeast Africa's from the Epipaeleolothic to the Bronze Age, where there have been more samples identified relative to anywhere else in Africa. One cannot make firm conclusions with that much inequality of archaeogenetic focus and obvious blind spots, especially when considering that the Levant is not considered to be the homeland by all Afro-Asiatic specialists.

With that said, what's worth noting is that some of these Sudanese hunter-gatherers did have a lifestyle that was very similar to that of the Natufians (e.g., wild grain collection, use of grindstones, semi-permanent settlements, large game hunting, etc.) and were contemporaneous with the Natufian culture.

4-What is the accepted dating linguists associate Proto-Afro Asiatic with ? about 10,000 BC

- For the accepted dating, one will be unlikely to find a meaningfully official estimate. However, the age of common unity between the different Afro-Asiatic branches is likelier to predate 10,000 B.C.E. (i.e., 12 kya). From discussions with a university-trained and informed linguist whom I know, he posits that Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken about 14,000 years ago. As for estimates from others, I have seen Agamemnon state that he believes Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken 13,500 years ago. That is still thought to be technically concurrent with the Natufian culture, but there is no indication of Natufians or, more appropriately, a related people (e.g., the people of the Harifian culture) migrating very near to the African mainland (i.e., to the southern and Eastern Sinai) until about 11,600 years ago, which would have almost certainly postdated the initial disintegration of Afro-Asiatic.

5-What "Ancestry" Did Ancient Afro-asiatic speakers carry so far ? All of them from Ancient egyptians to Ancient Northwest africans and Guanches to ancient Canaanites to ancient East african pastoralists
had common West eurasian ancestry mostly related to "Natufian ancestry".

- The presence and noting of Western Eurasian ancestry, while useful, is still too broad an association with the phylum. Berber speakers have far more Iberomaurusian and Early European farmer ancestry than they do Natufian-like ancestry. I have even seen some sampled Berber individuals showing almost no Natufian-like and/or even Neolithic Levantine ancestry at all when looking at runs from people on Anthrogenica and elsewhere. Likewise, the spread of Berber is fairly recent in Northwest Africa.

For Semitic speakers in West Asia, even if one were to contend that the entirety of the Natufian-like ancestry in them constitutes ancestry derived from earlier Afro-Asiatic speakers, there's significant additional Iranian agriculturalist and Anatolian agriculturalist ancestry interwoven into the genetic makeup of modern West Asian Semitic speakers. Thus, they, like those under some other Afro-Asiatic branches, are similarly admixed with peoples who are very unlikely to have spoken Afro-Asiatic languages or even their relatives.

So ..
The Proto-afro asiatic carriers must have been:
1-West Eurasian in origin
2-Carried haplogroup E1b1b
3-Carried ancestry mostly related to "Natufians"
4-Are dated to 10.000 BC give or take..

Consequently, even though the assertions above are certainly understandable, the reality of the situation is not so cut-and-dried. After all, this is the world's oldest identified phylum. One should not expect the conclusions on its early history to always be easily drawn.

[Michalis Moriopoulos]

Of course Omotic speakers would have been admixed through Cushitic admixture since the Eurasian-admixed population who migrated to horn africa were Cushitic ,or do you mean later admixture ?
The WEurasian admixture found in the "Ari" is the same one found in Cushites not later or earlier. Others like the Wolayta carry later cushitic admixtures...I don't think there's a gap at all we already know the Pre-Neolithic Horn africans aka Mota hunter gatherers and we know who introduced the eurasian ancestry in horn Africa "SVPN"

Surely you see the pickle you've gotten yourself in here. Associating the first Afro-Asiatic speakers in the Horn with Cushitic speakers doesn't fly if Omotic is the first AA branch to split off. It had split off from the AA trunk well before Cushitic became a branch of its own. According to Agememnon (who knows more about AA than anyone here), Omotic's status as the most basal member of AA is the consensus among AA experts and the objections to its basal position are fringe positions. So, assuming you don't deny the consensus (I'm guessing you do because it would be convenient for you to do so), you need to find a solution to the "Omotic problem" if you want to associate Proto-AA with West Eurasian ancestry.

Let's review what you've hypothesized:
a.) Proto-AAs were West Eurasian (Natufian-related).
b.) There were no AEA-West Eurasian hybrids until West Eurasian [Proto-]Cushitic-speaking pastoralists moved south and mixed with them, creating a Horn African-like profile.
c.) Ari-like Omotics have West Eurasian admixure but only because of gene flow from Horn African-like Cushitic speakers.

Am I right to assume you think all the AEA (Dinka)-like ancestry in Omotics also came from the Cushitic gene flow? That would leave only the Mota-like component. So now you have an AA-speaking Mota-like people to explain. How exactly does that work with your theory that Proto-AAs were West Eurasian? Am I to assume you think an early Proto-AA group migrated into the Omo Valley and was totally absorbed by Mota-like people, leaving no trace of themselves autosomally?

[JRD]

We have no autosomal ancient DNA from the Sahara. We'll need to sample it in order to solve what exactly ANA is and how would the populations of the Green Sahara look like genetically, among other enigmas.

[dmana]

Omotic's status as the most basal member of AA is the consensus among AA experts and the objections to its basal position are fringe positions.

There's hardly a consensus on Omotic among linguists. They can't even decide whether it's a valid node within AA even when assuming that it should belong to AA.

Am I to assume you think an early Proto-AA group migrated into the Omo Valley and was totally absorbed by Mota-like people, leaving no trace of themselves autosomally?

I mean, it's not more unlikely than a group of east african proto-AA migrating into west asia and getting completely absorbed by the local population, which i assume is the theory you support?

[davit]

What is AEA btw? IS it a hybrid component or a sister to ANA or West African?