24,000 Years Old Proto-North Eurasian Language (Ancient North Eurasian) migrations? Became: Proto-Afroasiatic, Proto-Sino-Tibetan, Proto-Transeurasian, Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Yeniseian, Proto-Na-Dene, Proto-Caucasian, Sumerian, Proto-Austronesian, and the Basque language

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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This art above explains my thinking from my life of investigation

I am an anarchist (Social anarchism, Left-wing anarchism, or Socialist anarchism) trying to explain prehistory as I see it after studying it on my own starting 2006. Anarchists are for truth and believe in teaching the plain truth; misinformation is against this, and we would and should fight misinformation and disinformation.

I see anarchism as a social justice issue not limited to some political issue or monetary persuasion. People own themselves, have self/human rights, and deserve freedoms. All humanity is owed respect for its dignity; we are all born equal in dignity and human rights, and no plot of dirt we currently reside on changes this.

I fully enjoy the value (axiology) of archaeology (empirical evidence from fact or artifacts at a site) is knowledge (epistemology) of the past, adding to our anthropology (evidence from cultures both the present and past) intellectual (rational) assumptions of the likely reality of actual events from time past.

I am an Axiological Atheist, Philosopher & Autodidact Pre-Historical Writer/Researcher, Anti-theist, Anti-religionist, Anarcho Humanist, LGBTQI, Race, & Class equality. I am not an academic, I am a revolutionary sharing education and reason to inspire more deep thinking. I do value and appreciate Academics, Archaeologists, Anthropologists, and Historians as they provide us with great knowledge, informing us about our shared humanity.

I am a servant leader, as I serve the people, not myself, not my ego, and not some desire for money, but rather a caring teacher’s heart to help all I can with all I am. From such thoughtfulness may we all see the need for humanism and secularism, respecting all as helpful servant leaders assisting others as often as we can to navigate truth and the beauty of reality.

‘Reality’ ie. real/external world things, facts/evidence such as that confirmed by science, or events taken as a whole documented understanding of what occurred/is likely to have occurred; the accurate state of affairs. “Reason” is not from a mind devoid of “unreason” but rather demonstrates the potential ability to overcome bad thinking. An honest mind, enjoys just correction. Nothing is a justified true belief without valid or reliable reason and evidence; just as everything believed must be open to question, leaving nothing above challenge.

I don’t believe in gods or ghosts, and nor souls either. I don’t believe in heavens or hells, nor any supernatural anything. I don’t believe in Aliens, Bigfoot, nor Atlantis. I strive to follow reason and be a rationalist. Reason is my only master and may we all master reason. Thinking can be random, but reason is organized and sound in its Thinking. Right thinking is reason, right reason is logic, and right logic can be used in math and other scientific methods. I don’t see religious terms Animism, Totemism, Shamanism, or Paganism as primitive but original or core elements that are different parts of world views and their supernatural/non-natural beliefs or thinking.

I am inspired by philosophy, enlightened by archaeology, and grounded by science that religion claims, on the whole, along with their magical gods, are but dogmatic propaganda, myths, and lies. To me, religions can be summed up as conspiracy theories about reality, a reality mind you is only natural and devoid of magic anything. And to me, when people talk as if Atlantis is anything real, I stop taking them seriously. Like asking about the reality of Superman or Batman just because they seem to involve metropolitan cities in their stores. Or if Mother Goose actually lived in a shoe? You got to be kidding.

We are made great in our many acts of kindness, because we rise by helping each other.

NE = Proto-North Eurasian/Ancient North Eurasian/Mal’ta–Buret’ culture/Mal’ta Boy “MA-1” 24,000 years old burial

A = Proto-Afroasiatic/Afroasiatic

Y= Proto-Yeniseian/Yeniseian

S = Samara culture

ST = Proto-Sino-Tibetan/Sino-Tibetan

T = Proto-Transeurasian/Altaic

C = Proto-Northwest Caucasus language/Northwest Caucasian/Languages of the Caucasus

I = Proto-Indo-European/Indo-European

IB = Iberomaurusian Culture/Capsian culture

Natufian culture (15,000–11,500 years ago, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Negev desert)

Proto-Uralic/Uralic languages

Nganasan people/Nganasan language

Na-Dene languages/Dené–Yeniseian, Dené–Caucasian

Tlingit language

Proto-Semitic/Semitic languages

Sumerian language

Proto-Basque/Basque language

24,000 years ago, Proto-North Eurasian Language (Ancient North Eurasian) migrations?

My thoughts:

Proto-North Eurasian Language (Ancient North Eurasian) With related Y-DNA R1a, R1b, R2a, and Q Haplogroups.

R1b 22,0000-15,000 years ago in the Middle east creates Proto-Afroasiatic languages moving into Africa around 15,000-10,000 years ago connecting with the Iberomaurusian Culture/Taforalt near the coasts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

R2a 10,000 years ago in Iran brings/creates Proto-Indo-European language and also a possibility is R1a in Russia around 9,000 years ago may have had a version of Proto-Indo-European language.

Around 14,000-10,000 years ago??? Proto-North Eurasian Language goes to the Yellow River basin (eventually relating with the Yangshao culture) in China creates Proto-Sino-Tibetan language.

Proto-Sino-Tibetan language then moves to the West Liao River valley (eventually relating with the Hongshan culture) in China creating Proto-Transeurasian (Altaic) language around 9,000 years ago.

N Haplogroups 9,000 years ago with Proto-Transeurasian language possibly moves north to Lake Baikal. Then after living with Proto-North Eurasian Language 24,000-9,000 years ago?/Pre-Proto-Yeniseian language 9,000-7,000 years ago Q Haplogroups (eventually relating with the Ket language and the Ket people) until around 5,500 years ago, then N Haplogroups move north to the Taymyr Peninsula in North Siberia (Nganasan homeland) brings/creates the Proto-Uralic language.

Q Haplogroups with Proto-Yeniseian language /Proto-Na-Dene language likely emerge 8,000/7,000 years ago or so and migrates to the Middle East (either following R2a to Iraq or R1a to Russia (Samara culture) then south to Iraq creates the Sumerian language. It may have also created the Proto-Caucasian languages along the way. And Q Haplogroups with Proto-Yeniseian language to a migration to North America that relates to Na-Dené (and maybe including Haida) languages, of which the first branch was Proto-Tlingit language 5,000 years ago, in the Pacific Northwest.

Sino-Tibetan language then moves more east in China to the Hemudu culture pre-Austronesian culture, next moved to Taiwan creating the Proto-Austronesian language around 6,000-5,500 years ago.

R1b comes to Russia from the Middle East around 7,500 years ago, bringing a version of Proto-Indo-European languages to the (Samara culture), then Q Y-DNA with Proto-Yeniseian language moves south from the (Samara culture) and may have been the language that created the Proto-Caucasian language. And R1b from the (Samara culture) becomes the 4,200 years or so R1b associated with the Basques and Basque language it was taken with R1b, but language similarities with the Proto-Caucasian language implies language ties to Proto-Yeniseian language.

Genetics of South Asia, Andamanese peoples, Indus Valley Civilization, Peopling of India, Dravidian languages, and the Paliyan/Pulliyar Dravidian tribal people

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Genetic Relations to Ancient North Eurasians (ANE):

Eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG)

Caucasus hunter-gatherer (CHG)

Western hunter-gatherer

Scandinavian hunter-gatherer

Iberian hunter-gatherers

Zagros/Iranian Hunter-Gatherer (IHG) 

Iranian Neolithic Farmers (INF)

Anatolian hunter-gatherer (AHG)

Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (ANF)

Early European Farmers (EEF)

Yamnaya/Steppe Herders (WSH)

Origin of Y-DNA Haplogroup R1a and Expansion (VIDEO)

Indo-Europeans to Asia (Y-DNA Haplogroup R1a-Z93) (VIDEO)

How did the Y-DNA Haplogroup R1b become European? (Human Migration) (VIDEO)

Are the people in Africa’s R1b European?(R1b-V88) (VIDEO)

Haplogroup mt-DNA R

Haplogroup Y-DNA R

Haplogroup Y-DNA R1

Haplogroup Y-DNA R1a

Haplogroup Y-DNA R1b

Haplogroup Y-DNA R2a

Haplogroup Y-DNA IJ

Haplogroup Y-DNA J1

Haplogroup Y-DNA J2

Haplogroup Y-DNA I2a

Villabruna 1 (burial)/Ripari Villabruna rock shelter in northern Italy (14,000 years old)

Satsurblia Cave (burial) in the Country of Georgia (13,000 years old)

Motala (burial) (8,000 years old)

Genetic Relations to Ancient North Eurasians: Zagros/Iranian, Anatolian, Eastern, Caucasus, Western, Scandinavian, and Iberian hunter-gatherers

Proto-Afroasiatic language

“Proto-Afroasiatic (PAA), also known as Proto-Hamito-Semitic, Proto-Semito-Hamitic, and Proto-Afrasian, is the reconstructed proto-language from which all modern Afroasiatic languages are descended. Though estimations vary widely, it is believed by scholars to have been spoken as a single language around 12,000 to 18,000 years ago (12 to 18 kya), that is, between 16,000 and 10,000 BC. Although no consensus exists as to the location of the Afroasiatic homeland, the putative homeland of Proto-Afroasiatic speakers, the majority of scholars agree that it was located within a region of Northeast Africa.” ref

“The reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic is problematic and has not progressed to the degree found in Indo-European linguistics. The immense amount of time over which the branches have been separated, coupled with the wide gap between the attestations of the original branches (3rd millennium BCE for Egyptian and Semitic, 19th and 20th centuries for many Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages) mean that determining sound correspondences has not yet been possible. In addition to more traditional proposed consonant correspondences, there is also a divergent proposal that has become popular among Egyptologists; there is no agreement about PAA’s vowels, the existence of tone, or its syllable structure. At the same time, scholars disagree to whether and to what extent the classical Semitic languages are a conservative, faithful representation of PAA morphology. This is particularly important for the question of whether the lexical roots in the language were originally mostly biradical or triradical, that is, whether they originally had two or three consonants. It also plays into the question of the degree to which Proto-Afroasiatic had root-and-pattern morphology, as most fully displayed in the Semitic, Egyptian, and Cushitic branches.” ref

“There are nonetheless, some items of agreement and reconstructed vocabulary. Most scholars agree that Proto-Afroasiatic nouns had grammatical gender, at least two and possibly three grammatical numbers (singular, plural, and possibly dual), as well as a case system with at least two cases. Proto-Afroasiatic may have had marked nominative or ergative-absolutive alignment. A deverbal derivational prefix *mV- is also widely reconstructed. While there is disagreement about the forms of the PAA personal pronouns, there is agreement that there were independent and “bound” (unstressed, clitic) forms. There is also agreement that a widespread demonstrative pattern of n = masculine and plural, t= feminine goes back to PAA, as well as about the existence of an interrogative pronoun *mV, which may not have distinguished animacy. There is some agreement that the PAA verb had two or possibly three basic forms, though there is disagreement about what those forms were and what tenses, aspects, or moods they expressed. There is also widespread agreement that there were possibly two sets of conjugational affixes (prefixes and suffixes) used for different purposes. Additionally, the importance of verbal gemination and reduplication and the existence of three derivational affixes, especially of a causative -*s-, are commonly reconstructed. A numeral system cannot be reconstructed, although numerous PAA numerals and cognate sets from 1 to 9 have been proposed.” ref

“There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant is c. 4000 BCE, after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary. The estimations offered by scholars as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary widely, ranging from 18,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE. An estimate at the youngest end of this range still makes Afroasiatic the oldest proven language family. Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact, with the evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples.” ref

“At present, there is no commonly accepted reconstruction of Afroasiatic morphology, grammar, syntax, or phonology. Because of the great amount of time since Afroasiatic split into branches, there are limits to what scholars can reconstruct. Cognates tend to disappear from related languages over time. There are currently not many widely accepted Afroasiatic cognates, and it is difficult to derive sound correspondence rules from a small number of examples. The most convincing cognates in Afroasiatic often have the same or very similar consonants but very different vowels, a fact which has not yet been explained. Additionally, it is not always clear which words are cognates, as some proposed cognates may be chance resemblances. Moreover, at least some cognates are likely to have been altered irregularly due to analogical change, making them harder to recognize. As words change meaning over time, the question of which words might have originally meant the same thing is often difficult to answer. As a result, Robert Ratcliffe suggests that Proto-Afroasiatic may never be reconstructed in the same way that Proto-Indo-European has been.” ref

“The current state of reconstruction is also hindered by the fact that the Egyptian and Semitic branches of Afroasiatic are attested as early as 3000 BCE, while the languages of the Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic branches are only attested much later, sometimes in the 20th century. The long history of scholarship of the Semitic languages compared to other branches is another obstacle in reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic; typical features of Semitic have often been projected back to the proto-language, despite their cross-linguistic rarity and lack of correspondences in other branches. Like cognates, shared morphological features tend to disappear over time, as can be demonstrated within Afroasiatic by comparing Old Egyptian (2600–2000 BCE) with Coptic (after 200 CE). Yet it is also possible for forms closer to PAA to be preserved in languages recorded later, while languages recorded earlier may have forms that diverge more from PAA. In order to provide a more accurate reconstruction of Afroasiatic, it will be necessary to first reconstruct the proto-forms of the individual branches, a task which has proven difficult. As of 2023, there is only the beginning of a consensus on the reconstruction of Proto-Semitic, and no widely accepted reconstruction of any of the other branches’ proto-forms. Current attempts at reconstructing Afroasiatic often rely on comparing individual words or features in the daughter languages, which leads to results that are not convincing to many scholars.” ref

“The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic, sometimes Afrasian), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, are a language family (or “phylum”) of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo. Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch.” ref

“Arabic, if counted as a single language, is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. Other major Afroasiatic languages include the Chadic Hausa language with over 34 million native speakers, the Semitic Amharic language with 25 million, and the Cushitic Somali language with 15 million. Other Afroasiatic languages with millions of native speakers include the Semitic Tigrinya and Modern Hebrew, the Cushitic Sidaama, and the Omotic Wolaitta language, though most languages within the family are much smaller in size. There are many well-attested Afroasiatic languages from antiquity that have since died or gone extinct, including Egyptian and the Semitic languages Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Phoenician, Amorite, and Ugaritic. There is no consensus among historical linguists as to precisely where or when the common ancestor of all Afroasiatic languages, known as Proto-Afroasiatic, was originally spoken. However, most agree that the Afroasiatic homeland was located somewhere in northeastern Africa, with specific proposals including the Horn of Africa, Egypt, and the eastern Sahara. A significant minority of scholars argues for an origin in the Levant. The reconstructed timelines of when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary extensively, with dates ranging from 18,000 to 8,000 BCE. Even the latest plausible dating makes Afroasiatic the oldest language family accepted by contemporary linguists.” ref

“Comparative study of Afroasiatic is hindered by the massive disparities in textual attestation between its branches: while the Semitic and Egyptian branches are attested in writing as early as the fourth millennium BC, Berber, Cushitic, and Omotic languages were often not recorded until the 19th or 20th centuries. While systematic sound laws have not yet been established to explain the relationships between the various branches of Afroasiatic, the languages share a number of common features. One of the most important for establishing membership in the branch is a common set of pronouns. Other widely shared features include a prefix m- which creates nouns from verbs, evidence for alternations between the vowel “a” and a high vowel in the forms of the verb, similar methods of marking gender and plurality, and some details of phonology such as the presence of pharyngeal fricatives. Other features found in multiple branches include a specialized verb conjugation using suffixes (Egyptian, Semitic, Berber), a specialized verb conjugation using prefixes (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), verbal prefixes deriving middle (t-), causative (s-), and passive (m-) verb forms (Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic), and a suffix used to derive adjectives (Egyptian, Semitic).” ref

“The Proto-Afroasiatic homeland is the hypothetical place where speakers of the Proto-Afroasiatic language lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into separate distinct languages. Afroasiatic languages are today mostly distributed in parts of Africa, and Western Asia. No consensus exists as to where proto-Afroasiatic originated. Scholars have proposed locations for the Afroasiatic homeland across Africa and western Asia. A complicating factor is the lack of agreement on the subgroupings of Afroasiatic (see Further subdivisions) – this makes associating archaeological evidence with the spread of Afroasiatic particularly difficult.” ref

“Nevertheless, there is a long-accepted link between the speakers of Proto-Southern Cushitic languages and the East African Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (3000 BCE), and archaeological evidence associates the Proto-Cushitic speakers with economic transformations in the Sahara dating c. 8,500 years ago, as well as the speakers of the Proto-Zenati variety of the Berber languages with an expansion across the Maghreb in the 5th century CE. More hypothetical links associate the proto-Afroasiatic-speakers with the Kebaran and the Mushabian culture, while others argue for a possible affiliation between proto-Afroasiatic and the Natufian culture.” ref

“The linguistic view on the location of the homeland of Afroasiatic languages is largely divided into proponents for a homeland within Africa, and proponents for a homeland in western Asia. To date, a homeland within Africa is favored by a majority of scholars, although a significant minority of scholars support a homeland in western Asia. Pagani and Crevecoeur (2019) argue that, given the still open debate on the origin of Afroasiatic, the consensus will probably settle on an intermediate “across-the-Sinai” solution. They also note that the very early interactions between African and Eurasian cultures, point “to a geographical shrinking of what can currently be defined as ‘strictly African’ in a long term perspective.” ref

“Supporters of a western Asian origin for Afroasiatic are particularly common among those with a background in Semitic or Egyptological studies, and amongst archaeological proponents of the “farming/language dispersal hypothesis” according to which major language groups dispersed with early farming technology in the Neolithic. The leading linguistic proponent of this idea in recent times is Alexander Militarev, who argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by early agriculturalists in the Levant and subsequently spread to Africa. Militarev associates the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic with the Levantine Post-Natufian Culture, arguing that the reconstructed lexicon of flora and fauna, as well as farming and pastoralist vocabulary indicates that Proto-AA must have been spoken in this area. Scholar Jared Diamond and archaeologist Peter Bellwood have taken up Militarev’s arguments as part of their general argument that the spread of linguistic macrofamilies (such as Afroasiatic, Bantu, and Austroasiatic) can be associated with the development of agriculture; they argue that there is clear archaeological support for farming spreading from the Levant into Africa via the Nile valley.” ref

“Militarev, who linked proto-Afroasiatic to the Levantine Natufian culture, that preceded the spread of farming technology, believes the language family to be about 10,000 years old. He wrote (Militarev 2002, p. 135) that the “Proto-Afrasian language, on the verge of a split into daughter languages”, meaning, in his scenario, into “Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian, Semitic and Chadic–Berber“, “should be roughly dated to the ninth millennium BC”. Support for the migration of agricultural populations, according to linguists, are the word for dog (an Asian domesticate) reconstructed to Proto-Afroasiatic as well as words for bow and arrow, which, according to some archaeologists, spread rapidly across North Africa once they were introduced to North Africa from the Near East, viz. Ounan points. Lexicon linked to a pastoralist society (cattle-breeding) reconstructed for proto-Afroasiatic also supports a western Asian homeland, possibly indicating an earlier pastoralist migration.” ref

“Scholars, such as Hodgson et al., present archaeogenetic evidence in favor for a place of dispersion within Africa, but argue that the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic can ultimately be linked to a Paleolithic and pre-agricultural migration wave into Africa from Western Asia, and that the Semitic-branch represents a later back-migration to the Levant. According to an autosomal DNA research in 2014 on ancient and modern populations, the Afroasiatic languages likely spread across Africa and the Near East by an ancestral population(s) carrying a newly identified “non-African” (Western Eurasian) genetic component, which the researchers dub the “Ethio-Somali” component. This genetic component is most closely related to the “Maghrebi” component and is believed to have diverged from other “non-African” (Western Eurasian) ancestries at least 23,000 years ago. The “Ethio-Somali” genetic component is prevalent among modern Afroasiatic-speaking populations, and found at its highest levels among Cushitic peoples in the Horn of Africa.” ref

“On this basis, the researchers suggest that the original Ethio-Somali carrying population(s) probably arrived in the pre-agricultural period (12,000–23,000 years ago) from the Near East, having crossed over into northeast Africa via the Sinai Peninsula and then split into two, with one branch continuing west across North Africa and the other heading south into the Horn of Africa. They suggest that a descendant population migrated back to the Levant prior to 4000 BCE and developed the Semitic branch of Afroasiatic. Later migration from Arabia into the HOA beginning around 3 ka would explain the origin of the Ethio-Semitic languages at this time. A similar view has already been proposed earlier, suggesting that the ancestors of Afroasiatic speakers could have been a population originating in the Near East that migrated to Northeast Africa during the Late Palaeolithic with a subset later moving back to the Near East.” ref

“Subsequent archaeogenetic studies have corroborated the migrations of Western Eurasian ancestry during the Paleolithic into Africa, becoming the dominant component of Northern Africa since at least 15,000 BCE. The “Maghrebi” component, which gave rise to the Iberomaurusian culture, is described as autochthonous to Northern Africa, related to the Paleolithic Eurasian migration wave, and the characteristic ancestry components of modern Northern Africans along a West-to-East cline, with Northeastern Africans having an additionally higher frequency of a Neolithic Western Asian component associated with the Neolithic expansion. Genetic research on Afroasiatic-speaking populations revealed strong correlation between the distribution of Afroasiatic languages and the frequency of Northern African/Natufian/Arabian-like ancestry. In contrast, Omotic speakers display ancestry mostly distinct from other Afroasiatic-speakers, indicating language shift, or support for the exclusion of Omotic from the Afroasiatic group.” ref

“Genetic studies on a specimen of the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic excavated at the Luxmanda site in Tanzania, which has been associated with migrations of Cushitic-speaking peoples and the spread of pastoralism, found that the specimen carried a large proportion of ancestry related to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture of the Levant (Natufian), similar to that borne by modern Afroasiatic-speaking populations inhabiting the Horn of Africa. It is suggested that a population related to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture of the Levant contributed significantly to historical Eastern African populations represented by the c. 5,000 year old Luxmanda specimen, while modern Cushitic-speaking populations have additional contributions from Dinka-related and “Neolithic Iranian-related” sources. This type of ancestry was later partially replaced by following migration events associated with the Bantu expansion, with Bantu-speaking Eastern Africans having only little ancestry associated with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture of the Levant.” ref

“Keita (2008) examined a published Y-chromosome dataset on Afro-Asiatic populations and found that a key lineage E-M35/E-M78, sub-clade of haplogroup E, was shared between the populations in the locale of Egyptian and Libyan speakers and modern Cushitic speakers from the Horn. These lineages are present in Egyptians, Berbers, Cushitic speakers from the Horn of Africa, and Semitic speakers in the Near-East. He noted that variants are also found in the Aegean and Balkans, but the origin of the M35 subclade was in Egypt or Libya, and its clades were dominant in a core portion of Afro-Asiatic speaking populations which included Cushitic, Egyptian and Berber groups, in contrast, Semitic speakers showed a decline in frequency going west to east in the Levantine-Syria region. Keita identified high frequencies of M35 (>50%) among Omotic populations, but stated that this derived from a small, published sample of 12. Keita also wrote that the PN2 mutation was shared by M35 and M2 lineages and this paternal clade originated from East Africa.” ref

“He concluded that “the genetic data give population profiles that clearly indicate males of African origin, as opposed to being of Asian or European descent” but acknowledged that the biodiversity does not indicate any specific set of skin colors or facial features as populations were subject to microevolutionary pressures. Fregel summarized that the Y-chromosome diversity of North Africans was compatible with a demic expansion from the Middle East, because the age of common lineages in North Africa (E-M78 and J-304) were relatively recent. The North African pattern of Y-chromosome variation was mostly shaped during the Neolithic period. Ehret cited genetic evidence which had identified the Horn of Africa as a source of a genetic marker “M35/215” Y-chromosome lineage for a significant population component which moved north from that region into Egypt and the Levant. Ehret argued that this genetic distribution paralleled the spread of the Afrasian language family with the movement of people from the Horn of Africa into Egypt and added a new demic component to the existing population of Egypt 17,000 years ago.” ref

Human Y chromosome haplogroup R-V88: a paternal genetic record of early mid Holocene trans-Saharan connections and the spread of Chadic languages

“Abstract: Although human Y chromosomes belonging to haplogroup R1b are quite rare in Africa, being found mainly in Asia and Europe, a group of chromosomes within the paragroup R-P25^* are found concentrated in the central-western part of the African continent, where they can be detected at frequencies as high as 95%. Phylogenetic evidence and coalescence time estimates suggest that R-P25^* chromosomes (or their phylogenetic ancestor) may have been carried to Africa by an Asia-to-Africa back migration in prehistoric times. Here, we describe six new mutations that define the relationships among the African R-P25^* Y chromosomes and between these African chromosomes and earlier reported R-P25 Eurasian sub-lineages. The incorporation of these new mutations into a phylogeny of the R1b haplogroup led to the identification of a new clade (R1b1a or R-V88) encompassing all the African R-P25^* and about half of the few European/west Asian R-P25^* chromosomes. A worldwide phylogeographic analysis of the R1b haplogroup provided strong support to the Asia-to-Africa back-migration hypothesis. The analysis of the distribution of the R-V88 haplogroup in >1800 males from 69 African populations revealed a striking genetic contiguity between the Chadic-speaking peoples from the central Sahel and several other Afroasiatic-speaking groups from North Africa. The R-V88 coalescence time was estimated at 9200–5600 kya, in the early mid Holocene. We suggest that R-V88 is a paternal genetic record of the proposed mid-Holocene migration of proto-Chadic Afroasiatic speakers through the Central Sahara into the Lake Chad Basin, and geomorphological evidence is consistent with this view.” ref

Haplogroup R1b

“The age of R1 was estimated by Tatiana Karafet et al. (2008) at between 12,500 and 25,700 years ago, and most probably occurred about 18,500 years ago. Since the earliest known example has been dated at circa 14,000 years ago, and belongs to R1b1 (R-L754), R1b must have arisen relatively soon after the emergence of R1.” ref

“Early human remains found to carry R1b include:

• Villabruna 1 (individual I9030), a Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG), found in an Epigravettian culture setting in the Cismon valley (modern Veneto, Italy), who lived circa 14000 years ago and belonged to R1b1a.
• Several males of the Iron Gates Mesolithic in the Balkans buried between 11200 and 8200 years ago carried R1b1a1a. These individuals were determined to be largely of WHG ancestry, with slight Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) admixture.
• Several males of the Mesolithic Kunda culture and Neolithic Narva culture buried in the Zvejnieki burial ground in modern-day Latvia c. 9500–6000 years ago carried R1b1b. These individuals were determined to be largely of WHG ancestry, with slight EHG admixture.
• Several Mesolithic and Neolithic males buried at Deriivka and Vasil’evka in modern-day Ukraine c. 9500-7000 years ago carried R1b1a. These individuals were largely of EHG ancestry, with significant WHG admixture.
• A WHG male buried at Ostrovul Corbuli, Romania c. 8700 years ago carried R1b1c.
• A male buried at Lepenski Vir, Serbia c. 8200-7900 years ago carried R1b1a.
• An EHG buried near Samara, Russia 7500 years ago carried R1b1a1a.
• An Eneolithic male buried at Khvalynsk, Russia c. 7200-6000 years ago carried R1b1a.
• A Neolithic male buried at Els Trocs, Spain c. 7178-7066 years ago, who may have belonged to the Epi-Cardial culture, was found to be a carrier of R1b1.
• A Late Chalcolithic male buried in Smyadovo, Bulgaria c. 6500 years ago carried R1b1a.
• An Early Copper Age male buried in Cannas di Sotto, Carbonia, Sardinia c. 6450 years ago carried R1b1b2.
• A male of the Baalberge group in Central Europe buried c. 5600 years ago carried R1b1a.
• A male of the Botai culture in Central Asia buried c. 5500 years ago carried R1b1a1 (R1b-M478).
• 7 males that were tested of the Yamnaya culture were all found to belong to the M269 subclade of haplogroup R1b.” ref

“R1b is a subclade within the “macro-haplogroup“ K (M9), the most common group of human male lines outside of Africa. K is believed to have originated in Asia (as is the case with an even earlier ancestral haplogroup, F (F-M89). Karafet T. et al. (2014) suggested that a “rapid diversification process of K-M526 likely occurred in Southeast Asia, with subsequent westward expansions of the ancestors of haplogroups R and Q“. However, the oldest example of R* has been found in an Ancient North Eurasian sample from Siberia (Mal’ta boy, 24,000 years ago), and its precursor P1 has been found in another Ancient North Eurasian sample from northern Siberia (Yana RHS) dating from c. 31,600 years ago.” ref

“Three genetic studies in 2015 gave support to the Kurgan hypothesis of Marija Gimbutas regarding the Proto-Indo-European homeland. According to those studies, haplogroups R1b-M269 and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the West Eurasian Steppe, along with the Indo-European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.” ref

Iberomaurusian

“The Iberomaurusian is a backed bladelet lithic industry found near the coasts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It is also known from a single major site in Libya, the Haua Fteah, where the industry is locally known as the Eastern Oranian. The Iberomaurusian seems to have appeared around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), somewhere between c. 25,000 and 23,000 years ago. It would have lasted until the early Holocene c. 11,000 years ago. In 2005, the Mitochondrial DNA of 31 prehistoric skeletons dated from the site of Taforalt, Morocco in a cave called ‘Grotte des pigeons’ was analyzed by the Tunisian geneticist Rym Kefi (Pasteur Institute of Tunis) and her team. The remains at Taforalt were dated between 23,000 and 10,800 years ago. Later analysis of bones and charcoals using a high precision radiocarbon chronology showed that the Iberomaurusian industry appeared in TAF at least 22,093–21,420 years ago. In 2016 she updated the research and wrote a new article which also included 8 skeletons from the Algerian Iberomaurusian site called ‘Afalou’. The Afalou site is dated from 15,000 to 11,000 years ago. 23 individuals from the original 2005 Taforalt sample were determined in Kefi’s 2016 article to be of the maternal genetic lineage U6 and of Eurasian haplogroups H, U, R0 and at the Algerian Afalou site maternal groups were JT, J, T, H, R0a1 and U. This suggests genetic flow between North Africa and southern Mediterranean littoral since the Epipaleolithic.” ref

“In an article entitled ‘Pleistocene North African genomes link Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African human populations’, Marieke Van de Loosdrecht et al. (2018) did a full genome-wide analysis including Y-DNA from seven ancient individuals from the Taforalt site. The fossils were directly dated to between 15,100 and 13,900 calibrated years before present. All males at Taforalt belonged to haplogroup E1b1b1a1 (M-78). This haplogroup occurs most frequently in present-day North and East African populations. The closely related E1b1b1b (M-123) haplogroup has been reported for Epipaleolithic Natufians and Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levantines. Loosdrecht states: “Present-day North Africans share a majority of their ancestry with present-day Near Easterners, but not with sub-Saharan Africans”, although the predominant Y-DNA of the Maghreb is E-M81 (see Haplogroup E-Z827). Maternally, six individuals of the Taforalt remains bore the U6a haplogroup and one individual was of the M1b haplogroup, these Eurasian haplogroups proposed as markers for autochthonous Maghreb ancestry which might have been originally introduced into this region by a back-to-Africa migration from West Asia. A two-way admixture scenario using Natufian and modern sub-Saharan samples (including West Africans and the Tanzanian Hadza) as reference populations, inferred that the seven Taforalt individuals are best modeled genetically as 63.5% West-Eurasian-related and 36.5% sub-Saharan ancestry (with the latter having both West African-like and Hadza-like affinities), with no apparent gene flow from the Epigravettian culture of Paleolithic southern Europe.” ref

“However, the Sub-Saharan African DNA in Taforalt individuals was not found to have a good proxy in any present-day or ancient Holocene African groups. It was also found that if Iberomaurusians harbor sub-Saharan African-like ancestry, they would fail as a possible contributing source for Natufians or other Middle Eastern groups, except if the sub-Saharan African geneflow postdated Iberomaurusian geneflow into the Levant, or was a locally confined phenomenon. Jeong (2020) indicated that the Sub-Saharan African DNA of the Taforalt population has similarity with the remnant of a more basal African lineage (e.g. a basal Eurasian and/or basal West African lineage). Iosif Lazaridis et al. (2018), as summarized by Rosa Fregel (2021), contested the conclusion of Loosdrecht (2018) and argued instead that the Iberomaurusian population of Upper Paleolithic North Africa, represented by the Taforalt sample, “can be better modeled as an admixture between a Dzudzuana [West Eurasian] component and a sub-Saharan African component” (or an “Ancient North African” component, “that may represent an even earlier split than the Basal Eurasians“).” ref

“Iosif Lazaridis et al. (2018) also argued that an Iberomaurusian/Taforalt-like population contributed to the genetic composition of Natufians “and not the other way around”, and that this Iberomaurusian/Taforalt lineage also contributed around 13% ancestry to modern West Africans “rather than Taforalt having ancestry from an unknown Sub-Saharan African source”. Fregel (2021) summarized: “More evidence will be needed to determine the specific origin of the North African Upper Paleolithic populations.” Martiniano et al. (2022) later reassigned all the Taforalt samples to haplogroup E-M78 and none to E-L618, the predecessor to EV13. D’Atanasio et al. (2023) found that Iberomaurusian-like ancestry was characterizing for the unsampled “ancient Green Saharan” population about 12,000-5,000 years ago, and that modern-day Fula people derive around 30% of their ancestry from this ancient Saharan population, which was “modeled as a sister group of ancient Northern Africans, or alternatively, as an outgroup of all the “Eurasian-ancestry” enriched groups.” ref

“An estimation for Holocene-era Near Easterners (e.g., Mesolithic Caucasus hunter-gatherers, Mesolithic and Neolithic Iranians, and Natufians) suggests that they formed from a combination of Basal Eurasian ancestry, and Western Hunter-Gatherer-related (WHG) and or Ancient North Eurasians-related (ANE) ancestries respectively. The Mesolithic and Neolithic Iranian lineage is inferred to derived between 38–48% ancestry from Basal Eurasians respectively, with the remainder ancestry being made up by Ancient North Eurasian or Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) like ancestry, while Natufians derived a mean average of 50% Basal and 50% ‘unknown hunter-gatherer’ ancestry being closer to Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG). Alternatively, Mesolithic and Neolithic Iranians derive most of their ancestry from a deep West Eurasian source (WEC2; c. 72%) with c. 18% Basal Eurasian and c. 10% Ancient East Eurasian admixture. It has been found that the “models of genetic history of West Asian human populations who are modeled as a mixture of ‘basal Eurasians’ and West European hunter–gatherers” is in agreement with the genomic data on ‘East Mediterranean Dogs‘, who “are modeled as a mixture of a basal branch (splitting deeper than the divergence of the Asian and European dogs) and West European dogs.” ref

“The Ancient North African Iberomaurusian (Taforalt) individuals were found to have harbored ~65% West Eurasian-like ancestry and considered likely direct descendants of such “Basal Eurasian” population. However, they were shown to be genetically closer to Holocene-era Iranians and Levantine populations, which already harbored increased archaic (Neanderthal) admixture. Early European Farmers (EEFs), who had some Western European Hunter-Gatherer-related ancestry and originated in the Near East, also derive approximately 30% (to up to 44%) of their ancestry from this hypothetical Basal Eurasian lineage. An Upper Paleolithic specimen from Kotias Klde cave in the Caucasus (Caucasus_25,000BP) had around 24% Basal Eurasian and 76% Upper Paleolithic European ancestry.” ref

“Among modern populations, Basal-like ancestry peaks among Arabs (such as Qataris) at c. 45%, and among Iranian populations at c. 35%, and is also found in significant amounts among modern Northern Africans, in accordance with the high affinity towards the ‘Arabian branch’ of Eurasian diversity, which expanded into Northern and Northeastern Africa between 30 and 15 thousand years ago. Modern populations of the Levant derive between 35-38% ancestry from Basal Eurasians, modern Anatolians and populations from the Caucasus derive between 25-30% ancestry from Basal Eurasians, and modern Europeans derive around or less than 20% ancestry from Basal Eurasians. Modern Bedouins and Yemenis are considered to represent direct descendants of the Basal Eurasians, carrying the highest amount of indigenous ‘Arabian ancestry’, and being basal to all modern Eurasian populations without displaying higher ‘African-associated’ admixture, and thus “are among the best genetic representatives of the autochthonous population on the Arabian Peninsula.” ref

“Basal Eurasians may have originated in a region stretching from North Africa to the Middle East, before admixing with West-Eurasian populations. North Africa has been described as a strong candidate for the location of the emergence of Basal Eurasians by Loosdrecht et al. in 2018. Ferreira et al. in 2021 argued for a point of origin for Basal Eurasians into the Middle East, specifically in the Persian Gulf region on the Arab peninsula. As Basal Eurasians had low levels of Neanderthal ancestry, genetic and archaeological evidence for interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals may allow certain areas, such as the Levant, to be ruled out as possible sources for Basal Eurasians. In other areas, such as southern Southwest Asia, there is currently no evidence for an overlap between modern human and Neanderthal populations. Vallini et al. 2024 suggests a homeland for Basal Eurasians in the Arabian Peninsula, with a ‘Common Eurasian Hub’ in the Iranian Plateau, where they diverged into ‘Ancient West Eurasians’ and ‘Ancient East Eurasians‘.” ref

“A study by Lazaridis et al. in 2014 demonstrated that modern Europeans can be modeled as an admixture of three ancestral populations; Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), and Early European Farmers (EEF). This same study also showed that EEFs harbor ancestry from a hypothetical non-African ‘ghost’ population, which the authors name ‘Basal Eurasians’. This group, who have not yet been sampled from ancient remains, are thought to have diverged from all non-African populations c. 60,000 to 100,000 years ago, before non-Africans admixed with Neanderthals (c. 50,000 to 60,000 years ago) and diversified from each other. A second study by Lazaridis et al. in 2016 found that populations with higher levels of Basal Eurasian ancestry have lower levels of Neanderthal ancestry, which suggests that Basal Eurasians had lower levels of Neanderthal ancestry compared with other non-Africans.” ref

“Another study by Ferreira et al. in 2021 suggested that Basal Eurasians diverged from other Eurasians between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, and lived somewhere in the Arabian peninsula, specifically the Persian Gulf region, shortly before proper Eurasians admixed with a Neanderthal population in a region stretching from the Levant to northern Iran. Vallini et al. 2024 argues that the Basal Eurasian lineage diverged from other Eurasians soon after the Out-of-Africa migration, and subsequently became isolated, until it started to mix with other populations in the Middle East since around 25,000 years ago. These different Middle Eastern populations would later spread Basal Eurasian ancestry via the Neolithic Revolution to all of Western Eurasia. In modern populations, Neanderthal ancestry is around 10% to 20% lower in West Eurasians than East Eurasians, with intermediate levels found in South and Central Asian populations. Although a scenario involving multiple admixture events between modern humans and Neanderthals is an alternative possibility, the most likely explanation for this is that Neanderthal ancestry in West Eurasians and South and Central Asians was diluted by admixture with Basal Eurasian groups.” ref

Natufian culture

“Natufian culture is a Late Epipaleolithic archaeological culture of the Neolithic prehistoric Levant in Western Asia, dating to around 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. The culture was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population even before the introduction of agriculture. Natufian communities may be the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world. Some evidence suggests deliberate cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, by the Natufian culture at Tell Abu Hureyra, the site of earliest evidence of agriculture in the world. The world’s oldest known evidence of the production of bread-like foodstuff has been found at Shubayqa 1, a 14,400-year-old site in Jordan’s northeastern desert, 4,000 years before the emergence of agriculture in Southwest Asia. In addition, the oldest known evidence of possible beer-brewing, dating to approximately 13,000 years ago, was found in Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel, although the beer-related residues may simply be a result of a spontaneous fermentation.” ref

“The Natufian developed in the same region as the earlier Kebaran culture. It is generally seen as a successor, which evolved out of elements within that preceding culture. There were also other industries in the region, such as the Mushabian culture of the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula, which are sometimes distinguished from the Kebaran culture or believed to have been involved in the evolution of the Natufian culture. More generally there has been discussion of the similarities of these cultures with those found in coastal North Africa. Graeme Barker notes there are: “similarities in the respective archaeological records of the Natufian culture of the Levant and of contemporary foragers in coastal North Africa across the late Pleistocene and early Holocene boundary.” According to Isabelle De Groote and Louise Humphrey, Natufians practiced the Iberomaurusian and Capsian custom of sometimes extracting their maxillary central incisors (upper front teeth).” ref

“Ofer Bar-Yosef has argued that there are signs of influences coming from North Africa to the Levant, citing the microburin technique and “microlithic forms such as arched backed bladelets and La Mouillah points.” But recent research has shown that the presence of arched backed bladelets, La Mouillah points, and the use of the microburin technique was already apparent in the Nebekian industry of the Eastern Levant. And Maher et al. state that, “Many technological nuances that have often been always highlighted as significant during the Natufian were already present during the Early and Middle EP [Epipalaeolithic] and do not, in most cases, represent a radical departure in knowledge, tradition, or behavior.” At the Natufian site of Ain Mallaha in Israel, dated to 12,000 BCE, the remains of an elderly human and a four-to-five-month-old puppy were found buried together. At another Natufian site at the cave of Hayonim, humans were found buried with two canids.” ref

“Authors such as Christopher Ehret have built upon the little evidence available to develop scenarios of intensive usage of plants having built up first in North Africa, as a precursor to the development of true farming in the Fertile Crescent, but such suggestions are considered highly speculative until more North African archaeological evidence can be gathered. In fact, Weiss et al. have shown that the earliest known intensive usage of plants was in the Levant 23,000 years ago at the Ohalo II site. Anthropologist C. Loring Brace (1993) cross-analysed the craniometric traits of Natufian specimens with those of various ancient and modern groups from the Near East, Africa and Europe. The Late Pleistocene Epipalaeolithic Natufian sample was described as problematic due to its small size (consisting of only three males and one female), as well as the lack of a comparative sample from the Natufians’ putative descendants in the Neolithic Near East.” ref

“Brace observed that the Natufian fossils lay between those of the Niger–Congo-speaking series included and the other samples (Near East, Europe), which he suggested may point to a Sub-Saharan influence in their constitution. Subsequent ancient DNA analysis of Natufian skeletal remains by Lazaridis et al. (2016) found that the specimens instead were a mix of 50% Basal Eurasian ancestral component (see Archaeogenetics) and 50% West-Eurasian Unknown Hunter Gatherer (UHG) population related to European Western Hunter-Gatherers. Natufians have also been described by anthropologists as a Proto-Mediterranean population. According to Bar-Yosef and Belfer-Cohen, “It seems that certain preadaptive traits, developed already by the Kebaran and Geometric Kebaran populations within the Mediterranean park forest, played an important role in the emergence of the new socioeconomic system known as the Natufian culture.” ref

“Natufian grave goods are typically made of shell, teeth (of red deer), bones, and stone. There are pendants, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and belt-ornaments as well. In 2008, the 12,400–12,000 cal BCE grave of an apparently significant Natufian female was discovered in a ceremonial pit in the Hilazon Tachtit cave in northern Israel. Media reports referred to this person as a “shaman.” The burial contained the remains of at least three aurochs and 86 tortoises, all of which are thought to have been brought to the site during a funeral feast. The body was surrounded by tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard, forearm of a boar, a wingtip of a golden eagle, and skull of a beech marten. At Ain Mallaha (in Northern Israel), Anatolian obsidian and shellfish from the Nile valley have been found. The source of malachite beads is still unknown. Epipaleolithic Natufians carried parthenocarpic figs from Africa to the southeastern corner of the Fertile Crescent, c. 10,000 BCE.” ref

“There was a rich bone industry, including harpoons and fish hooks. Stone and bone were worked into pendants and other ornaments. There are a few human figurines made of limestone (El-Wad, Ain Mallaha, Ain Sakhri), but the favorite subject of representative art seems to have been animals. Ostrich-shell containers have been found in the Negev. In 2018, the world’s oldest brewery was found, with the residue of 13,000-year-old beer, in a prehistoric cave near Haifa in Israel when researchers were looking for clues into what plant foods the Natufian people were eating. This is 8,000 years earlier than experts previously thought beer was invented. A study published in 2019 shows an advanced knowledge of lime plaster production at a Natufian cemetery in Nahal Ein Gev II site in the Upper Jordan Valley dated to 12,000 years ago. Production of plaster of this quality was previously thought to have been achieved some 2,000 years later.” ref

“A pita-like bread has been found from 12,500 BCE attributed to Natufians. This bread is made of wild cereal seeds and papyrus cousin tubers, ground into flour. According to one theory, it was a sudden change in climate, the Younger Dryas event (c. 10,800 to 9500 BCE), which inspired the development of agriculture. The Younger Dryas was a 1,000-year-long interruption in the higher temperatures prevailing since the Last Glacial Maximum, which produced a sudden drought in the Levant. This would have endangered the wild cereals, which could no longer compete with dryland scrub, but upon which the population had become dependent to sustain a relatively large sedentary population. By artificially clearing scrub and planting seeds obtained from elsewhere, they began to practice agriculture. However, this theory of the origin of agriculture is controversial in the scientific community.” ref

“The population associated with the Natufian culture formed genetically by the merger of a West Eurasian-like population, sharing deep ancestry with Western Hunter-Gatherers of Europe, and Basal Eurasians of local Arabian origin.^{[citation needed]} Vallini et al. (2024) modeled the amount of Basal Eurasian ancestry among Natufians at roughly 15%, with the remainder being associated with West Eurasian sources. The Natufian population also displays ancestral ties to Paleolithic Taforalt samples, the makers of the Epipaleolithic Iberomaurusian culture of the Maghreb, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture of the Levant, the Early Neolithic Ifri N’Amr Ou Moussa and the Late Neolithic Kelif el Boroud culture of North Africa, with samples associated with these early cultures all sharing a common genomic component dubbed the “Natufian component”, which diverged from other West Eurasian lineages ~26,000 years ago, and is most closely linked to the Arabian lineage. Possible bidirectional geneflow events between these groups has also been suggested, with particular evidence for affinity between the Natufians and Iberomaurusians.” ref

“Contact between Natufians and other Neolithic Levantines, Caucasus hunter-gatherers (CHG), Anatolian and Iranian farmers is believed to have decreased genetic variability among later populations in the Middle East. Migrations from the Near-East also occurred towards Africa, and the West Eurasian-like ancestry among populations in the Horn of Africa being best represented by the Levant Neolithic, and may be associated with the spread of Afroasiatic languages. Lazaridis et al. (2016) did not find a greater genetic affinity between Natufians and sub-Saharan Africans than that existing between sub-Saharan Africans and other ancient populations of Western Eurasia, and also stated that the ancestry of a primitive population from North Africa could not be tested because modern North Africans are largely descended from late migrant populations from Eurasia. However, Daniel Shriner (2018), using modern populations as a reference, found 28% autosomal African ancestry in Natufian samples, with 21.2% related to North Africa and 6.8% related to Omotic-speaking populations in southern Ethiopia, which reveals a plausible source for haplogroup E in Natufians; still according to Shriner, the Natufian samples had 61.2% ancestry related to Arabs and 10.8% ancestry related to West Asians.” ref

“As summarized by Rosa Fregel, a later preprint from Lazaridis et al. (2018) has contested Loosdrecht’s conclusion and argues for a minor sub-Saharan African component in Natufians, stating “that [the Iberomaurusians of] Taforalt can be better modeled as a mixture of a Dzudzuana component and a sub-Saharan African component” (or an ancient and now-extinct North African component that diverged prior to the Out-of-Africa migration) and “also argue that (…) the Taforalt people (…) contributed to the genetic composition of Natufians and not the other way around”, , which, according to Lazaridis et al., would be consistent with morphological and archaeological studies that indicate a dissemination of morphological characteristics and artifacts from North Africa to the Near East, as well as explaining the presence of Y-chromosome haplogroup E in Natufians and Levantine farmers. Fregel summarizes that “More evidence will be needed to determine the specific origin of the North African Upper Paleolithic populations.” ref

“In their 2017 paper, Ranajit Das, Paul Wexler, Mehdi Pirooznia and Eran Elhaik analyzed the Lazaridis et al. (2016) study concluding that the Natufians, together with one Neolithic Levantine sample, clustered in the proximity to modern Palestinians and Bedouins, and also “marginally overlapped” with Yemenite Jews. Ferreira et al. (2021) and Almarri et al. (2021) found that ancient Natufians cluster with modern Arabian groups, such as Saudi Arabians and Yemenis, which derive most of their ancestry from local Natufian-like hunter-gatherer peoples and have less Neolithic Anatolian ancestry than Levantines. Sirak et al. (2024) found that medieval Socotra (the Soqotri people), similar to modern Saudis, Yemenis and Bedouins, have a majority component that is “maximized in Late Pleistocene (Epipaleolithic) Natufian hunter–gatherers from the Levant.” ref

“Alexander Militarev, Vitaly Shevoroshkin and others have linked the Natufian culture to the proto-Afroasiatic language, which they in turn believe has a Levantine origin. Some scholars, for example Christopher Ehret, Roger Blench and others, contend that the Afroasiatic Urheimat is to be found in North Africa or Northeast Africa, probably in the area of Egypt, the Sahara, Horn of Africa or Sudan. Within this group, Ehret, who like Militarev believes Afroasiatic may already have been in existence in the Natufian period, would associate Natufians only with the Near Eastern Proto-Semitic branch of Afroasiatic.” ref

“E-Z827, also known as E1b1b1b, is a major human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. It is the parent lineage to the E-Z830 and E-V257 subclades, and defines their common phylogeny. The former is predominantly found in the Middle East; the latter is most frequently observed in North Africa, with its E-M81 subclade observed among the ancient Guanche natives of the Canary Islands. E-Z827 is also found at lower frequencies in Europe, and in isolated parts of Southeast Africa.” ref

“E-M35, also known as E1b1b1-M35, is a human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup. E-M35 has two basal branches, E-V68 and E-Z827. E-V68 and E-Z827 are primarily distributed in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, and occur at lower frequencies in the Middle East, Europe, and Southern Africa. In June 2015, Trombetta et al. reported a previously unappreciated large difference in the age between haplogroup E-M215 (38,600 years ago; 95% CI 31.4–45,900 years ago) and its sub-haplogroup E-M35 (25,000 years ago; 95% CI 20,000–30,000 years ago) and estimated its origin to be in Horn of Africa, where the node separating the E-V38 and E-M215 branches occurs about 47,500 years ago (95% CI: 41,300–56,800 years ago). E-M35 was dated by Batini in 2015 to between 15,400 and 20,500 years ago.” ref

“All major sub-branches of E-M35 are thought to have originated in the same general area as the parent clade: in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, or nearby areas of the Near East. Some branches of E-M35 are assumed to have left Africa thousands of years ago, whereas others may have arrived from the Near East. For example, Underhill (2002) associates the spread of the haplogroup with the Neolithic Revolution, believing that the structure and regional pattern of E-M35 subclades potentially give “reagents with which to infer specific episodes of population histories associated with the Neolithic agricultural expansion”. Battaglia et al. (2008) also estimate that E-M78 (called E1b1b1a1 in that paper) has been in Europe longer than 10,000 years. Accordingly, human remains excavated in a Spanish funeral cave dating from approximately 7,000 years ago were shown to be in this haplogroup. Two more E-M78 have been found in the Neolithic Sopot and Lengyel cultures too.” ref

“Concerning E-M35 in Europe within this scheme, Underhill & Kivisild (2007) have remarked that E-M215 seems to represent a late-Pleistocene migration from North Africa to Europe over the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. While this proposal remains uncontested, it has more recently been proposed by Trombetta et al. (2011) that there is also evidence for additional migration of E-M215 carrying men directly from North Africa to southwestern Europe, via a maritime route (see below.) According to Lazaridis et al. (2016), Natufian skeletal remains from the ancient Levant predominantly carried the Y-DNA haplogroup E1b1b. Of the five Natufian specimens analysed for paternal lineages, three belonged to the E1b1b1b2(xE1b1b1b2a,E1b1b1b2b), E1b1(xE1b1a1,E1b1b1b1) and E1b1b1b2(xE1b1b1b2a,E1b1b1b2b) subclades (60%).” ref

“Haplogroup E1b1b was also found at moderate frequencies among fossils from the ensuing Pre-Pottery Neolithic B culture, with the E1b1b1 and E1b1b1b2(xE1b1b1b2a,E1b1b1b2b) subclades observed in two of seven PPNB specimens (~29%). The scientists suggest that the Levantine early farmers may have spread southward into East Africa, bringing along Western Eurasian and Basal Eurasian ancestral components separate from that which would arrive later in North Africa. Additionally, haplogroup E1b1b1 has been found in an ancient Egyptian mummy excavated at the Abusir el-Meleq archaeological site in Middle Egypt, which dates from a period between the late New Kingdom and the Roman era.” ref

“Fossils at the Iberomaurusian site of Ifri n’Amr or Moussa in Morocco, which have been dated to around 5,000 BCE, also carried haplotypes related to the E1b1b1b1a (E-M81) subclade. These ancient individuals bore an autochthonous Maghrebi genomic component that peaks among modern North Africans, indicating that they were ancestral to populations in the area.^[12] The E1b1b haplogroup has likewise been observed in ancient Guanche fossils excavated in Gran Canaria and Tenerife on the Canary Islands, which have been radiocarbon-dated to between the 7th and 11th centuries CE. The clade-bearing individuals that were analyzed for paternal DNA were inhumed at the Tenerife site, with all of these specimens found to belong to the E1b1b1b1a1 or E-M183 subclade (3/3; 100%).” ref

“Loosdrecht et al. (2018) analysed genome-wide data from seven ancient Iberomaurusian individuals from the Grotte des Pigeons near Taforalt in eastern Morocco. The fossils were directly dated to between 15,100 and 13,900 calibrated years before present. The scientists found that five male specimens with sufficient nuclear DNA preservation belonged to the E1b1b1a1 (M78) subclade, with one skeleton bearing the E1b1b1a1b1 parent lineage to E-V13, another male specimen belonged to E1b1b (M215*).” ref

“E-V257’s dominant sub-clade E-M81 is thought to have originated in the area of the northwest of Africa 7,000 years ago, but all Yfull members are M183 and have a TMRCA just 2700 years ago. E-M81 is the most common subclade of haplogroup E-L19/V257. It is concentrated in North Africa, and is dominated by its E-M183 subclade. E-M183 is believed to have originated in the Northwest of Africa, and has an estimated age of 2,284-2,984 years ago. The E-M183 sub haplogroup reaches a mean frequency of 42% in North Africa. It decreases in frequency from 100% in some populations to approximately 28.6% to the east of this range in Egypt. The E-M81 subclade is predominant among North African Berber-speaking populations. In Tunisia, it reached 100% frequency among a sample of Arabs from Zriba, 89.5% in Andalusians (Qalaat-al-Andalous), and 100% in Berbers from Chenini-Douiret, Jradou and Takrouna. It is generally found at frequencies around 45% in coastal cities of the Maghreb (Oran, Tunis, Algiers).” ref

“It is also prevalent among other Berber populations and reaches frequency of 72.4% in Marrakesh Berbers, 80% in Mozabite, and 71% in Middle Atlas Berbers (Moyen). It also reaches high levels (77.8%) among the Tuareg population inhabiting the Sahara in Burkina Faso, near Gor it reaches a much lower frequency of 11.1% in the vicinity of Tanut in the Republic of Niger. In this key area from Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean, report a pattern of decreasing STR haplotype variation (implying decreasing lineage age in those areas) from East to West (but reports West to East for M183), accompanied by a substantial increasing frequency. At the eastern extreme of this core range, M81 is found in 28.6% (10 out of 35 men) in El-Hayez in the Western desert in Egypt.” ref

“The pattern of distribution and variance to be consistent with the hypothesis of a post Paleolithic “demic diffusion” from the Middle East. The ancestral lineage of E-M81 in their hypothesis could have been linked with the spread of Neolithic food-producing technologies from the Fertile Crescent via the Nile, although pastoralism rather than agriculture. E-M81 and possibly proto-Afroasiatic language may have been carried either all the way from Asia, or they may represent a “local contribution to the North African Neolithic transition.” The E-M81 subclade has been found in ancient Guanche (Bimbapes) fossils excavated in Punta Azul, El Hierro, Canary Islands, which are dated to the 10th century (~44%). Also found in ifri n’ammar that makes the Northwest African origin the likely origin of where it expanded, and not the Middle East.” ref

Ifri N’Amr Ou Moussa

“Ifri n’Amr Ou Moussa is an archaeological site discovered in 2005, located in the rural commune of Aït Siberne, Khémisset Province, in Western Morocco. This site has revealed burials associated with both Moroccan Early Neolithic and Bell Beaker culture. Fregel et al. 2018 examined the remains of 7 individuals buried at Ifri N’Amr Ou Moussa (c. 5325-4786 BCE). The 2 samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to the paternal haplogroup E-L19*, while the 5 samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to the maternal haplogroups M1b1*, U6a1b (two samples), U6a7b2 and U6a3. The paternal haplogroup E-L19* is very common in North Africa. The maternal haplogroups are associated with migrations from Eurasia into North Africa during the Upper Paleolithic. They were found to be closely related to the early Stone Age people buried at Taforalt, Morocco (c. 15000 BCE). Both the Taforalt and Ifri N’Amr ou Moussa people were found to also be related to people of the Natufian culture (c. 9000 BCE) and Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 6500 BCE) of the Levant, with whom they appeared to share a common origin.” ref

“This genetic continuity with the Taforalt suggested that the ancestors of the Ifri n’Amr ou Moussa people had adopted a Neolithic lifestyle without substantial migration, however a paper from 2023 dealing with ancient genomes in Morocco, found that a change from foraging to food production occurred 7,400 years ago, and farming practices were introduced by Neolithic European groups, being adopted by locals initially without demic diffusion. Among modern populations, the examined individuals were determined to be most closely related to the Mozabite people of Algeria. In contrast to the Ifri N’Amr individuals, the examined samples at the Late Neolithic site of Kelif el Boroud (~c. 4000 BCE or around 6,000 years ago), carried about 50% Early European Farmer (EEF) ancestry, suggesting substantial migration of Cardial Ware people from Iberia into North Africa during the Neolithic phases.” ref

“Both the studied groups buried at Ifri n’Amr ou Moussa and Kelif el Boroud carried a much lower amount of Sub-Saharan African admixture than modern North Africans, indicating that the trans-Saharan migrations occurred after Neolithic times (however, they also carried lower Sub-Saharan African admixture than the Stone Age people of Taforalt). Phenotypically, the Ifri n’Amr ou Moussa people were determined to have had dark skin and dark eye color. The ancient Guanches (c. 500 BCE – 1500 CE) of the Canary Islands were modeled as a mixture of ancestry from the Ifri N’Amr ou Moussa and Kelif el Boroud.” ref

Oldest DNA from Africa offers clues to mysterious ancient culture

North Africa was an ancient crossroads with a more sophisticated culture than expected

“About 15,000 years ago, in the oldest known cemetery in the world, people buried their dead in sitting positions with beads and animal horns, deep in a cave in what is now Morocco. These people were also found with small, sophisticated stone arrowheads and points, and 20th-century archaeologists assumed they were part of an advanced European culture that had migrated across the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa. But now, their ancient DNA—the oldest ever obtained from Africans—shows that these people had no European ancestry. Instead, they were related to both Middle Easterners and sub-Saharan Africans, suggesting that more people were migrating in and out of North Africa than previously believed.” ref

“The findings are really exciting,” says evolutionary geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, who was not part of the work. One big surprise from the DNA, she says, is that it shows that “North Africa has been an important crossroads … for a lot longer than people thought.” The origins of the ancient Moroccans, known as the Iberomaurusians because 20th-century archaeologists thought they were connected to peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, have been a mystery ever since the Grotte des Pigeons cave was discovered near Oujda, Morocco, in 1908. Starting 22,000 or so years ago, these hunter-gatherers eschewed more primitive Middle Stone Age tools, such as larger blades used on spears, to produce microliths—small pointed bladelets that could be shot farther as projectile points or arrowheads. Similar tools show up earlier in Spain, France, and other parts of Europe, some associated with the famous Gravettian culture, known for its stone figurines of curvaceous women.” ref

“The idea in the 1960s was that the Iberomaurusians must have got the microblades from the Gravettian,” says co-author and archaeologist Louise Humphrey of the Natural History Museum in London. During the ice age 20,000 years ago, sea level would have been lower, and the Iberomaurusians were thought to have crossed the Mediterranean by boat at Gibraltar or Sicily. Humphrey and her Moroccan colleagues got a chance to test this view after they discovered 14 individuals associated with Iberomaurusian artifacts at the back of the Grotte des Pigeons cave in 2005. Paleogeneticists Marieke van de Loosdrecht and Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (SHH) in Jena, Germany, with Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, used state-of-the-art methods to extract DNA from the ear bones of skeletons that had lain undisturbed since they were buried about 15,000 years ago.” ref

“That’s a major technical feat because ancient DNA degrades rapidly in warm climates; these samples are almost twice as old as any other DNA obtained from humans in Africa. DNA in hand, Van de Loosdrecht, and Choongwon Jeong, also ​of SHH, were able to analyze genetic material from the cell’s nucleus in five people and the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from seven people. However, they found no genetic tie to ancient Europeans. Instead, the ancient Iberomaurusians appear to be related to Middle Easterners and other Africans: They shared about two-thirds of their genetic ancestry with Natufians, hunter-gatherers who lived in the Middle East 14,500 to 11,000 years ago, and one-third with sub-Saharan Africans who were most closely related to today’s West Africans and the Hadza of Tanzania.” ref

“The Iberomaurusians lived before the Natufians, but they were not their direct ancestors: The Natufians lack DNA from Africa, Krause says. This suggests that both groups inherited their shared DNA from a larger population that lived in North Africa or the Middle East more than 15,000 years ago, the team reports today in Science. As for the sub-Saharan DNA in the Iberomaurusian genome, the Iberomaurusians may have gotten it from migrants from the south who were their contemporaries. Or they may have inherited the DNA from much more ancient ancestors who brought it from the south but settled in North Africa where some of the earliest members of our species, Homo sapiens, have been found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco.” ref

“All this offers the first glimpse of the deep history of North Africans, who today have a large amount of European DNA. It suggests that there were more migrations between North Africa, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa than previously believed. “Cleary, human populations were interacting much more with groups from other, more distant areas than was previously assumed,” Krause says. Further studies will search for the people who gave rise to both the Iberomaurusians and the Natufians. “It’s a thrill to look for the first time at ancient DNA from prehistoric peoples from North Africa, a place where repeated waves of migration have made reconstruction of the deep population history based on living populations almost impossible,” says population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, who was not part of the team.” ref

Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East

“Researchers report genome-wide ancient DNA from 44 ancient Near Easterners ranging in time between ~12,000-1,400 BCE, from Natufian hunter-gatherers to Bronze Age farmers. We show that the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages prior to their separation from each other. The first farmers of the southern Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter-gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, these two populations and Anatolian-related farmers had mixed with each other and with the hunter-gatherers of Europe to drastically reduce genetic differentiation. The impact of the Near Eastern farmers extended beyond the Near East: farmers related to those of Anatolia spread westward into Europe; farmers related to those of the Levant spread southward into East Africa; farmers related to those from Iran spread northward into the Eurasian steppe; and people related to both the early farmers of Iran and to the pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe spread eastward into South Asia.” ref

Haplogroup R0

“Haplogroup R0 derives from the macro-haplogroup R. It is an ancestral clade to the R0a subclade and haplogroup HV, and is therefore antecedent to the haplogroups H and V. R0’s greater subclade variety in the Arabian Peninsula suggests that the clade originated in and spread from there. R0a is believed to have evolved in Ice Age oases in South Arabia around 22,000 years ago. The subclade would then have spread from there with the onset of the Late Glacial period circa 15,000 years ago. Haplogroup R0 has been found in around 55% of osteological remains belonging to the Eneolithic Trypillia culture.” ref

“The R0 clade has also been found among Iberomaurusian specimens at the Taforalt and Afalou prehistoric sites, which date from the Epipaleolithic. Among the Taforalt individuals, around 17% of the observed haplotypes belonged to various R0 subclades, including R0a1a (3/24; 13%) and R0a2c (1/24; 4%). Among the Afalou individuals, one R0a1a haplotype was detected (1/9; 11%). R0 has likewise been observed among mummies excavated at the Abusir el-Meleq archaeological site in Middle Egypt, which date from the Pre-Ptolemaic/late New Kingdom, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods. The 3rd century AD Catholic Church Saint, Fortunato of Serracapriola, was also found to carry the R0a’b subclade.” ref

“R0 today occurs commonly in the Arabian peninsula, with its highest frequency observed nearby among the Soqotri (40.7%). The Soqotri also have the greatest R0 subclade diversity. The clade is likewise found at high frequencies among the Kalash in South Asia (23%). Additionally, moderate frequencies of R0 occur in Northeast Africa, Anatolia, the Iranian Plateau, and Dalmatia. The haplogroup has been observed among Chad Arabs (19%), Sudanese Copts (13.8%), Tigrais (13.6%), Somalis (13.3%), Oromos (13.3%), Afar (12.5%), Amhara (11.5%), Gurage (10%), Reguibate Sahrawi (9.26%; 0.93% R0a and 8.33% R0a1a), Gaalien (9%), Beja (8.3%), Nubians (8%), Arakien (5.9%), Yemenis (5.1–27.7%), Iraqis (4.8%), Druze (4.3%), Palestinians (4%), Algerians (1.67%), and Saudis (0–25%).” ref

Ancient Paleo-Siberian 

“In archaeogenetics, the term Ancient Paleo-Siberian is the name given to an ancestral component that represents the lineage of the hunter-gatherer people of the 15th-10th millennia before present, in northern and northeastern Siberia. The Ancient Paleo-Siberian population is thought to have arisen from an Ancient East Asian lineage, which diverged from other East Asian populations sometimes between 26,000 to 36,000 years ago, and merged with an Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) lineage sometimes between 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. The source for the East Asian component among Ancient Paleo-Siberians is to date best represented by Ancient Northern East Asian populations from the Amur region older than 13,000 years, such as AR19K and AR14K, and before the Devil’s Cave Ancient Northeast Asian specimens.” ref

“The Ancient Paleo-Siberians are mainly defined by two human archaeological specimens: the 14,000-year-old Ust-Kyakhta-3 (UKY) individual found near Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, and the 9-10,000-year-old Kolyma_M individual found in northeastern Siberia. Ancient Paleo-Siberians derive between 32–42% ancestry from the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), deeply related to European hunter-gatherers, with the remainder ancestry (58–68%) being derived from an East Asian source. The Ancient Paleo-Siberians are closely related to the Ancient Beringians, and modern far-northeastern Siberia communities, such as the Koryaks, as well as to Native Americans. Ancestral Native Americans originated from a similar admixture event as Ancient Paleo-Siberians, carrying c. 56–64% East Asian-related ancestry and 36–44% ANE ancestry.” ref

“Technologically, Ancient Paleo-Siberians have been associated with microblade technologies and post-Last Glacial Maximum mammoth hunting. Ancient Paleo-Siberians, in conjunction with an Inner Northeast Asian (Yumin-like) lineage, gave rise to the Cisbaikal_LNBA ancestry, which may be associated with ancient Yeniseian speakers. Ancient Paleo-Siberians also formed the dominant ancestral source for Altai hunter-gatherers (7500 years ago), in conjunction with a Botai-like source, as well as for the subsequent Okunevo culture, in conjunction with additional Baikal hunter-gatherer and Afanasievo-like sources. They were later largely replaced by waves of Neo-Siberians and Neolithic Amur populations, which may be associated with the expansion of early Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic speakers, as well as possibly early Yukaghir and Uralic speakers (c. 7,000–11,000 years ago).” ref

Paleo-Siberian languages

“The Paleo-Siberian languages are several language isolates and small language families spoken in parts of Siberia. They are not known to have any genetic relationship to each other; their only common link is that they are held to have antedated the more dominant languages, particularly Tungusic and latterly Turkic languages, that have largely displaced them. Even more recently, Turkic (at least in Siberia) and especially Tungusic have been displaced in their turn by Russian.” ref

“Four small language families and isolates are usually considered to be Paleo-Siberian languages:

1. The Chukotko-Kamchatkan family, sometimes known as Luoravetlan, includes Chukchi and its close relatives, Koryak, Alutor and Kerek. Itelmen, also known as Kamchadal, is also distantly related. Chukchi, Koryak and Alutor are spoken in easternmost Siberia by communities numbering in the thousands (Chukchi) or hundreds (Koryak and Alutor). Kerek is extinct, and Itelmen is now spoken by fewer than 5 people, mostly elderly, on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
2. Nivkh (Gilyak, Amuric) consists of two or three languages spoken in the lower Amur basin and on the northern half of Sakhalin island. It has a recent modern literature.
3. The Yeniseian languages were a small family formerly spoken on the middle Yenisei River and its tributaries, but are now represented only by Ket, spoken in the Turukhansk district of Krasnoyarsk Krai by no more than 200 people.
4. Yukaghir is spoken in two mutually unintelligible varieties in the lower Kolyma and Indigirka valleys. Other languages, including Chuvan, spoken further inland and further east, are now extinct. Yukaghir is held by some to be related to the Uralic languages.” ref

“On the basis of morphological, typological, and lexical evidence, Michael Fortescue suggests that Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkh (Amuric) are related, forming a larger Chukotko-Kamchatkan–Amuric language family. Fortescue does not consider Yeniseian and Yukaghir to be genetically related to Chukotko-Kamchatkan–Amuric.” ref

“The purpose of the existence of Paleo-Siberian itself lies in its practicability and remains a grouping of convenience for a variety of unclassifiable language isolates located in Northeast Eurasia. Some proposals for the relationship of languages located within the Paleo-Siberian group have been made by some scholars, including Edward Vajda, who suggests them to be related to the Na-Dené and Eskimo–Aleut families of Alaska and northern Canada. This would correlate with the widespread idea that North America’s aboriginal peoples migrated from present-day Siberia and other regions of Asia when the two continents were joined during the last ice age.” ref

“Ket, or more precisely the now largely extinct Yeniseian family, has been linked to the Na-Dené languages of North America. Dené–Yeniseian has been called “the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative-historical linguistics.” In the past, attempts to connect it to Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, and Burushaski have been made. Kim Bang-han proposed that placename glosses in the Samguk sagi reflect the original language of the Korean peninsula and a component in the formation of both Korean and Japanese. It is suggested that this language was related to Nivkh in some form.” ref 

“Juha Janhunen suggests the possibility that similar consonant stop systems in Koreanic and Nivkh may be due to ancient contact. Martine Robbeets suggests that Proto-Korean had a Nivkh substrate influence. Further parallel developments in their sound inventory (Old to Middle Korean and Proto-Nivkh to Nivkh) as well as commonalities in the syntax between Koreanic and Nivkh specifically have been observed. The Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic languages predate the spread of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages, but are part of the well established larger Uralic family, thus not Paleo-Siberian. Yukaghir has often been suggested as a more distant relative of Uralic as part of the Uralic-Yukaghir languages, as well as Eskimo-Aleut as part of the Uralo-Siberian languages. However, these hypotheses are controversial and not universally accepted.” ref

Yeniseian languages

“Proto-Yeniseian or Proto-Yeniseic is the unattested reconstructed proto-language from which all Yeniseian languages are thought to descend from. It is uncertain whether Proto-Yeniseian had a similar tone/pitch accent system as Ket. Many studies about Proto-Yeniseian phonology have been done; however, there are still many things unclear about Proto-Yeniseian. The probable location of the Yeniseian homeland is proposed on the basis of geographic names and genetic studies, which suggests a homeland in Southern Siberia.” ref

“The Yeniseian languages (/ˌjɛnɪˈseɪən/ YEN-ih-SAY-ən; sometimes known as Yeniseic, Yeniseyan, or Yenisei-Ostyak; occasionally spelled with –ss-) are a family of languages that are spoken by the Yeniseian people in the Yenisei River region of central Siberia. As part of the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, the Yeniseian languages have been argued to be part of “the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative–historical linguistics“. The only surviving language of the group today is Ket.” ref

“As noted by Tailleur and Werner, some of the earliest proposals of genetic relations of Yeniseian, by M.A. Castrén (1856), James Byrne (1892), and G.J. Ramstedt (1907), suggested that Yeniseian was a northern relative of the Sino–Tibetan languages. These ideas were followed much later by Kai Donner and Karl Bouda. A 2008 study found further evidence for a possible relation between Yeniseian and Sino–Tibetan, citing several possible cognates. Gao Jingyi (2014) identified twelve Sinitic and Yeniseian shared etymologies that belonged to the basic vocabulary, and argued that these Sino-Yeniseian etymologies could not be loans from either language into the other. From hydronymic and genetic data, it is suggested that the Yeniseian languages were spoken in a much greater area in ancient times, including parts of northern China and Mongolia. It has been further proposed that the recorded distribution of Yeniseian languages from the 17th century onward represents a relatively recent northward migration, and that the Yeniseian urheimat lies to the south of Lake Baikal.” ref

“The Yeniseians have been connected to the Xiongnu confederation, whose ruling elite may have spoken a southern Yeniseian language similar to the now extinct Pumpokol language. The Jie, who ruled the Later Zhao state of northern China, are likewise believed to have spoken a Pumpokolic language based on linguistic and ethnogeographic data. For those who argue the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language, the Yeniseian languages are thought to have contributed many ubiquitous loanwords to Turkic and Mongolic vocabulary, such as Khan, Khagan, Tarqan, and the word for ‘god’ and ‘sky’, Tengri. This conclusion has primarily been drawn from the analysis of preserved Xiongnu texts in the form of Chinese characters.” ref

“The “Sino-Caucasian” hypothesis of Sergei Starostin posits that the Yeniseian languages form a clade with Sino-Tibetan, which he called Sino-Yeniseian. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis has been expanded by others to “Dené–Caucasian” to include the Na-Dené languages of North America, Burushaski, Basque, and, occasionally, Etruscan. A narrower binary Dené–Yeniseian family has recently been well received. The validity of the rest of the family, however, is viewed as doubtful or rejected by nearly all historical linguists.” ref

“A link between the Na–Dené languages and Sino-Tibetan languages, known as Sino–Dené had also been proposed by Edward Sapir. Around 1920 Sapir became convinced that Na-Dené was more closely related to Sino-Tibetan than to other American families. Edward Vadja’s Dené–Yeniseian proposal renewed interest among linguists such as Geoffrey Caveney (2014) to look into support for the Sino–Dené hypothesis. Caveney considered a link between Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian to be plausible but did not support the hypothesis that Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dené were related to the Caucasian languages (Sino–Caucasian and Dené–Caucasian).” ref

“A 2023 analysis by David Bradley using the standard techniques of comparative linguistics supports a distant genetic link between the Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian language families. Bradley argues that any similarities Sino-Tibetan shares with other language families of the East Asia area such as Hmong-Mien, Altaic (which is a sprachbund), Austroasiatic, Kra–Dai, Austronesian came through contact; but as there has been no recent contact between the Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian language families, any similarities these groups share must be residual.” ref

“The Glazkov culture, Glazkovo culture, or Glazkovskaya culture (2200-1200 BCE), was an archaeological culture in the Lake Baikal area during the Early Bronze Age. Glazkovs is a conditional name for the group of the ancient tribes inhabiting Siberia in the 2nd millennium BCE (Glazkov time) the headwaters of Angara river. Glazkov culture is named after a suburb of the city Irkutsk, where it was first found. Archeologists distinguish in the 2nd millennium BCE Southern Siberia two synchronous independent cultures: Glazkov in the east and the Andronovo culture in the west. All 4 tested Early Bronze Age individuals from the Ust-Ida burial site belonged to the Y-DNA haplogroup Q-YP4004 under Q1a2. Two earlier Late Neolithic burials from the same area yielded Y-haplogroups Q1a2 and N1c1.” ref

“In the Baikal territory lived a Glazkov group of related tribes, most likely the ancestors of modern Evenks, Evens or Yukagirs. Their culture was very close to the culture of the inhabitants of the upper Amur and Northern Manchuria, and of Mongolia to the Great Wall of China and Ordos Loop. It is possible, hence, that all this extensive area was populated by peoples culturally related with the hunter and fisher tribes of Neolith and Early Bronze… probably speaking related tribal languages”. Later the carriers of the southern part Glazkov culture tribes converged with some ancestors of the Huns, and intermixed with them. In the 18th century BCE the elements of the Andronovo culture seized the Minusinsk depression and almost encountered the Glazkovs on the Yenisei. Glazkovs and Andronovs played a secondary role in the 2nd millennium BCE Southern Siberia.” ref

“Glazkov burials brought new funeral traditions into the region: the deceased were oriented down the river, instead of previously common geographical direction orientations. The remains were placed in a crouched position, with intentionally broken artifacts, likely to protect the living from the danger presented by a deceased. To the end of the Glazkov time in the southern portion of the eastern Baikal area, there was an influx of people from Mongolia, who brought a distinctive tradition of stone kurgans with fences (chereksurs), which resulted in the formation of a Slab Grave culture that became the eastern wing of a huge nomadic world in Eurasia, which produced in the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE a bright civilization known as Scythian-Siberian World.” ref

“The genetic ancestry associated with the Glazkovo culture remains is known as “Baikal Early Bronze Age” (Baikal_EBA) ancestry, and falls into the Ancient Northern East Asian (ANEA) gene pool, with c. 11% (5-20%) admixture from Ancient North Eurasians (ANE). The Glazkovo remains display high genetic affinity with the “Cisbaikal_LNBA” ancestry, possibly associated with ancient Yeniseian speakers. Cisbaikal_LNBA ancestry is inferred to be rich in Ancient Paleo-Siberian ancestry, and also display affinity to Inner Northeast Asian (Yumin-like) groups. Modern Altaians display genetic affinity to the Glazkovo hunter-gatherer culture, and can be used as possible proxy for the East Eurasian component among Saka (Scytho-Siberian nomads).” ref

“The Xiongnu were a tribal confederation of nomadic peoples who, according to ancient Chinese sources, inhabited the eastern Eurasian Steppe from the 3rd century BCE to the late 1st century CE. Modu Chanyu, the supreme leader after 209 BC, founded the Xiongnu Empire. After overthrowing their previous overlords, the Yuezhi, the Xiongnu became the dominant power on the steppes of East Asia, centred on the Mongolian Plateau. The Xiongnu were also active in areas now part of Siberia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang. Their relations with adjacent Chinese dynasties to the south-east were complex—alternating between various periods of peace, war, and subjugation. Ultimately, the Xiongnu were defeated by the Han dynasty in a centuries-long conflict, which led to the confederation splitting in two, and forcible resettlement of large numbers of Xiongnu within Han borders. During the Sixteen Kingdoms era, as one of the “Five Barbarians“, they founded the dynastic states of Han-Zhao, Northern Liang and Helian Xia in northern China.” ref

Attempts to associate the Xiongnu with the nearby Sakas and Sarmatians were once controversial. However, archaeogenetics has confirmed their interaction with the Xiongnu, and also possibly their relation to the Huns. The identity of the ethnic core of Xiongnu has been a subject of varied hypotheses, because only a few words, mainly titles and personal names, were preserved in the Chinese sources. The name Xiongnu may be cognate with that of the Huns and/or the Huna, although this is disputed. Other linguistic links—all of them also controversial—proposed by scholars include Turkic, Iranian, Mongolic, Uralic, Yeniseian, or multi-ethnic.” ref

“The territories associated with the Xiongnu in central/east Mongolia were previously inhabited by the Slab Grave Culture (Ancient Northeast Asian origin), which persisted until the 3rd century BCE. Genetic research indicates that the Slab Grave people were the primary ancestors of the Xiongnu, and that the Xiongnu formed through substantial and complex admixture with West Eurasians. During the Western Zhou (1045-771 BCE), there were numerous conflicts with nomadic tribes from the north and the northwest, variously known as the Xianyun, Guifang, or various “Rong” tribes, such as the Xirong, Shanrong or Quanrong. These tribes are recorded as harassing Zhou territory, but at the time the Zhou were expanding northwards, encroaching on their traditional lands, especially into the Wei River valley. Archaeologically, the Zhou expanded to the north and the northwest at the expense of the Siwa culture. The Quanrong put an end to the Western Zhou in 771 BC, sacking the Zhou capital of Haojing and killing the last Western Zhou king You. Thereafter the task of dealing with the northern tribes was left to their vassal, the Qin state.” ref

“To the west, the Pazyryk culture (6th-3rd century BCE) immediately preceded the formation of the Xiongnus. A Scythian culture, it was identified by excavated artifacts and mummified humans, such as the Siberian Ice Princess, found in the Siberian permafrost, in the Altay Mountains, Kazakhstan and nearby Mongolia. To the south, the Ordos culture had developed in the Ordos Loop (modern Inner Mongolia, China) during the Bronze and early Iron Age from the 6th to 2nd centuries BCE, and is of unknown ethno-linguistic origin, and is thought to represent the easternmost extension of Indo-European-speakers. The Yuezhi were displaced by the Xiongnu expansion in the 2nd century BCE, and had to migrate to Central and Southern Asia.” ref

“The Xiongnu confederation was unusually long-lived for a steppe empire. The purpose of raiding the Central Plain was not simply for goods, but to force the Central Plain polity to pay regular tribute. The power of the Xiongnu ruler was based on his control of Han tribute which he used to reward his supporters. The Han and Xiongnu empires rose at the same time because the Xiongnu state depended on Han tribute. A major Xiongnu weakness was the custom of lateral succession. If a dead ruler’s son was not old enough to take command, power passed to the late ruler’s brother. This worked in the first generation but could lead to civil war in the second generation. The first time this happened, in 60 BCE, the weaker party adopted what Barfield calls the ‘inner frontier strategy.’ They moved south and submitted to the dominant Central Plain regime and then used the resources obtained from their overlord to defeat the Northern Xiongnu and re-establish the empire. The second time this happened, about 47 CE, the strategy failed. The southern ruler was unable to defeat the northern ruler and the Xiongnu remained divided.” ref

“The Xiongnu empire is widely thought to have been multiethnic. There are several theories on the ethnolinguistic identity of the Xiongnu, though there is no consensus among scholars as to what language was spoken by the Xiongnu elite. Lajos Ligeti was the first to suggest that the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language. In the early 1960s Edwin Pulleyblank was the first to expand upon this idea with credible evidence. The Yeniseian theory proposes that the Jie, a western Xiongnu people, spoke a Yeniseian language. Hyun Jin Kim notes that the 7th AD Chinese conpendium, Jin Shu, contains a transliterated song of Jie origin, which appears to be Yeniseian. This song has led researchers Pulleyblank and Vovin to argue for a Yeniseian Jie dominant minority, that ruled over the other Xiongnu ethnicities, like Iranian and Turkic people. Kim has stated that the dominant Xiongnu language was likely Turkic or Yeniseian, but has cautioned that the Xiongnu were definitely a multi-ethnic society.” ref

“Pulleybank and D. N. Keightley asserted that the Xiongnu titles “were originally Siberian words but were later borrowed by the Turkic and Mongolic peoples”. Titles such as tarqan, tegin and kaghan were also inherited from the Xiongnu language and are possibly of Yeniseian origin. For example, the Xiongnu word for “heaven” is theorized to come from Proto-Yeniseian *tɨŋVr. Vocabulary from Xiongnu inscriptions sometimes appears to have Yeniseian cognates which were used by Vovin to support his theory that the Xiongnu has a large Yeniseian component, examples of proposed cognates include words such as Xiongnu kʷala ‘son’ and Ket qalek ‘younger son’, Xiongnu sakdak ‘boot’ and Ket sagdi ‘boot’, Xiongnu gʷawa “prince” and Ket gij “prince”, Xiongnu “attij” ‘wife’ and proto-Yeniseian “alrit”, Ket “alit” and Xiongnu dar “north” compared to Yugh tɨr “north.” ref

“Pulleyblank also argued that because Xiongnu words appear to have clusters with r and l, in the beginning of the word it is unlikely to be of Turkic origin, and instead believed that most vocabulary we have mostly resemble Yeniseian languages. Alexander Vovin also wrote, that some names of horses in the Xiongnu language appear to be Turkic words with Yeniseian prefixes. An analysis by Savelyev and Jeong (2020) has cast doubt on the Yeniseian theory. If assuming that the ancient Yeniseians were represented by modern Ket people, who are more genetically similar to Samoyedic speakers, the Xiongnu do not display a genetic affinity for Yeniseian peoples. A review by Wilson (2023) argues that the presence of Yeniseian-speakers among the multi-ethnic Xiongnu should not be rejected, and that “Yeniseian-speaking peoples must have played a more prominent (than heretofore recognized) role in the history of Eurasia during the first millennium of the Common Era.” ref

Sino-Tibetan languages

“Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.” ref

“Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese languages) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated. The Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages are generally included within Sino-Tibetan by Chinese linguists but have been excluded by the international community since the 1940s. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.” ref

“Laurent Sagart proposes a “Sino-Austronesian” family with Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian (including Kra–Dai as a subbranch) as primary branches. Stanley Starosta has extended this proposal with a further branch called “Yangzian” joining Hmong–Mien and Austroasiatic. The proposal has been largely rejected by other linguists who argue that the similarities between Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan more likely arose from contact rather than being genetic.” ref

“Proto-Austronesian (commonly abbreviated as PAN or PAn) is a proto-language. It is the reconstructed ancestor of the Austronesian languages, one of the world’s major language families. Proto-Austronesian is assumed to have begun to diversify c. 4000 BCE – c. 3500 BCE in Taiwan. Lower-level reconstructions have also been made, and include Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, Proto-Oceanic, and Proto-Polynesian. Recently, linguists such as Malcolm Ross and Andrew Pawley have built large lexicons for Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Polynesian.” ref

Altaic (Transeurasian)

“”Transeurasian” renaming: In Robbeets and Johanson (2010), there was a proposal to replace the name “Altaic” with the name “Transeurasian”. While “Altaic” has sometimes included Japonic, Koreanic, and other languages or families, but only on the consideration of particular authors, “Transeurasian” was specifically intended to always include Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Koreanic. Robbeets and Johanson gave as their reasoning for the new term: 1) to avoid confusion between the different uses of Altaic as to which group of languages is included, 2) to reduce the counterproductive polarization between “Pro-Altaists” and “Anti-Altaists”; 3) to broaden the applicability of the term because the suffix -ic implies affinity while -an leaves room for an areal hypothesis; and 4) to eliminate the reference to the Altai mountains as a potential homeland. In Robbeets and Savelyev, ed. (2020) there was a concerted effort to distinguish “Altaic” as a subgroup of “Transeurasian” consisting only of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, while retaining “Transeurasian” as “Altaic” plus Japonic and Koreanic.” ref

“The linguistic relatedness of the Transeurasian languages—also known as ‘Altaic’—is among the most disputed issues in linguistic prehistory. Transeurasian denotes a large group of geographically adjacent languages stretching across Europe and northern Asia, and includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The question of whether these five groups descend from a single common ancestor has been the topic of a long-standing debate between supporters of inheritance and borrowing. Recent assessments show that even if many common properties between these languages are indeed due to borrowing, there is nonetheless a core of reliable evidence for the classification of Transeurasian as a valid genealogical group. Accepting this classification, however, gives rise to new questions about the time depth, location, cultural identity, and dispersal routes of ancestral Transeurasian speech communities.” ref

“Here researchers challenge the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’ that identifies the primary dispersals of the Transeurasian languages with nomadic expansions starting in the eastern steppe in the fourth millennium years ago, by proposing a ‘farming hypothesis’, which places those dispersals within the scope of the ‘farming/language dispersal hypothesis’. As these issues reach far beyond linguistics, we address them by integrating archaeology and genetics in a single approach termed ‘triangulation.’ Bayesian methods to infer a dated phylogeny of the Transeurasian languages. Our results indicate a time-depth of 9,181 years ago (5595–12793 95% highest probability density (95% HPD)) for the Proto-Transeurasian root of the family; 6,811 years ago (4404–10166 95% HPD) for Proto-Altaic, the unity of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages; 4,491 years ago (2599–6373 95% HPD) for Mongolo-Tungusic; and 5,458 years ago (3335–8024 95% HPD) for Japano-Koreanic. These dates estimate the time-depth of the initial break-up of a given language family into more than one foundational subgroup.” ref

“Although Neolithic Northeast Asia was characterized by widespread plant cultivation25, cereal farming expanded from several centers of domestication, the most important of which for Transeurasian was the West Liao basin, where cultivation of broomcorn millet started 9000 years ago. Extracting data from the published literature, we scored 172 archaeological features for 255 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites and compiled an inventory of 269 directly carbon-14-dated early crop remains in northern China, the Primorye, Korea, and Japan.” ref

Uralo-Altaic (Transeurasian) hypothesis

“In 1844, the Finnish philologist Matthias Castrén proposed a broader grouping which later came to be called the Ural–Altaic family, which included Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus (=Tungusic) as an “Altaic” branch, and also the Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages as the “Uralic” branch (though Castrén himself used the terms “Tataric” and “Chudic”). The name “Altaic” referred to the Altai Mountains in East-Central Asia, which are approximately the center of the geographic range of the three main families. The name “Uralic” referred to the Ural Mountains. While the Ural-Altaic family hypothesis can still be found in some encyclopedias, atlases, and similar general references, since the 1960s it has been heavily criticized. Even linguists who accept the basic Altaic family, such as Sergei Starostin, completely discard the inclusion of the “Uralic” branch. The term continues to be used for the central Eurasian typological, grammatical and lexical convergence zone. Indeed, “Ural-Altaic” may be preferable to “Altaic” in this sense. For example, Juha Janhunen states that “speaking of ‘Altaic’ instead of ‘Ural-Altaic’ is a misconception, for there are no areal or typological features that are specific to ‘Altaic’ without Uralic.” ref

Uralic languages

“The Uralic languages, sometimes called the Uralian languages (/jʊəˈreɪliən/ yoor-AY-lee-ən), form a language family of 42 languages spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for approximately 60% of speakers), Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still, smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; and the Samoyedic languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia.” ref

“The name Uralic derives from the family’s purported “original homeland” (Urheimat) hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in Asia Polyglotta (1823). Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic, though Finno-Ugric is widely understood to exclude the Samoyedic languages. Scholars who do not accept the traditional notion that Samoyedic split first from the rest of the Uralic family may treat the terms as synonymous. Uralic langagues are known for their often complex case systems and vowel harmony. Many relationships between Uralic and other language families have been suggested, but none of these is generally accepted by linguists at the present time: All of the following hypotheses are minority views at the present time in Uralic studies.” ref

“Uralo-Siberian is an expanded form of the Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis. It associates Uralic with Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo–Aleut. It was propounded by Michael Fortescue in 1998. Michael Fortescue (2017) presented new evidence in favor for a connection between Uralic and other Paleo-Siberian languages. Theories proposing a close relationship with the Altaic languages were formerly popular, based on similarities in vocabulary as well as in grammatical and phonological features, in particular the similarities in the Uralic and Altaic pronouns and the presence of agglutination in both sets of languages, as well as vowel harmony in some.” ref

“For example, the word for “language” is similar in Estonian (keel) and Mongolian (хэл (hel)). These theories are now generally rejected and most such similarities are attributed to language contact or coincidence. All Uralic languages are thought to have descended, through independent processes of language change, from Proto-Uralic. The internal structure of the Uralic family has been debated since the family was first proposed. Doubts about the validity of most or all of the proposed higher-order branchings (grouping the nine undisputed families) are becoming more common.” ref

“Proto-Uralic is the unattested reconstructed language ancestral to the modern Uralic language family. The reconstructed language is thought to have been originally spoken in a small area in about 7000–2000 BCE (estimates vary), and then expanded across northern Eurasia, gradually diverging into a dialect continuum and then a language family in the process. The location of the area or Urheimat is not known, and various strongly differing proposals have been advocated, but the vicinity of the Ural Mountains is generally accepted as the most likely.” ref

“In the early 21st century, these tree-like models have been challenged by the hypothesis of larger number of proto-languages giving an image of a linguistic “comb” rather than a tree. Thus, the second-order groups of the Uralic phylum would then be Sami, Finnic, Mordvinic, Mari, Permic, Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty, and Samoyedic, all on equal footing. This order is both the order of geographical positions as well as linguistic similarity, with neighboring languages being more similar than distant ones.” ref

Origin of the Basques

“The origin of the Basques and the Basque language is a controversial topic that has given rise to numerous hypotheses. Modern Basque, a descendant or close relative of Aquitanian and Proto-Basque, is the only pre-Indo-European language that is extant in western Europe. The Basques have therefore long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe.” ref

“The main hypotheses about the origin of the Basques are:

• Native origin, the mainstream theory, according to which the Basque language would have developed over the millennia entirely between the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the current south of France, without the possibility of finding any kind of relationship between the Basque language and other modern languages in other regions.
• Basque-Iberism theorizes the existence of a kinship between the Basque and the Iberian language, and therefore between their speakers.
• Caucasian origin theorizes that the Basque language and the languages of the Caucasus may have a direct relation, explaining why they share some linguistic typologies absent in the Indo-European languages.” ref

“In 2008, the Finnish linguist Kalevi Wiik proposed that the current Basque language is the remainder of a group of “Basque languages” that were spoken in the Paleolithic throughout western Europe and that retreated with the progress of the Indo-European languages. Wiik states that his theory coincides with the homogeneous distribution of the Haplogroup R1b in Atlantic Europe. Ludomir R. Lozny states that “Wiik’s controversial ideas are rejected by the majority of the scholarly community, but they have attracted the enormous interest of a wider audience.” ref

“In May 2012, the National Geographic Society Genographic Project released a study that showed through detailed DNA analysis of samples from French and Spanish Basque regions that Basques share unique genetic patterns that distinguish them from the surrounding non-Basque populations. The results of the study clearly support the hypothesis of a partial genetic continuity of contemporary Basques with the preceding Paleolithic/Mesolithic settlers of their homeland. Paleogenetic investigations by the Complutense University of Madrid indicate that the Basque people have a genetic profile coincident with the rest of the European population and that goes back to Prehistoric times.” ref 

“The haplotype of the mitochondrial DNA known as U5 entered in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic and developed varieties as the U8a, native of the Basque Country, which is considered to be Prehistoric, and as the J group, which is also frequent in the Basque population. The works of Alzualde A, Izagirre N, Alonso S, Alonso A, de la Rua C. about mitochondrial DNA of the Human remains found in the Prehistoric graveyard of Alaieta, in Alava, note that there are no differences between these remains and others found across Atlantic Europe. Studies based on the Y chromosome genetically relate the Basques with the Celtic Welsh, and Irish; Stephen Oppenheimer from the University of Oxford says that the current inhabitants of the British Isles have their origin in the Basque refuge during the last Ice age.” ref

“Oppenheimer reached this conclusion through the study of correspondences in the frequencies of genetic markers between various European regions. The haplogroup R1b, can be found most frequently in the Basque Country (91%), Wales (89%), and Ireland (81%). The age of the subclade which Basque carry, Haplogroup R1b-DF27, “is estimated at ~4,200 years ago, at the transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, when the Y chromosome landscape of Western Europe was thoroughly remodeled. In spite of its high frequency in Basques, Y-STR internal diversity of R1b-DF27 is lower there, and results in more recent age estimates”, implying it was brought to the region from elsewhere.” ref

“In 2015, a new scientific study of Basque DNA was published which seems to indicate that Basques are descendants of Neolithic farmers who mixed with local hunters before becoming genetically isolated from the rest of Europe for millennia. Mattias Jakobsson from Uppsala University in Sweden analysed genetic material from eight Stone Age human skeletons found in El Portalón Cavern in Atapuerca, northern Spain. These individuals lived between 3,500 and 5,500 years ago, after the transition to farming in southwest Europe. The results show that these early Iberian farmers are the closest ancestors to present-day Basques.” ref 

“The official findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. “Our results show that the Basques trace their ancestry to early farming groups from Iberia, which contradicts previous views of them being a remnant population that trace their ancestry to Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups,” says Prof. Jakobsson. However, the results also showed that Basques, along with many other Iberian groups, carry both Neolithic farmer ancestry as well as some local mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry; showing that “the incoming farmers admixed with local, Iberian hunter-gather groups, a process that continued for at least 2 millennia.” ref

“Rather, some 4500 years ago almost all Y-DNA heritage from Iberian admixture of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers was replaced by the lineage of Indo-European herders from the steppe, and the Basque genetic distinctiveness is a result of centuries of low population size, genetic drift, and endogamy. In 2019, a study was published in Science in which a more fine-tuned and deep time-transect of Iberian ancient populations including the Basque were analyzed. From their abstract, it says: “and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia.” This indicates Basques were isolated from admixture with outside groups since at least 1000 BCE or 3000 years before the present. In Iberia, these later admixture (interbreeding) events were with central European (Celtic), eastern Mediterranean, and northern African populations, and genomic ancestry from them is found in all or most present-day Iberian populations, except for the Basque.” ref

“Some researchers have propounded the similarities between the Basque language and the Caucasian languages, especially the Georgian language. The comparison between the matrilineal and patrilineal DNA of the native peoples from the Basque Country and Georgia has allowed the discovery of significant differences. The hypothesis that related both populations is only based on the typological similarities, which is not an accepted marker of linguistic kinship. These superficial similarities in the linguistic typologies do not seem to accompany a genetic relation at a population level. The possible relation between Basque and the languages of the Caucasus is denied by authors such as Larry Trask, who stated that the comparisons were wrongly made, given the fact that the Basque language was compared with several Caucasian languages at the same time.” ref

“In human genetics, Haplogroup R-DF27 (R1b1a2a1a2a) is a Y-chromosome haplogroup which is a subdivision of haplogroup R-M269 (more specifically, its subclade R-) defined by the presence of the marker DF27 (also known as S250). Along with R-U152 and R-L21, the lineage is to a significant extent associated with Proto-Celtic, Celtic and later Celtiberian movements. It arose comparatively recently, after the beginning of the European Bronze Age, and is mostly prevalent in the population of the Pyrenees region. The regions where it has been mostly found are Basque Country, Navarre, Asturias, Galicia, Portugal, Aragon, Catalonia, Pyrénées-Atlantiques as well as some presence in Great Britain and Ireland, though it has been found in smaller quantities as far away as Germany and Poland. Specific subclades of DF27 have been associated with specific groups of people, for example R-M167 is associated with the Catalans and R-M153 is associated with the Basques.” ref

“According to a 2017 article published in Springer Nature entitled, Analysis of the R1b-DF27 haplogroup shows that a large fraction of Iberian Y-chromosome lineages originated recently in situ, DF27 was found in frequences of 40% in the general population of the Iberian Peninsula and in particular spikes at 70% among the Basques. Overall in France it accounts for between 6–20% of the population but has a high level in the Pyrenees area. It is estimated to have developed around 4,200 years ago in north-eastern Prehistoric Iberia as the Neolithic made way for the Atlantic Bronze Age. The DF27 subgroups correspond closely to the various pre-Roman kingdoms formed by the Celtiberians.” ref

“Haplogroup R-M269 is the sub-clade of human Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b that is defined by the SNP marker M269. According to ISOGG 2020 it is phylogenetically classified as R1b1a1b. It underwent intensive research and was previously classified as R1b1a2 (2003 to 2005), R1b1c (2005 to 2008), R1b1b2 (2008 to 2011) and R1b1a1a2 (2011 to 2020). R-M269 is of particular interest for the genetic history of Western Europe, being the most common European haplogroup. It increases in frequency on an east to west gradient (its prevalence in Poland estimated at 22.7%, compared to Wales at 92.3%). It is carried by approximately 110 million European men (2010 estimate). The age of the mutation M269 is estimated at 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.” ref

“R-M269 is of particular interest for the genetic history of Western Europe, being the most common European haplogroup. It increases in frequency on an east to west gradient (its prevalence in Poland estimated at 22.7%, compared to Wales at 92.3%). It is carried by approximately 110 million European men (2010 estimate). The age of the mutation M269 is estimated at 4,000 to 10,000 years ago. R-M269 had formerly been dated to the Upper Paleolithic, but by about 2010 it was thought to have formed near the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, about 10,000 years ago. More recent archaeogenetics studies since 2015, however, strongly suggest an origin among Eneolithic hunter-gatherers from eastern Europe.” ref

“Balaresque et al. (2010) based on the pattern of Y-STR diversity argued for a single source in the Near East and introduction to Europe via Anatolia in the Neolithic Revolution. In this scenario, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe would have been nearly replaced by the incoming farmers. By contrast, Busby et al. (2012) could not confirm the results of Balaresque et al. (2010) and could not make credible estimates of the age of R-M269 based on Y-STR diversity. Furthermore, more recent studies have found that the Y-DNA of Early European Farmers is typically haplogroup G2a.” ref

“According to a 2015 study, a hunter-gatherer from Samara (dated 5640-5555 cal BCE) belonging to haplogroup R1b1(*) was ancestral for both haplogroups R-M269 and R-M478. According to the authors, the occurrence of basal forms of R1b in eastern European hunter-gatherers provides a “geographically plausible source” for haplogroup R-M269. Subclades of R-M269, such as R-Z2103, have been found to be prevalent in ancient DNA found in individuals associated with the Yamnaya culture and related populations, and the dispersal of this haplogroup is associated with the spread of so-called “steppe ancestry” and at least some of the Indo-European languages. According to Lazaridis et al. (2022), “the most likely hypothesis” is that the entire R-M269 clade originated “in the North Caucasus and steppe to the north.” ref

“The subclade R-P311 is substantially confined to Western Europe in modern populations. R-P311 is absent from Neolithic-era ancient DNA found in Western Europe, strongly suggesting that its current distribution is due to population movements within Europe taking place after the end of the Neolithic. The three major subclades of P311 are U106 (S21), L21 (M529, S145), and U152 (S28). These show a clear articulation within Western Europe, with centers in the Low Countries, the British Isles, and the Alps, respectively. These lineages are associated with the non-Iberian steppe-related groups of the Bell Beaker culture, and demonstrate the relationship between steppe-related ancestry and R1b-M269 subclades, which are “the major lineage associated with the arrival of Steppe ancestry in western Europe after 2500 BCE.” ref

Proto-Euphratean language

“Proto-Euphratean is a hypothetical unclassified language or languages which was considered by some Assyriologists (such as Samuel Noah Kramer) to be the substratum language of the people who introduced farming into Southern Iraq in the Early Ubaid period (5300–4700 BCE). Dyakonov and Ardzinba identified these hypothetical languages with the Samarran culture. Benno Landsberger and other Assyriologists argued that by examining the structure of Sumerian names of occupations, as well as toponyms and hydronyms, one can suggest that there was once an earlier group of people in the region who spoke an entirely different language, often referred to as Proto-Euphratean. Terms for “farmer”, “smith”, “carpenter”, and “date” (the fruit) do not appear to have a Sumerian or Semitic origin.” ref

“Igor Dyakonov and Vladislav Ardzinba proposed a different term, “banana languages”, based on a characteristic feature of multiple personal names attested in Sumerian texts, namely reduplication of syllables (as in the English word banana): Inanna, Zababa, Chuwawa/Humbaba, Bunene, Pazuzu, etc found in Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian texts. The same feature was attested in some other unclassified languages, including Minoan. The same feature is allegedly attested by several names of Hyksos rulers: although the Hyksos tribes were Semitic Canaanites, some of their names, like Bnon, Apophis, etc. were apparently non-Semitic in origin. Rubio challenged the substratum hypothesis, arguing that there is evidence of borrowing from more than one language. This theory is now predominant in the field (Piotr Michalowski, Gerd Steiner, etc.). A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period (c. 3350–3100 BCE) is an early Indo-European language that he terms “Euphratic”, although this does not have mainstream support.” ref

Sumerian language

“Sumerian was the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 2900 BCE. It is a local language isolate that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the area that is modern-day Iraq. Akkadian, a Semitic language, gradually replaced Sumerian as the primary spoken language in the area c. 2000 BCE (the exact date is debated), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century CE. Thereafter, it seems to have fallen into obscurity until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets that had been left by its speakers.” ref

“In spite of its extinction, Sumerian exerted a significant impact on the languages of the area. The cuneiform script, originally used for Sumerian, was widely adopted by numerous regional languages such as Akkadian, Elamite, Eblaite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian; it similarly inspired the Old Persian alphabet which was used to write the eponymous language. The impact was perhaps the greatest on Akkadian, whose grammar and vocabulary were significantly influenced by Sumerian. The pictographic writing system used during the Proto-literate period (3200 – 3000 BCE), corresponding to the Uruk III and Uruk IV periods in archeology, was still so rudimentary that there remains some scholarly disagreement about whether the language written with it is Sumerian at all, although it has been argued that there are some, albeit still very rare, cases of phonetic indicators and spelling that show this to be the case. The texts from this period are mostly administrative; there are also a number of sign lists, which were apparently used for the training of scribes.” ref

“The next period, Archaic Sumerian (3000 – 2500 BCE), is the first stage of inscriptions that indicate grammatical elements, so the identification of the language is certain. It includes some administrative texts and sign lists from Ur (c. 2800 BCE). Texts from Shuruppak and Abu Salabikh from 2600 to 2500 BC (the so-called Fara period or Early Dynastic Period IIIa) are the first to span a greater variety of genres, including not only administrative texts and sign lists, but also incantations, legal and literary texts (including proverbs and early versions of the famous works The Instructions of Shuruppak and The Kesh temple hymn). However, the spelling of grammatical elements remains optional, making the interpretation and linguistic analysis of these texts difficult.” ref

“The Old Sumerian period (2500-2350 BCE) is the first one from which well-understood texts survive. It corresponds mostly to the last part of the Early Dynastic period (ED IIIb) and specifically to the First Dynasty of Lagash, from where the overwhelming majority of surviving texts come. The sources include important royal inscriptions with historical content as well as extensive administrative records. Sometimes included in the Old Sumerian stage is also the Old Akkadian period (c. 2350 – c. 2200 BCE), during which Mesopotamia, including Sumer, was united under the rule of the Akkadian Empire. At this time Akkadian functioned as the primary official language, but texts in Sumerian (primarily administrative) did continue to be produced as well.” ref

“The first phase of the Neo-Sumerian period corresponds to the time of Gutian rule in Mesopotamia; the most important sources come from the autonomous Second Dynasty of Lagash, especially from the rule of Gudea, which has produced extensive royal inscriptions. The second phase corresponds to the unification of Mesopotamia under the Third Dynasty of Ur, which oversaw a “renaissance” in the use of Sumerian throughout Mesopotamia, using it as its sole official written language. There is a wealth of texts greater than from any preceding time – besides the extremely detailed and meticulous administrative records, there are numerous royal inscriptions, legal documents, letters, and incantations.” ref

“In spite of the dominant position of written Sumerian during the Ur III dynasty, it is controversial to what extent it was actually spoken or had already gone extinct in most parts of its empire. Some facts have been interpreted as suggesting that many scribes and even the royal court actually used Akkadian as their main spoken and native language. On the other hand, evidence has been adduced to the effect that Sumerian continued to be spoken natively and even remained dominant as an everyday language in Southern Babylonia, including Nippur and the area to its south.” ref

“By the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000 – c. 1600 BCE), Akkadian had clearly supplanted Sumerian as a spoken language in nearly all of its original territory, whereas Sumerian continued its existence as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes. In addition, it has been argued that Sumerian persisted as a spoken language at least in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia (Nippur and its surroundings) at least until about 1900 BCE and possibly until as late as 1700 BCE. Nonetheless, it seems clear that by far, the majority of scribes writing in Sumerian at this point were not native speakers, and errors resulting from their Akkadian mother tongue become apparent. For this reason, this period as well as the remaining time during which Sumerian was written are sometimes referred to as the “Post-Sumerian” period. The written language of administration, law, and royal inscriptions continued to be Sumerian in the undoubtedly Semitic-speaking successor states of Ur III during the so-called Isin-Larsa period (c. 2000 – c. 1750 BCE). The Old Babylonian Empire, however, mostly used Akkadian in inscriptions, sometimes adding Sumerian versions.” ref

“The Old Babylonian period, especially its early part, has produced extremely numerous and varied Sumerian literary texts: myths, epics, hymns, prayers, wisdom literature, and letters. In fact, nearly all preserved Sumerian religious and wisdom literature and the overwhelming majority of surviving manuscripts of Sumerian literary texts in general can be dated to that time, and it is often seen as the “classical age” of Sumerian literature. Conversely, far more literary texts on tablets surviving from the Old Babylonian period are in Sumerian than in Akkadian, even though that time is viewed as the classical period of Babylonian culture and language. However, it has sometimes been suggested that many or most of these “Old Babylonian Sumerian” texts may be copies of works that were originally composed in the preceding Ur III period or earlier, and some copies or fragments of known compositions or literary genres have indeed been found in tablets of Neo-Sumerian and Old Sumerian provenance. In addition, some of the first bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists are preserved from that time (although the lists were still usually monolingual, and Akkadian translations did not become common until the late Middle Babylonian period), and there are also grammatical texts – essentially bilingual paradigms listing Sumerian grammatical forms and their postulated Akkadian equivalents.” ref

“After the Old Babylonian period or, according to some, as early as 1700 BCE, the active use of Sumerian declined. Scribes did continue to produce texts in Sumerian at a more modest scale, but generally with interlinear Akkadian translations, and only part of the literature known in the Old Babylonian period continued to be copied after its end around 1600 BCE. During the Middle Babylonian period, approximately from 1600 to 1000 BCE, the Kassite rulers continued to use Sumerian in many of their inscriptions, but Akkadian seems to have taken the place of Sumerian as the primary language of texts used for the training of scribes and their Sumerian itself acquires an increasingly artificial and Akkadian-influenced form. In some cases, a text may not even have been meant to be read in Sumerian; instead, it may have functioned as a prestigious way of “encoding” Akkadian via Sumerograms (cf. Japanese kanbun). Nonetheless, the study of Sumerian and copying of Sumerian texts remained an integral part of scribal education and literary culture of Mesopotamia and surrounding societies influenced by it and it retained that role until the eclipse of the tradition of cuneiform literacy itself in the beginning of the Common Era. The most popular genres for Sumerian texts after the Old Babylonian period were incantations, liturgical texts, and proverbs; among longer texts, the classics Lugal-e and An-gim were most commonly copied.” ref

“Sumerian is widely accepted to be a local language isolate. Sumerian was at one time widely held to be an Indo-European language, but that view has been almost universally rejected. Since its decipherment in the early 20th century, scholars have tried to relate Sumerian to a wide variety of languages. Because Sumerian has prestige as the first attested written language, proposals for linguistic affinity sometimes have a nationalistic flavor. Attempts have been made to link Sumerian with a range of widely disparate groups such as the Austroasiatic languages, Dravidian languages, Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish, Sino-Tibetan languages and Turkic languages (the last being promoted by Turkish nationalists as part of the Sun language theory). Additionally, long-range proposals have attempted to include Sumerian in broad macrofamilies. Such proposals enjoy virtually no support among modern linguists, Sumerologists, and Assyriologists and are typically seen as fringe theories.” ref

“It has also been suggested that the Sumerian language descended from a late prehistoric creole language (Høyrup 1992). However, no conclusive evidence, only some typological features, can be found to support Høyrup’s view. A more widespread hypothesis posits a Proto-Euphratean language that preceded Sumerian in Mesopotamia and exerted an areal influence on it, especially in the form of polysyllabic words that appear “un-Sumerian”—making them suspect of being loanwords—and are not traceable to any other known language. There is little speculation as to the affinities of this substratum language, or these languages, and it is thus best treated as unclassified. Other researchers disagree with the assumption of a single substratum language and argue that several languages are involved. A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period (c. 3350–3100 BCE) is really an early Indo-European language which he terms “Euphratic.” ref

“The Marsh Arabs are descendants of the ancient Sumerians and Akkadians and are groups of tribal people who make their home in this lush environment. This group of people developed a unique culture in antiquity centered on the natural resources of the marshes.” ref

“The Marsh Arabs (Arabic: عرب الأهوار ʻArab al-Ahwār “Arabs of the Marshlands”), also referred to as Ahwaris, the Maʻdān (Arabic: معدان “dweller in the plains”) or Shroog (Mesopotamian Arabic: شروگ “those from the east”)—the latter two often considered derogatory in the present day—are Arab inhabitants of the Mesopotamian marshlands in the modern-day south Iraq, as well as in the Hawizeh Marshes straddling the Iraq-Iran border. The origins of Marsh Arabs are still a matter of some dispute. British colonial ethnographers found it difficult to classify some of Ahwaris’ social customs and speculated that they might have originated in India. They may have descended from Zuṭṭ, who moved to the region of lower Iraq in the 8th and 9th centuries and followed similar customs and traditions.” ref

“Some scholars such as Ali al-Wardi have claimed they are descended from the Nabataeans of Iraq, the Aramaic-speaking people who inhabited Lower Mesopotamia in the Middle Ages, and some of their clans even follow their ancestry to Islamized Mandaeans. Other scholars have proposed historical and genetic links between the Marsh Arabs and the ancient Sumerians due to shared agricultural practices, methods of house-building, and location. There is, however, no written record of the marsh tribes until the ninth century and the Sumerians lost their distinct ethnic identity by around 1800 BCE, some 2700 years before. Links to Sumerian genetics can likely be traced back to the Arabization and assimilation of indigenous Mesopotamians.” ref

“A 2011 study showed that Marsh Arabs have a high concentration of Y-chromosomal Haplogroup J-M267 and mtDNA haplogroup J having the highest concentration, with haplogroups H, U and T following, the study included 143 Marsh Arab samples. According to this study, Marsh Arabs have the following haplogroups.

• Y-DNA haplogroups:
  • E1b1b 6.3% (-M35* 2.1%, -M78* 0.7%, -M123* 1.4%, -M34 2.1%)
  • G-M201 1.4%
  • J1 81.1% (-M267* 7.0%, -P58 (Page08)* 72.7%, -M365 (shared with other J1 branches) 1.4%), J2-M172* 3.5%
  • L-M76 0.7%
  • Q-M242 2.8% (Q1a1b-M25 0.7%, Q1b-M378 2.1%)
  • R-M207 4.2% (R1-L23 2.8%, R2-M124 1.4%)
• Mt-DNA haplogroups:
  • West Eurasia (77.8%): R0 24.1% (R0* 0.7%, R0a 6.9%, HV 4.1%, H 12.4%), KU 15.9% (K 6.2%, U 9.7%), JT 22.7% (J 15.2%, T 7.6%), N 15.1% (I 0.7%, N1 8.2%, W 4.8%, X2 1.4%)
  • North/East Africa (2.8%): M1 2.8%
  • Sub-Saharan Africa (4.9%): L 4.9%
  • East Asia (1.4%): B4c2 1.4%
  • Southwest Asia (10.4%): M* 0.7%, M3 2.1%, R2 2.8%, U7 4.8%
  • Others (2.8%): N* 0.7%, R* 2.1%” ref

“The term Maʻdān was used disparagingly by desert tribes to refer to those inhabiting the Iraqi river basins, as well as by those who farmed in the river basins to refer to the population of the marshes. Ahwaris speak South Mesopotamian Arabic and traditionally wore a variant of normal Arab dress: for males, a thawb (“long shirt”; in recent times, occasionally with a Western-style jacket over the top) and a keffiyeh (“headcloth”) worn twisted around the head in a turban, as few could afford an ʻiqāl. The society of the Marsh Arabs was divided into two main groups by occupation. One group bred and raised water buffaloes while others cultivated crops such as rice, barley, wheat, and pearl millet; they also kept some sheep and cattle. Rice cultivation was especially important; it was carried out in small plots cleared in April and sown in mid-May. Cultivation seasons were marked by the rising and setting of certain stars, such as the Pleiades and Sirius.” ref

“Some Ahwari branches were nomadic pastoralists, erecting temporary dwellings and moving buffaloes around the marshes according to the season. Some fishing, especially of species of barbel (notably the binni or bunni, Mesopotamichthys sharpeyi), was practiced using spears and datura poison, but large-scale fishing using nets was until recent times regarded as a dishonorable profession by Ahwaris and was mostly carried out by a separate low-status tribe known as the Berbera. By the early 1990s, however, up to 60% of the total amount of fish caught in Iraq’s inland waters came from the marshes. In the later twentieth century, a third main occupation entered Marsh Arab life; the weaving of reed mats on a commercial scale. Though they often earned far more than workers in agriculture, weavers were looked down upon by both Ahwaris and farmers alike: however, financial concerns meant that it gradually gained acceptance as a respectable profession.” ref

“As with most tribes of southern Iraq, the main authority was the tribal shaikh. To this day, the shaikh of a Marsh Arab group will collect a tribute from his tribe in order to maintain the mudhif, the tribal guesthouse, which acts as the political, social, judicial and religious centre of Marsh Arabic life. The mudhif is used as a place to settle disputes, to carry out diplomacy with other tribes and as a gathering point for religious and other celebrations. It is also the place where visitors are offered hospitality. Although the tribal shaykh was the principal figure, each Ahwari village (which may have contained members of several different tribes) would also follow the authority of the hereditary qalit “headman” of a tribe’s particular section. Blood feuds, which could only be settled by the qalit, were a feature of Marsh Arab life, in common with that of the Arab bedouin. Many of the Marsh Arabs’ codes of behaviour were similar to those of the desert tribes.” ref

“Most Marsh Arabs lived in arched reed houses considerably smaller than a mudhif. The typical dwelling was usually a little more than two meters wide, about six meters long, and a little less than three meters high, and was either constructed at the waterside or on an artificial island of reeds called a kibasha; a more permanent island of layered reeds and mud was called a dibin. Houses had entrances at both ends and a screen in the middle; one end was used as a dwelling and the other end (sometimes extended with a sitra, a long reed structure) was used to shelter animals in bad weather. A raba was a higher-status dwelling, distinguished by a north-facing entrance, which also served as a guesthouse where there was no mudhif. Traditional boats (the mashoof and tarada) were used as transport: Ahwaris would drive buffalo through the reedbeds during the season of low water to create channels, which would then be kept open by constant use, for the boats. The marsh environment meant that certain diseases, such as schistosomiasis and malaria, were endemic; Ahwari agriculture and homes were also vulnerable to periodic droughts and flooding.” ref

Prehistoric Egypt 40,000 years ago to The First Dynasty 5,150 years ago

Gobekli Tepe is more like Shamanistic early Paganism, Not Adam, Eve, and Cain or Bible anything!

Progressed organized religion (at least 5,000 years ago), (Egypt, the First Dynasty 5,150 years ago)

*Institutional religion “organized religion”, as a social institution with official dogma usually set in a hierarchical/bureaucratic structure that contains strict rules and practices dominating the believer’s life. And to me, paganism and Institutional religion are categorized into the following stages:

*The primal stage of organized religion was 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.

*The proto-stage of organized religion was around 10,000 to 7,000 years ago.

*The progressed stage of organized religion was around 7,000 to 5000 years ago.

The emergence of world religions arose after 4,000 years ago

After around 2,000 to 1,000 years ago monotheism and its male-centric religions became dominant 

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Paganism 12,000 years old: (Pre-Capitalism) the beginning of inequality and hierarchy of power:

“Social stratification is a system of ranking individuals and groups within societies. It refers to a society’s ranking of its people into socioeconomic tiers based on factors like wealth, income, race, education, and power. You may remember the word “stratification” from geology class. The distinct horizontal layers found in rock, called “strata,” are an illustrative way to visualize social structure. Society’s layers are made of people, and society’s resources are distributed unevenly throughout the layers. Social stratification has been a part of all societies dating from the agricultural revolution, which took place in various parts of the world between 7,000-10,000 BCE. Unlike relatively even strata in rock, though, there are not equal numbers of people in each layer of society. There are typically very few at the top and a great many at the bottom, with some variously populated layers in the middle.” ref

Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and slaves:

“Something Weird Happened to Men 7,000 Years Ago, it fell to one man for every 17 women: fighting between patrilineal clans. Around 7,000 years ago – all the way back in the Neolithic – something really peculiar happened to human genetic diversity. Over the next 2,000 years, and seen across Africa, Europe, and Asia, the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome collapsed, becoming as though there was only one man for every 17 women. This points to a social, rather than an environmental, cause, and given the social restructures between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago as humans shifted to more agrarian cultures with patrilineal structures, this may have had something to do with it.” ref

“Slavery predates written records and has existed in many cultures. Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations because it requires economic surpluses and a substantial population density. Thus, although it has existed among unusually resource-rich hunter-gatherers, such as the American Indian peoples of the salmon-rich rivers of the Pacific Northwest coast, slavery became widespread only with the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution about 11,000 years ago.” ref

When the First Farmers Arrived in Europe, Inequality Evolved

“Forests gave way to fields, pushing hunter-gatherers to the margins—geographically and socially. There is no clear genetic evidence of interbreeding along the central European route until the (Linear Pottery culture 5500–4500 BCE or 7,522-6,522 years ago) LBK farmers reached the Rhine. And yet the groups mixed in other ways—potentially right from the beginning. A tantalizing hint of such interactions came from Gamba’s discovery of a hunter-gatherer bone in a farming settlement at a place called Tiszaszőlős-Domaháza in Hungary. But there was nothing more to be said about that individual. Was he a member of that community? A hostage? Someone passing through?” ref

“With later evidence, the picture became clearer. At Bruchenbrücken, a site north of Frankfurt in Germany, farmers, and hunter-gatherers lived together roughly 7,300 years ago in what Gronenborn calls a “multicultural” settlement. It looks as if the hunters may have come there originally from farther west to trade with the farmers, who valued their predecessors’ toolmaking techniques—especially their finely chiseled stone arrowheads. Perhaps some hunter-gatherers settled, taking up the farming way of life. So fruitful were the exchanges at Bruchenbrücken and other sites, Gronenborn says, that they held up the westward advance of farming for a couple of centuries.” ref

“There may even have been rare exceptions to the rule that the two groups did not interbreed early on. The Austrian site of Brunn 2, in a wooded river valley not far from Vienna, dates from the earliest arrival of the LBK farmers in central Europe, around 7,600 years ago. Three burials at the site were roughly contemporaneous. Two were of individuals of pure farming ancestry, and the other was the first-generation offspring of a hunter and a farmer. All three lay curled up on their sides in the LBK way, but the “hunter” was buried with six arrowheads.” ref

My thoughts on how cultural/ritual was influenced in the area of Göbekli Tepe. I think it relates to a few different cultures starting in the area before the Neolithic. Two different groups of Siberians first from northwest Siberia with U6 haplogroup 40,000 to 30,000 or so. Then R Haplogroup (mainly haplogroup R1b but also some possible R1a both related to the Ancient North Eurasians). This second group added its “R1b” DNA of around 50% to the two cultures Natufian and Trialetian. To me, it is likely both of these cultures helped create Göbekli Tepe. Then I think the female art or graffiti seen at Göbekli Tepe to me possibly relates to the Epigravettians that made it into Turkey and have similar art in North Italy. I will also show you my art explaining this to help show my thoughts. I also have lots of links if interested to validate all this.

Gobekli Tepe: First Temple, Early Paganism Themes, Sky Burial, Skull Cult, T-pillar Site Similarities, Obsidian Trade, Agriculture Revolution, and Megalith Cultures

Göbekli Tepe 12,000 years old T-shaped Pillars are not Alone (not Ancient Aliens)

Alcohol, where Agriculture and Religion Become one? Such as Gobekli Tepe’s Ritualistic use of Grain as Food and Ritual Drink

R2a from Siberia spreading to Iran, influenced the creation of Proto-Indo-European languages, transferring to R1b, emerging south of the Caucasus, and then spreading north into Russia/Europe

ref

“Indo-European dialects dispersed across Eurasia in successive waves over the course of 8,000 years. Word origins and ancient DNA reveal the evolutionary path traveled by the languages spoken by half the world.” ref

ref

“New DNA Analysis Redirects the Cradle of Indo-Europeans, Sheds Light on Proto-Greeks.” ref

ref

“The Indo-European language family was born south of the Caucasus.” ref

Pottery before the Pre-Pottery Neolithic? Pre-Pottery Neolithic (10000 – 6500 BCE) and Pottery Neolithic (7000–5000 BCE)

C-M217 Na-Dene and Yeniseian Languages and Religion relatedness from Asia connecting to the Americas

Dené–Yeniseian language, Old Copper Complex, and Pre-Columbian Mound Builders?

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

Austronesian peoples reached New Zealand, but have origin in Taiwan, with DNA that can be traced back to Neolithic China

Green Sahara: attracted “Back to Africa” migrations and culminated in the dispersals of “New” African cultures, including Ancient Egypt