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S.O.Y. Keita: Afro-Asiatic Speaker: An Exploration
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Youngblood Priest[Formerly The Bass: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Narmer Menes: [qb] You probably have a point with your logical fallacy statement. Perhaps I should clarify. ''If you don't want to use the work of racist - you would have to dismiss virtually all of Egyptology.'' I agree, and I do (dismiss) to a large extent when it comes to hypothesisng the race of the Egyptians, as most Eurocentric research is usually a nonsense and should not be engaged seriously. Diop, to a large degree used the study of racist Egyptologists to falsify and highlight contradiction. For the large part he relied on his own research and statements refuted/ignored by the Egyptological community to prove Egypt's African origin. My stance is that people approaching Egyptology objectively need to carry out their own research, or let the research of more objective Egyptologists take precedence. You are correct, in your 'eat the meat, spit out the bones' argument that you present. In another thread I have referenced Gadallah who makes some flimsy and easily refutable arguments (regarding the 'Hamite' race, but this does not negate his excellent research regarding the African Migrations: off topic) But, just how 'boney' does a piece of research have to be before you dismiss it as a nonsense? On a side note, I have noticed you have indulged a couple of strawman arguments yourself re: 'diop mistakes'. And the fact that I agree with a statement posted by akoben does not mean I disagree with the premise of the thread, hence your indulging in telling me I shouldn't do this could be classified as a strawman argument, no? Because you're making an assumption that this single note of support refutes the entire thread, and it doesn't. I have no interest in taking sides, just call it how I see it. Thanks for the heads up though, I always appreciate when people take the time to reply at length to anything I post. On a side note, my issue with the Sforza study is because of their racist origin, it is so easy to bias the results of a genetic argument. You can bias a sample, bias the strands that you use for comparison. I saw Keita's study being misquoted to argue that the Moor's were solely Berbers and their was no black African presence in mainland Europe! If you use a biased study as a basis, then your interpretation of the results will ultimately be false. I don't want to be viewed as a troll, so I'll leave it at that. Thanks again for your reply... [/qb][/QUOTE]In defense of Cavalli-Sforza I don't think he was being racist at all, but what he did do is conduct his studies in such a way so as to gain the desired results and Keita addresses this as well as another author who critiqued his study: Current Anthropology Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 [i]Pygmies, Khoisan, and Caucasian connections. The high-level cluster of sub-Saharan African populations contains 33 of the 49 populations of the phylogenetic tree. It is a considerably more diverse grouping than the Saharan/Northern African, with multiple subclusters at different fissioning points. The most famous "outlier" populations of traditional African ethnography are of course Pygmy and Khoisan-speaking groups, which are to varying degrees physically distinct from their African neighbors and also to varying degrees participate in foraging economies. These latter are frequently seen by Westerners as archaic, and Pygmy and Khoisan populations have often been identified as unchanged relics of earlier ages (e.g., Thomas 1959:68; Turnbull 1983:1113, 15758). Pygmy (Mbuti and Biaka) and "Pygmoid" populations are found at various points on Cavalli-Sforza et al.'s phylogenetic tree as outliers and with other groups. As Froment (1998) points out, this separation of Pygmy and other African populations is extremely imprecise; it depends to a great extent upon linguistic criteria, ignores the numerous transitional populations (not only those denominated as "Pygmoid"), and systematically discounts the fact that we know very little about the historical and physical relations between these groups over any significant period of time. Similarly, Khoi and San populations cluster with a Somali sample (which itself is held to be out of place, given that Somali groups geographically sit within the Northern African range), while Sandawe clusters with populations from Senegambia and Hadza is an outlier between the two. Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994:16970, 17477, 18993) posit that especially San populations are the result of admixture between "Caucasoid" groups originating in Southwest Asia and African "Negroid" groups. This is supposed to be a different process of interaction across the Red Sea from the one that yielded the distinctive genetic and physical characteristics of Ethiopian populations; indeed, the San and Ethiopian peoples are held to be "similar to Caucasoids but ... otherwise very different [from one another]" ( p. 191). The historical mechanismsand even the demographic meaning of such multiple similarities are left unspecified. This is unfortunate, given that hypotheses of immigration into Africa by (often "Hamitic") "Caucasoids" have bedeviled African history and archaeology for much of the past century, often being advanced to explain away African cultural innovations and based on very unsatisfactory evidence. One would have hoped that consciousness of this situation would have led the authors of The History and Geography of Human Genes to substantiate this hypothesis in detail. The nongenetic evidence marshaled in support of the hypothesis of relations between San groups and populations in the Near East is extremely weak. A putative "Asian" genetic contribution to forager groups in Ethiopia (Nijenhuis and Hendrikse 1986) is discussed only with reference to "Pygmoid" populations, although Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994:174) imply that these groups are related to the San. They claim ( pp. 160, 176) that skeletal material "credibly identified as San" has been found in various parts of North and East Africa, including northern Egypt, but note only parenthetically that this assertion in Nurse, Weiner, and Jenkins (1984) is based upon a 30-year-old paper by Philip Tobias (1968 [1964]). The Tobias paper does not in fact seem to make that claim, and it is in any case disputed by more recent researchers on the basis of the characteristics of the material involved, the very fragmentary state of the collections, and known problems with the accumulation of Khoi and San skeletal reference collections (Froment 1998; Morris 1986, 1987; Rightmire 1975; 1984:19398; Schepartz 1988). In fact, the identification of this skeletal material from northeastern Africa as related to San skeletal material from southern Africa is very doubtful; the material indicates that ancient populations in the area were most closely affiliated with the present-day inhabitants. The only widely accepted evidence of ancient Khoisan populations in East Africa is the ascription of the Sandawe and Hadza languages to the Khoisan phylum (with even less well-attested traces of Khoisan contacts in Dahalo and Yaaku [Ehret 1974:11, 88]). However, the Khoisan affiliations of Sandawe and/or Hadza are still disputed by some linguists, and in any case the available genetic data do not indicate a close relationship between Sandawe and Hadza people, on the one hand, and San and Somali people, on the other. The paradox is obvious: Sandawe and Hadza provide the only firm link between San populations and northeastern Africa (a linguistic one), but according to the genetic data that provide the basis for The History and Geography of Human Genes they are more closely related to West and Central African groups (fig. 2). There seems to be no a priori reason to associate Khoisan-speaking populations with Southwest Asia on the basis of San genetic data and not to associate Khoisan-speaking populations with Senegambia on the basis of Sandawe genetic data, but this is just what Cavalli-Sforza et al. do. It is also, of course, possible that either or both associations are spurious, especially given the small size of some of these forager groups and the attendant possibility of genetic drift.... The distinction between Saharan/Northern African populations and peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa is explained by the varying contribution of genes from "Caucasoid" populations in Europe and Southwest Asia to the former. This is very likely a contributing factor, given the archaeological and historical evidence of such population interactions around the Mediterranean. It is also quite likely that clines in gene frequencies across the Sahara are in part the result of natural selection operating upon characteristics that are not adaptively neutral in the very different environments through this region. There is a significant amount of evidence for both climatic and latitudinal effects upon different gene frequencies (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994:143; Mastana, Constans, and Papiha 1996; O'Rourke, Suarez, and Crouse 1985; Spitsyn et al. 1998). The greater instability of Saharan environments through time probably offered less scope for such in situ adaptation than is the case among, for example, the Nile Valley populations examined by Brace et al. (1996). Saharan and Sahelian groups (various Berber- and Arabic-speaking populations, including Tuareg and groups subordinated to them, such as the Bella and the Haratine and Saharan-speakers such as the Chaamba, Reguibat, Teda, and Kanembu) are not covered in detail in the work (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994:173), although investigations of biological variation among those populations have indicated that their anthropometric and genetic affiliations are very diverse and complex (Froment 1999). This lack of data on intermediate groups may make human physical and genetic distinctions across the Sahara appear more clear-cut than they are. The status of these populations is particularly important given that climatic change rendered significant parts of the Sahara passable (and in some cases habitable) through periods in the Holocene at least, with the result that there is abundant evidence of more extensive human contacts across the desert than have existed in historic times. Sutton (1974) and Ehret (1993) have suggested that the Saharo-Sudanese Neolithic tradition was largely the province of Nilo-Saharan-speakers. Populations speaking those languages do not, however, occupy an intermediate position between North African and sub-Saharan African populations, suggesting that either the correlations between archaeology and linguistics or those between genetics and linguistics or both are erroneous. While Cavalli-Sforza et al. emphasize the contribution of immigrant genes to the modern genetic makeup of Saharan/Northern African populations, they do not really consider the possibility of an African genetic contribution to either Europe or the Near East. It thus appears that Africa accepts genetic contributions from other areas but does not reciprocate them. A principal-component map of 42 world populations (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994:82) indicates a somewhat more complex picture, with a succession of Basques, Sardinians, Near Eastern populations, and Berbers occupying a space intermediate between African and European populations, although certainly arrayed closer to European groups. This assumption is also at variance with the known history of the region, where we see evidence for two-way relations throughout the Holocene, especially via Southwest Asia and the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. People from North, Saharan, and sub-Saharan Africa have crossed the Mediterranean as settlers, conquerors, and slaves through recorded history just as have Europeans. In recent times such population flows may have tended to be from north to south, but it should not be assumed that this has always been the case. [/i] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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