The way I understand it, North Africans are a gradation of northward expanding African populations and "Eurasians" are a gradation of North and East African populations which is why there's a close genetic relationship between the three. This being the case, where and when did their lighter skin color come into play?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Similarly, Khoi and San people further away from the equator in SA and Namibia tend to be lighter on average than equatorial Africans. Why you always on skin color?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: The way I understand it, North Africans are a gradation of northward expanding African populations and "Eurasians" are a gradation of North and East African populations which is why there's a close genetic relationship between the three. This being the case, where and when did their lighter skin color come into play?
Your description of the genetic situation was discussed many times before with experts like Tishkoff and Cruciani back in the 2001s saying that Eurasians are a subset of Northeast Africans who are in turn a subset of Africans. That said, your last question is somewhat loaded since modern North Africans have admixture from Eurasian back-migrations. But as Lioness points out the Khoisan of Southern Africa also have light skin but the genetics of thier skin color was discussed already.
Posted by Elijah The Tishbite (Member # 10328) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: The way I understand it, North Africans are a gradation of northward expanding African populations and "Eurasians" are a gradation of North and East African populations which is why there's a close genetic relationship between the three. This being the case, where and when did their lighter skin color come into play?
Your description of the genetic situation was discussed many times before with experts like Tishkoff and Cruciani back in the 2001s saying that Eurasians are a subset of Northeast Africans who are in turn a subset of Africans. That said, your last question is somewhat loaded and since modern North Africans have admixture from Eurasian back-migrations. But as Lioness points out the Khoisan of Southern Africa also have light skin but the genetics of thier skin color was discussed already.
I guess what I'm trying to say is were those back-migrating "Eurasians" still dark, or light?
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: I guess what I'm trying to say is were those back-migrating "Eurasians" still dark, or light?
Depends on which ones you're talking about. IIRC, the Iberomaurisian aDNA samples from Taforalt and the Early Neolithic of Morocco all had ancestral alleles for dark skin despite all the Eurasian admixture they supposedly had, so presumably the Eurasian people their ancestors interbred with were dark as well. The lighter skin you see in the Maghreb today is probably from later incursions, such as the Iberian peninsula during the Neolithic and later.
Posted by Thereal (Member # 22452) on :
ElMaestro in a thread with late user antalas pointed out North Africans light skin is mostly from admixture.
Some North Africans do carry similar mutations around melanin related genes like the Khoisan.
For my metric was the presence of known alleles for pigmentation. You'd have to define Amerindian dark if you want that basis of comparison. Just to save you the details, skin color variation in Africans is complicated, skin color variation outside is simple, Admixed (with Euro) populations lose a whole lot of diversity when it comes to pigmentation related genes. And that's the effect of North Africans today, they have overlap and evidence of selection pressure for the known genes in pigmentation. The lightening was due to admixture.
Introduction to the History of African Civilization: Precolonial Africa Volume 1 By C. Magbaily Fyle · 1999 p 30
Posted by Elijah The Tishbite (Member # 10328) on :
From Every People and Nation A Biblical Theology of Race By J. Daniel Hays · 2016 p.152
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: From Every People and Nation A Biblical Theology of Race By J. Daniel Hays · 2016 p.152
^^^ this book you are quoting is a biblical theology book by a Christian theologian, J. Daniel Hays
he will be thinking along the lines of a world history of 6,000 years and the ethnology of Berbers in perspective of the bible
quote: Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century, Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri), Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly, there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian," or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs. Archaeologists and linguists routinely describe proto-Berber groups and languages in even more ancient times, while biologists look for Berber DNA markers that go back thousands of years. Taking the pervasiveness of such anachronisms as a point of departure, Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home.
Key both to Rouighi's understanding of the medieval phenomenon of the "berberization" of North Africa and its reverberations in the modern world is the Kitāb al-'ibar of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), the third book of which purports to provide the history of the Berbers and the dynasties that ruled in the Maghrib. As translated into French in 1858, Rouighi argues, the book served to establish a racialized conception of Berber indigenousness for the French colonial powers who erected a fundamental opposition between the two groups thought to constitute the native populations of North Africa, Arabs and Berbers. Inventing the Berbers thus demonstrates the ways in which the nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval text has not only served as the basis for modern historical scholarship but also has had an effect on colonial and postcolonial policies and communal identities throughout Europe and North Africa.
________________________________
and this website, you will also see in the table of contents:
The Berber Garamantes Kingdom as well as the rest of berber history
The book Inventing the Berbers does not cover the Garamantes but this one does in depth , read p 431 to 434, this covers
1. THE STEROTYPICAL IMAGE OF THE GARAMANTES
2. THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DEBATE
3. THE REAL IMAGE OF THE GARAMANTES
Aghram Nadharif: The Barkat Oasis (Sha'Abiya of Ghat, Libyan Sahara) in Garamantian Times Volume 2 2005, Mario Liverani Mario Liverani (born 1939 ), is an Italian historian and Professor of Ancient Near East History at the University of Rome La Sapienza.
The total population of Tuareg is estimated to be around 4 million and as we can see the whole Berber population is estimated at 36 million but they are spread over a much wider territory than others, also more southerly and thus have a lot of diversity in their population in addition to the wide diversity of so called "Berbers" in general and their sometimes nomadic lifestyle
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote: Blench (2019) states:
One of the most problematic aspects is the language and inscriptions attributed to the Garamantes...Sites in the vicinity of Jarma, the Garamantian capital of what is now known as Fazzan, have abundant inscriptions (Fig. 14.7). 67 They are found cut or painted on dark grey amphorae, in the tombs of Garamantian cemeteries, such as those of Saniat bin Huwaydi.68 A recent project under the auspices of the British Library has digitised most of the known inscriptions and these are described in Biagetti et al.69 Although the inscriptions are in Berber characters, only some are decipherable. Various reasons for this have been suggested; either the messages were deliberately coded, so that only specific readers could understand them. Alternatively, they may have had a ‘ludic’ nature. The most exciting possibility is that they were in a non-Berber language, perhaps Nilo-Saharan or something unknown.[14]
Burials, Migration and Identity in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond , pp. 431 - 463 Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2019
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite:
From Every People and Nation A Biblical Theology of Race By J. Daniel Hays · 2016 p.152
First off, modern Berbers are diverse peoples who only have in common related languages and some customs. Thus Berbers range from Nordic looking (pale white with blonde/red hair and blue eyes) to black (chocolate colored) so-called "Hamitic" types, with the majority near the coasts being intermediate or a mix between the two. Such was discussed too many times before like here.
The problem with Snowden is that he subscribes to the racist notion of his time that Ethiopian = 'true Negro' which is hilarious considering that Greco-Roman writers at times included Egyptians in that moniker. Also so-called "Mediterranean" features are common in some Africans like modern day Ethiopians as shown to Antalas here and that so-called "negroid" features were not uncommon among early Iron Age natives of Carthage and Algeria as Antalas admitted here, which does not necessarily mean Sub-Saharan or "true negro" either as I explained on metric data here.
Racist anthropologist Carleton Coon’s photo of a “gracile Mediterranean” Shluh Berber of Morocco
modern day Shluh Moroccan
By the way, ironically enough most linguists agree that the Berber languages diffused and diversified only in the Iron Age, meaning that there were other langauges spoken in the Maghreb before Berber primacy. In fact, Berber is hypothesized to be a branch of a Lybico-Berber subfamily the same way Semitic is a branch of a greater subfamily with Semitic being the only survivor.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Recall the 2013 Metspalu et al. light skin allele SLC245 paper showing the presence of the shared European allele in pre-agricultural India..
^ Note the high concentration of SLC245 in littoral Algeria which corresponds to the settlements of the Neolithic Cardial Ware from Europe as was discussed before.
It is this area that has the highest concentration of white Berbers like Antalas.
quote:Originally posted by Antalas: Most north africans live along the coast and look like me:
Antalas
Though how much of these fair skin alleles in the area are traced to Neolithic immigrants, Medieval Vandals or somewhere in between those periods is another issue.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Rapid evolution of a skin-lightening allele in southern African KhoeSan
Meng Lin , Rebecca L. Siford, Alicia R. Martin and Brenna M. Henn Edited by Nina G. Jablonski, 2018
Significance Skin pigmentation reflects strong local adaptation to latitude after humans migrated around the globe. In the Northern Hemisphere, the gene SLC24A5 plays a key role in the genetic basis of light skin pigmentation, where a nonsynonymous mutation in the gene has swept to fixation in contemporary Europeans. Although considered European-specific, we find this mutation at an unexpectedly high frequency in light-skinned KhoeSan from South Africa, far exceeding the European gene flow during colonial migration. Using haplotype analysis and comprehensive demographic modeling including positive selection, we show that this is an example of surprisingly strong adaptation of a recently introduced allele, via back-to-Africa migration, which occurred less than 2,000 y ago.
Discussion Here, we have demonstrated that the derived rs1426654*A in SLC24A5 in the KhoeSan has a common origin with Europeans, reflected by the similar tMRCA estimates and identical modal haplotypes. This is consistent with the extended haplotype similarity observed between San from Botswana and Europeans (17). We asked whether the common origin of rs1426654*A haplotype could be due to recent migration between Europe and South Africa, or via an indirect route of migration through eastern Africa. A pastoralist migration from eastern Africa to southern Africa 2 kya is well documented from human genetic and archaeological data, and is likely associated with the introduction of domestic sheep and goats into the region. The summary statistics in our demographically explicit ABC approach clearly discriminate between the East African Source and European Source models, and strongly favor the East African Source model (Materials and Methods and SI Appendix, Supplementary Text). We cannot speculate as to the precise geographic origin of this allele, due to the limited sequencing data from eastern African and Near Eastern populations. Additionally, the allele frequency of rs1426654*A in the KhoeSan exceeds the expected frequency under a neutral, migration-based scenario. Both deterministic modeling and simulation of complex demography suggest strikingly strong positive selection on this allele in far southern Africa (s = 0.04 to 0.05), similar to the strength of its counterpart in Europe at high northern latitudes [s = 0.08 under an additive model (21)]. The modal values of the selection coefficients from our modeling are primarily shaped by the current allele frequency, with minor updates to s from the ABC (SI Appendix, Fig. S7). Our selection coefficients are comparable to or exceed other well-known examples of positive selection, including lactase persistence in Europeans [s = 0.012 (32)] and eastern Africans [s = 0.035 to 0.097 (33)], malaria resistance [s = 0.02 to 0.20 (34)], and other pigmentation genes in Europeans [s = 0.02 to 0.04 (21)]. Furthermore, the selective sweep, albeit incomplete, appears to have occurred in fewer than 1,500 y, making it one of the few examples of selection during very recent human history. We have shown that the phenotypic consequences of rs1426654*A have a large effect on the pigmentation of present-day KhoeSan; individuals who carry the derived homozygote are 14% lighter than the population average. The biological or cultural advantage of the lighter pigmentation phenotype remains to be tested in southern Africa. The southern tip of Africa receives relatively lower ultraviolet radiation intensity (35), which would serve as the major driving force of selection on the lighter skin pigmentation of the local populations. Additional selection force may have come from a possible diet shift about 2,000 y ago as evidenced in the Cape and coastal regions, as Khoekhoe populations transitioned from vitamin D-enriched marine fish and terrestrial food, likely including animal liver, to pastoralism (36–38). This decrease of dietary intake of vitamin D could have accelerated depigmentation for more photosynthesis of vitamin D, to promote calcium absorption, bone formation and innate immunity. However, as the ≠Khomani San live in the southern Kalahari and many individuals were still practicing a hunter-gatherer subsistence 100 y ago, it is unclear how the transition to pastoralism might have impacted their ancestors. It is particularly interesting to note that the model of evolution at SLC24A5 is remarkably similar to selection for the eastern African lactase persistence allele in the Nama (11). An alternative hypothesis is that sexual selection for light skin pigmentation drove the allele frequency. We find the third hypothesis unlikely, as this sexual preference would make most sense under the European colonialist regime, but we find that that selection most likely began before European arrival (East Africa Source model; SI Appendix). While the biological cause of the selective event merits further investigation, we have demonstrated an unusually rapid case of selection for lighter skin pigmentation based on a recently introduced allele <2,000 y ago, the first case of pigmentation adaptation from migration in humans.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: In fact, I've always questioned just how Eurasian is the SLC24A5 gene and for good reason.
Pigmentary Diversity: Identifying the genes causing human diversity SLC24A5 has a striking pattern of variation in human populations. A coding variant in the gene has previously been described as one of a set of ancestry-informative markers. The ancestral form encodes alanine at residue 111, whereas a derived allele encodes threonine. Alanine is present at this position in all known members of the SLC24 subfamily of proteins, suggesting the change to threonine has functional consequences. The derived variant is universally present on all European chromosomes analysed, while chromosomes of *African* and Asian origin almost invariably carry the ancestral form. The population difference puts this variant in the top 0.01% of all variants studied. Furthermore, analysis of the HapMap Consortium data6 found that SLC24A5 was within a chromosomal region that has a striking reduction of heterozygosity of SNPs in the European population. In fact, at 150 kb it is the longest such segment identified in the genome.1 Such a long conserved homozygous haplotype indicates that there has been strong selection on a gene or genes, which has swept this segment across the population, and selection for homozygosity eliminated recombination between SNPs, which maintained a long haplotype.
Another solute channel gene SLC45A2, or MATP, which is affected in human, mouse and fish pigmentary mutants, also shows strong association with ethnic ancestry. More than 90% of European chromosomes have a derived allele which is rare or absent in Africans. The small number of people of European descent with the ancestral form of the gene appear to have significantly more pigmented skin and there is clear evidence for a selective sweep of the chromosomal segment around the SLC45A2 in the European population.
Posted by Forty2Tribes (Member # 21799) on :
North Africans became light skin the same time as Europeans. Residual/favored mutations after the last ice age. It wasn't during, it wasn't right after it was slowly after. 6000 BC - 1200 BC. Back migrating Eurasians had little to do with it until the Egyptian invasions and Rome's occupation of parts of North Africa.
Posted by Askia_The_Great (Member # 22000) on :
This is a topic I feel should be discussed more. You have some good arguments that argue that light skin could be indignous to that part of Africa but that's another story.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Forty2Tribes: North Africans became light skin the same time as Europeans. Residual/favored mutations after the last ice age. It wasn't during, it wasn't right after it was slowly after. 6000 BC - 1200 BC.
yes but you made that all up
Posted by Forty2Tribes (Member # 21799) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: yes but you made that all up
I made up the conclusion. I didn't make up people living near water and how the northern tip of Africa was a glacier during the Ice Age. North Africans have always had light skin, hair, eye pigment genes. They were just punished for expressing them until the Ice Age.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Hopefully better techniques to retrieve and analyze DNA from human remains will help to also see how those ancient people looked like. Already now they start to try to assess phenotype from DNA out of just fragments of skeletons, and soon perhaps also from eDNA.
Interesting is that they tried to make some kind of reconstructions from the autosomal DNA from three of the Abusir specimens.
Even the phenotype of the Denisovans has been predicted by DNA analysis
quote: Now, in an impressive feat, Gokhman and his colleagues have mapped out a proposed Denisovan skeleton using information for 32 skeletal features encoded in DNA that was extracted from a pinky bone. The research, published today in the journal Cell, doesn’t give exact values for Denisovan proportions, but it does offer a comparative look at how this mysterious kind of hominin measured up against Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Hopefully better techniques to retrieve and analyze DNA from human remains will help to also see how those ancient people looked like. Already now they start to try to assess phenotype from DNA out of just fragments of skeletons, and soon perhaps also from eDNA.
Interesting is that they tried to make some kind of reconstructions from the autosomal DNA from three of the Abusir specimens.
Even the phenotype of the Denisovans has been predicted by DNA analysis
quote: Now, in an impressive feat, Gokhman and his colleagues have mapped out a proposed Denisovan skeleton using information for 32 skeletal features encoded in DNA that was extracted from a pinky bone. The research, published today in the journal Cell, doesn’t give exact values for Denisovan proportions, but it does offer a comparative look at how this mysterious kind of hominin measured up against Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
That DNA study has been discussed here before and such techniques are not necessarily accurate. The only way to prove that this DNA based method works is to take random individuals from around the world and submit their DNA this process in the blind. Meaning have the labs run the DNA and see what skin color it predicts without them actually knowing anything about the individuals being sampled. Then compare their results with reality.
The issue is that reconstructions are always going to be subjective in many aspects. That is why it is always to be taken with a grain of salt, not just for skin color but overall fleshy features and appearance.
Beyond that, Denisovans arent humans and we know what the first humans in Asia looked like. That isnt really a mystery needing to be solved. Not to mention, we also know for a fact that black skin was always present in Northern Africa. The issue is when did white skin become dominant in North Africa, because a few immigrants doesn't change an entire population. And we know for a fact that Africans across the continent have variation in skin tones, without Eurasian influence. So light skin was always present to some degree in North Africa as well. Not to mention "North Africa" as a region covers thousands of square miles and it is impossible to claim that populations along the coast are representative of the entire region in time and space. Populations in Southern Algeria and Libya are on average much darker than those in the North of these countries and have been for quite some time. So lumping all people in Northern Africa together as having the same complexion is just not based on facts or reality.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
Beyond that, Denisovans arent humans
Well obviously they were human enough for some of our ancestors to make babies with them. And since they seem to have been able to get fertile offspring it shows that we were very closely related. So in one way we must call them humans, even if somewhat different. In their case we did not know so very much how they looked since we just have a few bones preserved. Hopefully we will find more complete skeletons in the future so we can compare their morphology with what the DNA showed. It seems research about both neanderthals and denisovans have rendered enough interest to motivate a Nobelprize to Svante Pääbo who has sequenced their genomes.
Also in Africa it seems that Homo sapiens mixed with one or more kinds of archaic humans, but we know even less about them than what we know of Denisovans since we can not yet tie them to any skeletons or other human remains.
About light skin in Asia it seems to first have evolved somewhere between 20 000 and 30 000 years ago. Seems that light skin evolved separately in Europeans and Asians since it is partly different genes involved who came under selection. Then it took time before these genes came to dominate in respective area.
With better methods of analysing aDNA, and with more samples we will of course get a more detailed knowledge about when and where. That also goes for other physical traits.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
Beyond that, Denisovans arent humans
Well obviously they were human enough for some of our ancestors to make babies with them. And since they seem to have been able to get fertile offspring it shows that we were very closely related. So in one way we must call them humans, even if somewhat different. In their case we did not know so very much how they looked since we just have a few bones preserved. Hopefully we will find more complete skeletons in the future so we can compare their morphology with what the DNA showed. It seems research about both neanderthals and denisovans have rendered enough interest to motivate a Nobelprize to Svante Pääbo who has sequenced their genomes.
Also in Africa it seems that Homo sapiens mixed with one or more kinds of archaic humans, but we know even less about them than what we know of Denisovans since we can not yet tie them to any skeletons or other human remains.
Thats fine and dandy but the point still stands Denisovans aren't human and we know how humans got to Asia. And Denisovans are not a key to human migration to or evolution in Asia, which is implied by this statement. Aboriginal Australians and the Aborigines of the Andamans do not have any Denisovan DNA and those two groups are some of representatives of the oldest human populations in Asia. Not to mention the fact that MOST of the mixing between humans and ancient hominids took place in Africa because that is the birthplace of the hominid family tree to begin with.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: About light skin in Asia it seems to first have evolved somewhere between 20 000 and 30 000 years ago. Seems that light skin evolved separately in Europeans and Asians since it is partly different genes involved who came under selection. Then it took time before these genes came to dominate in respective area.
With better methods of analysing aDNA, and with more samples we will of course get a more detailed knowledge about when and where. That also goes for other physical traits.
Using DNA to determine skin color is not an exact science because skin color varies and there is no singe DNA value that is going to tell you the exact skin complexion of a person. There are multiple various DNA codes that relate to skin color and how they combine for a specific tone or complexion is not fixed but varies across populations and individuals. Not to mention, "light skin" is not a single color but a range of complexions just like "dark skin" isn't a single value but a range of values. So like I was saying before, until we get a study showing an exact correlation between skin color genes and specific tones in a living person, it will remain ambiguous at best. Most of the times these kinds of studies using statistical models use reference populations but those populations are not "universal" and cannot provide the kind of accuracy required for ancient populations across the globe.
Also the evolution of "lighter skin" in Africa did not start with Eurasians but that doesn't necessarily mean as light as the lightest Europeans. And most people obsessing with light skin in North Africa are specifically focusing on Eurasian arrival into North Africa.
quote: While many have turned to science to falsely support the notion of a biological construct of race, modern research has demonstrated genetics has little to do with it. Now, as Ed Yong at The Atlantic reports, a large-scale study of skin pigmentation demonstrates that humans with both light and dark skin pigmentation have co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years.
A long-standing assumption about the evolution skin color was that Homo sapiens started out in Africa with darkly pigmented skin, full of melanin to protect from the intense ultraviolet radiation from the sun. As humans migrated out of Africa, it was believed that mutations led to lighter skin that can supposedly regulate vitamin D production in lower sunlight levels. But the new study, published in the journal Science, shows that the evolution of skin color is much more complex.
A team of researchers led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania and her postdoctoral fellow Nicholas Crawford measured the skin pigmentation of over 2,000 genetically and ethnically diverse people across Tanzania, Ethiopia and Botswana. They analyzed the genome of nearly 1,600 of those people, which allowed them to identify eight key areas in the DNA associated with skin pigmentation.
As Colin Barras at New Scientist reports, each of these sites had genetic variants associated with paler skin and ones associated with darker skin. Seven genetic variants associated with lighter skin developed at least 270,000 years ago and four more than 900,000 years ago. Considering our species, Homo sapiens, did not evolve until around 200,00 to 300,000 years ago, the discovery suggests that the genes responsible for lighter skin tones were present into the genetic material of our hominin ancestors—hundreds of thousands of years before the first humans walked the Earth.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Thats fine and dandy but the point still stands Denisovans aren't human and we know how humans got to Asia. And Denisovans are not a key to human migration to or evolution in Asia, which is implied by this statement. Aboriginal Australians and the Aborigines of the Andamans do not have any Denisovan DNA either and those two groups are be representative of the oldest human populations in Asia. Not to mention the fact that MOST of the mixing between humans and ancient hominids took place in Africa because that is the birthplace of the hominid family tree to begin with.
Actually Australian aborigines do have Denisovan DNA, but the Andamanese have not. Most Denisovan DNA has a people in the Philippines. People from Papua New Guinea also have a high percentage of Denisovan DNA.
Homo sapiens mixed with archaic humans in Africa, we also mixed with neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe and we mixed probably more than one time with Denisovans in different parts of Asia. Perhaps we mixed with three different groups of Denisovans who had slightly genetical differencies from each other.
Also Denisovans and Neanderthals seem to have mixed with each other.
When it concerns if Denisovans were human or not one can only imagine if they would have managed to survive until today. Would we have regarded them as humans or not? They belonged to the same genus as we and they could get fertile offspring with us, so I would regard them as humans.
quote: Originally posted by Doug M: Using DNA to determine skin color is not an exact science because skin color varies. "Light skin" is not a single color but a range of complexions just like "dark skin" isn't a single value but a range of values. So like I was saying before, until we get a study showing an exact correlation between skin color genes and specific tones in a living person, it will remain ambiguous at best. Also the evolution of "lighter skin" in Africa did not start with Eurasians but that doesn't necessarily mean as light as the lightest Europeans. And most people obsessing with light skin in North Africa are specifically focusing on Eurasian arrival into North Africa. While many have turned to science to falsely support the notion of a biological construct of race, modern research has demonstrated genetics has little to do with it. Now, as Ed Yong at The Atlantic reports, a large-scale study of skin pigmentation demonstrates that humans with both light and dark skin pigmentation have co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years.
A long-standing assumption about the evolution skin color was that Homo sapiens started out in Africa with darkly pigmented skin, full of melanin to protect from the intense ultraviolet radiation from the sun. As humans migrated out of Africa, it was believed that mutations led to lighter skin that can supposedly regulate vitamin D production in lower sunlight levels. But the new study, published in the journal Science, shows that the evolution of skin color is much more complex. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/genetic-study-shows-skin-color-just-skin-deep-180965261/
A big study in South America has looked at the genetics behind skin color and one can see that light skin color arose separately in Europeans and Asians, and probably before that in Africa. But hopefully the methods to assess skin color from DNA will get better so we can know more in detail when, where and why we have different skin tones.
quote:The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that the variation of light skin among Eurasian people evolved independently from different genetic backgrounds.
The genetic study analysed pigmentation in over 6,000 Latin Americans, who have a mix of Native American, European and African ancestry.
It is well established that Native Americans are genetically closely related to East Asians, the initial settlement of the Americas occurring some 15-20,000 years ago, through migration from Eastern Siberia into North America. As a consequence, genetic variations in Native Americans are often shared with East Asians.
This study identifies five new associated regions involving skin, eye and hair colour. Genes affecting skin colour in Europeans have been extensively studied, but here researchers identified an important variation in the gene MFSD12 seen uniquely in East Asians and Native Americans.
They show it was under natural selection in East Asians after they split from Europeans around 40,000 years ago, and was then carried over to America by ancient migrations of Native Americans. It is the first time this gene has been linked to skin colour in Native Americans and East Asians.
Dr Kaustubh Adhikari (UCL Genetics Institute), said: "Our work demonstrates that lighter skin colour evolved independently in Europe and East Asia. We also show that this gene was under strong natural selection in East Asia, possibly as adaptation to changes in sunlight levels and ultraviolet radiation."
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Thats fine and dandy but the point still stands Denisovans aren't human and we know how humans got to Asia. And Denisovans are not a key to human migration to or evolution in Asia, which is implied by this statement. Aboriginal Australians and the Aborigines of the Andamans do not have any Denisovan DNA either and those two groups are be representative of the oldest human populations in Asia. Not to mention the fact that MOST of the mixing between humans and ancient hominids took place in Africa because that is the birthplace of the hominid family tree to begin with.
Actually Australian aborigines do have Denisovan DNA, but the Andamanese have not. Most Denisovan DNA has a people in the Philippines. People from Papua New Guinea also have a high percentage of Denisovan DNA.
Homo sapiens mixed with archaic humans in Africa, we also mixed with neanderthals in the Middle East and Europe and we mixed probably more than one time with Denisovans in different parts of Asia. Perhaps we mixed with three different groups of Denisovans who had slightly genetical differencies from each other.
Also Denisovans and Neanderthals seem to have mixed with each other.
The mixing of humans and hominids isn't special is my point. Again, the hominid family tree originated millions of years ago in Africa and they have been mixing every since. HSS are the last of a long line of species of hominids that emerged from Africa and migrated to other parts of the globe. And as I posted previously, the skin color of HSS already included ancient genetic mutations for light and dark skin from previous hominid ancestors. That didn't come from neanderthal or denisovan mixture. People keep trying to make more of this than it really is as if hominids didn't originate in Africa, including Denisovans and Neanderthals. We know how humans migrated into Asia and Denisovans and Neanderthals are not "key" to understanding that because all those early groups did not mix with them. And honestly at one point Europeans used to call various aboriginal popultions "primitive hominids".
But to the point of this thread, skin color genes for "light" and "dark" skin have always been in humans since the beginning. However, over time different populations have evolved novel mutations to those genes in various circumstances. This is why it is not possible to say there is one single gene responsible for skin color. It is more complex than that.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: When it concerns if Denisovans were human or not one can only imagine if they would have managed to survive until today. Would we have regarded them as humans or not? They belonged to the same genus as we and they could get fertile offspring with us, so I would regard them as humans.
Then if that is the case then all archaic hominids are humans then, but they aren't. Again, humans are the last of the ancient hominid species to spread from Africa and the most successful. Not Denisovans or Neanderthals.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Actually the genus Homo is often called humans in the literature, even if they were different species (or possibly subspecies). As i said we could interbreed with both Neanderthals and Denisovans and get fertile offspring, that fact alone justifies calling them humans. Also in other aspect they were human, having good cognitive abilities, making relatively advanced tools, and having behavioral patterns that are considered human. Some of the earlier hominins were maybe not so compatible, and they were also separated in time from us. One can also wonder about species like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, they seem to have been more unlike us than neanderthals or denisovans. But generally speaking those we mated with are also regarded as humans. As I said if some neanderthals or denisovans would have survived until today we would most probably have considered them human.
Some people also today would probably mated with them and got babies with them. Those people would hardly regard their partners as some kind of alien animals.
One must also remember that not so long time ago not even all members of our own species (modern Homo sapiens) were considered fully human.
About skin color, yes skin color is complex and an interplay between different genes, but it seems we learn more and more about these genes and how they affect skin color.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Actually the genus Homo is often called humans, even if they were different species (or possibly subspecies). As i said we could interbreed with both Neanderthals and Denisovans and get fertile offspring, that fact alone justifies calling them humans. Also in other aspect they were human, having good cognitive abilities, making relatively advanced tools, and having behavioral patterns that are considered human. Some of the earlier hominins were maybe not so compatible, and they were also separated in time from us. One can also wonder about species like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, they seem to have been more unlike us than neanderthals or denisovans. But generally speaking those we mated with are also regarded as humans. As I said if some neanderthals or denisovans would have survived until today we would most probably have considered them human.
Some people also today would probably mated with them and got babies with them. Those people would hardly regard their partners as some kind of alien animals.
About skin color, yes skin color is complex and an interplay between different genes, but it seems we learn more and more about these genes and how they affect skin color.
The discovery of ancient hominids at Jebel Irhoud going back 300,000 years ago shows that archaic hominids of all types have existed in Africa for millions of years. There is nothing "special" about Neanderthals and Denisovans as they are simply a branches of the hominid family tree. What is at issue here is the scientific classification of ancient skeletal remains and if you look at the history of such, you will see many theories. At the end of the day there is no complete skull of a Denisovan and everything about them is based purely on theoretical DNA evidence. Neanderthals are much more well established as a species of homo erectus. But again, in Africa if you actually look at the skulls being found going back over 100,000 years you will see many variations, this is how you get Homo Naledi in South Africa. So really hominids of all types have been roaming around in Africa for millions of years and mixing, but this is something that only has come to the forefront relatively recently. Most of the history of the scientific classification of hominid species has been focused on Eurasia and at one time there was an out of Asia theory as well. This really isn't the thread for it though and I don't want to sidetrack it on a tangent discussion.
quote: Any model consistent with our data requires a more dynamic scenario and a more complex population structure than the one implied by the classic Out-of-Africa model. Our findings on neurocranial shape diversity are consistent with the assumption that intra-African population expansions (21, 22) produced temporarily subdivided and isolated groups (8, 26). In such a metapopulation model, transient populations are connected by migration, subject to extinction and rebirth by colonization, as well as to fluctuation in local size (7, 27). This view is in agreement with recent genetic results (28) suggesting divergence of some recent human populations from the rest of the human mtDNA pool 90–150,000 years ago, and isolation times between 50 and 100,000 years. Separated demes (population subdivisions) might have partly merged again, whereas others left Africa at different times and maybe using different routes, and still others probably also remigrated to Africa.
...
Seemingly ancient contributions to the modern human gene pool (36) have been explained by admixture with archaic forms of Homo, e.g., Neanderthals. Although we cannot rule out such admixture (37), the clear morphological distinction between AMH and archaic forms of Homo in the light of the proposed ancestral population structure of early AMH to us suggests another underestimated possibility: the genetic exchange between subdivided populations of early AMH as a potential source for “ancient” contributions to the modern human gene pool (9, 36).
Although more data are needed to corroborate our inferences, we could clearly demonstrate the pronounced variability of early AMH and their morphological relationship to modern humans. It is crucial for any analysis, genetic or phenetic, of modern human origins to take into account this Late Pleistocene African diversity that predates the range expansions into Eurasia. The molecular and fossil evidence of the African continent deserves more attention in the modern human origins debate.
Suffice to say this is a tangent discussion but again, the genes for skin color variation have always been in Africa and various populations in Africa have different complexions due to that. This issue with North African skin color is primarily derived from a question of when Eurasians entered into North Africa and affected the morphology of the populations there.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Humans in some form have existed outside Africa for nearly two million years, and new species have now and then left Africa and replaced and/or mixed with the older ones.
Neanderthals and denisovans are not so special, the only thing is maybe that the neanderthals have been known longer time than many other archaic humans, and they are maybe the ones that are most researched (which is not so strange since the first neanderthal remains were found in Europe and at that time it was mostly Europeans who conducted that kind of research). But gradually more and more other ancient human species have been discovered and researched. Probably there are still different species to be found. Now and then new variants pops up, like H. floresiensis and H. luzonesis in Asia. Actually we seem to find some new fossils nearly every year. All these species have their origins in Homo erectus but have adapted to different environments.
We know DNA from Denisovans, we have some bones, including a half lower jaw, some teeth, and we maybe we have parts of a couple of skulls, if they can be shown to be Denisovans. Some of the African archaic humans that introgressed into Homo sapiens are also very little known, they exist as a kind of shadow DNA in modern humans.
Still there are many discoveries to be make, and often we also get news from researchers like Svante Pääbo who even got a nobel prize for his research about neanderthals and denisovans and their introgressions into Homo sapiens.
Still 50 000 years from now there were still maybe fem or six, or even more speparate species of humans, before modern Homo sapiens in the end became the only version of humans left on earth.
Here is a couple of more recent articles about the interplay between archaic humans and Homo sapiens
But now we maybe gone off topic a bit.
Posted by Forty2Tribes (Member # 21799) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Hopefully better techniques to retrieve and analyze DNA from human remains will help to also see how those ancient people looked like. Already now they start to try to assess phenotype from DNA out of just fragments of skeletons, and soon perhaps also from eDNA.
Interesting is that they tried to make some kind of reconstructions from the autosomal DNA from three of the Abusir specimens.
Even the phenotype of the Denisovans has been predicted by DNA analysis
quote: Now, in an impressive feat, Gokhman and his colleagues have mapped out a proposed Denisovan skeleton using information for 32 skeletal features encoded in DNA that was extracted from a pinky bone. The research, published today in the journal Cell, doesn’t give exact values for Denisovan proportions, but it does offer a comparative look at how this mysterious kind of hominin measured up against Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
This is a good example of the bias in pigment predictors. I looked at the raw data behind the Denisovan and they had a darker pigment gene profile than the Africans. According to their genes, they should be Dinka dark. Likewise the Abu Sir 3 probably should have been darker too. If Bob Marley is the standard I remember one of them having darker pigment genes than a mixed Jamaican, one was very close to the mixed Jamaican and the other was lighter. All three of them look lighter than Marley in the prediction.
Posted by Forty2Tribes (Member # 21799) on :
Its the same source from my old Black Neanderthal video. Its in the description. Denisovans pigment genes were compared to a bunch of people and they had darker pigment genes than the all the homosapiens.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Here is one study which discusses eventual variability in Neanderthal skin color and how different genes for phenotype also can have affected modern humans through introgressions.
Since Neanderthals inhabited several environments, some on relatively high latitudes during a longer time than modern Homo sapiens it would not be surprising if their phenotypes can have varied just like modern humans.
And regarding Denisovans we have not DNA from very many places (actually we have aDNA from one location) so maybe we have not caught the variation that can have occurred among them.
quote: Assessing the genetic contribution of Neanderthals to non-disease phenotypes in modern humans has been difficult because of the absence of large cohorts for which common phenotype information is available. Using baseline phenotypes collected for 112,000 individuals by the UK Biobank, we can now elaborate on previous findings that identified associations between signatures of positive selection on Neanderthal DNA and various modern human traits but not any specific phenotypic consequences. Here, we show that Neanderthal DNA affects skin tone and hair color, height, sleeping patterns, mood, and smoking status in present-day Europeans. Interestingly, multiple Neanderthal alleles at different loci contribute to skin and hair color in present-day Europeans, and these Neanderthal alleles contribute to both lighter and darker skin tones and hair color, suggesting that Neanderthals themselves were most likely variable in these traits.
Dannemann, M., & Kelso, J. (2017). The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans.` The American Journal of Human Genetics, 101(4), 578–589.
According to this map we have light sin alleles in Europeans about 22 000 to 28 000 years ago, and alleles for blonde hair around 18 000 years ago.
Seems that alleles for light skin arose also among Asians at that time or maybe earlier.
Natural selection affects humans too with different adaptations in different environments, so it would be a bit strange if Neanderthals and Denisovans all looked alike regarding skin color, hair color and other traits.
The National Geographic article about Denisovan traits did not mention skin color, it concentrated on skeletal elements. The picture is an artistic reconstruction which wants to catch the shape of the Denisovans head based on such elements.
Skin and hair are more artistic license.
But there is also this model which does not show skin color, even if it shows hair.
A 3D-printed reconstruction of a female Denisovan. Photo by Maayan Harel
There is also a somewhat darker version of the drawing
About bias in facial reconstructions, and even more in works of art, they probably can contain some bias, depending on who has made them. Maybe we all have a wish to identify with these ancient humans so we want them to have some resemblance to us. So black artists maybe tend to make somewhat darker reconstructions and white artists will make somewhat lighter reconstructions.
Posted by Punos_Rey (Member # 21929) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: About bias in facial reconstructions, and even more in works of art, they probably can contain some bias, depending on who has made them. Maybe we all have a wish to identify with these ancient humans so we want them to have some resemblance to us. So black artists maybe tend to make somewhat darker reconstructions and white artists will make somewhat lighter reconstructions.
An important difference being that white(and pretty much any other non-Black person) reconstructionists are accorded an automatic presumption of competence and objectivity in their reconstructions that black reconstructionists are not given no matter their rigor or qualifications.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Humans in some form have existed outside Africa for nearly two million years, and new species have now and then left Africa and replaced and/or mixed with the older ones.
Want to provide any scientific study or source stating such a thing? Because the oldest HSS remains are about 300,000 years old and only found in Africa. Archaic hominids are not humans and humans evolved exclusively in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years before leaving the continent and they coexisted with remnants of other hominids that existed in Africa for millions of years. That happened in no other place.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Neanderthals and denisovans are not so special, the only thing is maybe that the neanderthals have been known longer time than many other archaic humans, and they are maybe the ones that are most researched (which is not so strange since the first neanderthal remains were found in Europe and at that time it was mostly Europeans who conducted that kind of research). But gradually more and more other ancient human species have been discovered and researched. Probably there are still different species to be found. Now and then new variants pops up, like H. floresiensis and H. luzonesis in Asia. Actually we seem to find some new fossils nearly every year. All these species have their origins in Homo erectus but have adapted to different environments.
Humans as in homo sapien sapiens only evolved in Africa and nowhere else. Ancient hominids like homo erectus are not humans but they too originated in Africa.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: We know DNA from Denisovans, we have some bones, including a half lower jaw, some teeth, and we maybe we have parts of a couple of skulls, if they can be shown to be Denisovans. Some of the African archaic humans that introgressed into Homo sapiens are also very little known, they exist as a kind of shadow DNA in modern humans.
Still there are many discoveries to be make, and often we also get news from researchers like Svante Pääbo who even got a nobel prize for his research about neanderthals and denisovans and their introgressions into Homo sapiens.
Still 50 000 years from now there were still maybe fem or six, or even more speparate species of humans, before modern Homo sapiens in the end became the only version of humans left on earth.
Here is a couple of more recent articles about the interplay between archaic humans and Homo sapiens
Again archaic humans outside of Africa have nothing to do with the origin of the skin color genes in homo sapiens sapiens. I already provided you a source stating this clearly, yet you persist in trying to act like archaics outside of Africa have something to do with it. Humans have been in North Africa for 300,000 years. And for most of that time they were darker skinned but that still included variation with some on the lighter end of the scale without any Eurasian input.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Punos_Rey: An important difference being that white(and pretty much any other non-Black person) reconstructionists are accorded an automatic presumption of competence and objectivity in their reconstructions that black reconstructionists are not given no matter their rigor or qualifications.
^^ That is one factor. But probably some other factors do also matter in how your reconstruction will be perceived: For example are you connected to, or have made reconstructions for a major institution (like a university or museum) or magazine? Do you work alone or together with scientists? Have you access to for example casts of skulls, or 3D- visual data in a computer? So also among whites a person without formal attachment to academia (or major magazines) will probably not be taken as seriously as one who is backed by such entities. But admittedly are these issues connected since fewer Black (and other non whites) are working for these major institutions.
Thus one can for example see a difference in "status" (at least in the academic world) between Oscar Nilsson who often works for major institutions, and Ancestral Whispers who works from photos and who mostly works online, and who are more or less anonymous.
But admittedly things like race or ethnicity also plays a role, since fewer Blacks (or other non Whites) are connected to major institutions or magazines.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote: Posted by Doug M Want to provide any scientific study or source stating such a thing? Because the oldest HSS remains are about 300,000 years old and only found in Africa. Archaic hominids are not humans and humans evolved exclusively in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years before leaving the continent and they coexisted with remnants of other hominids that existed in Africa for millions of years. That happened in no other place.
When I talked about humans I meant in a broader sense, not only Homo sapiens. For example remains of Homo are found in Georgia which are around 1,8 million years old.
quote:Posted by Doug M Again archaic humans outside of Africa have nothing to do with the origin of the skin color genes in homo sapiens sapiens. I already provided you a source stating this clearly, yet you persist in trying to act like archaics outside of Africa have something to do with it. Humans have been in North Africa for 300,000 years. And for most of that time they were darker skinned but that still included variation with some on the lighter end of the scale without any Eurasian input.
Did I not just post a study that shows that archaic genes can have a role in the phenotype of Homo sapiens outside Africa?
quote:Here, we show that Neanderthal DNA affects skin tone and hair color, height, sleeping patterns, mood, and smoking status in present-day Europeans. Interestingly, multiple Neanderthal alleles at different loci contribute to skin and hair color in present-day Europeans, and these Neanderthal alleles contribute to both lighter and darker skin tones and hair color, suggesting that Neanderthals themselves were most likely variable in these traits.
Dannemann, M., & Kelso, J. (2017). The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans.` The American Journal of Human Genetics, 101(4), 578–589. https://tinyurl.com/yv32hbd9
You can of course deny that, or criticize those authors, it is up to you.
If archaic humans are humans is of course a matter of definition, but many sources actually define them as human.
quote: Posted by Doug M Want to provide any scientific study or source stating such a thing? Because the oldest HSS remains are about 300,000 years old and only found in Africa. Archaic hominids are not humans and humans evolved exclusively in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years before leaving the continent and they coexisted with remnants of other hominids that existed in Africa for millions of years. That happened in no other place.
When I talked about humans I meant in a broader sense, not only Homo sapiens. For example remains of Homo are found in Georgia which are around 1,8 million years old.
quote:Posted by Doug M Again archaic humans outside of Africa have nothing to do with the origin of the skin color genes in homo sapiens sapiens. I already provided you a source stating this clearly, yet you persist in trying to act like archaics outside of Africa have something to do with it. Humans have been in North Africa for 300,000 years. And for most of that time they were darker skinned but that still included variation with some on the lighter end of the scale without any Eurasian input.
Did I not just post a study that shows that archaic genes can have a role in the phenotype of Homo sapiens outside Africa?
quote:Here, we show that Neanderthal DNA affects skin tone and hair color, height, sleeping patterns, mood, and smoking status in present-day Europeans. Interestingly, multiple Neanderthal alleles at different loci contribute to skin and hair color in present-day Europeans, and these Neanderthal alleles contribute to both lighter and darker skin tones and hair color, suggesting that Neanderthals themselves were most likely variable in these traits.
Dannemann, M., & Kelso, J. (2017). The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans.` The American Journal of Human Genetics, 101(4), 578–589. https://tinyurl.com/yv32hbd9
You can of course deny that, or criticize those authors, it is up to you.
I posted this earlier and you just keep ignoring it in the context that AMH or Homo Sapien Sapiens got their genetics for light skin before even leaving Africa as inherited from archaic hominid ancestors in Africa. The idea that this only happened as a result of neanderthal mixture is silly. Again, like I said before, the point is that "lighter skin" has always existed to some degree in parts of Africa and does not require Eurasian mixture to explain it. Human diversity originates in Africa not Eurasia.
quote:
While many have turned to science to falsely support the notion of a biological construct of race, modern research has demonstrated genetics has little to do with it. Now, as Ed Yong at The Atlantic reports, a large-scale study of skin pigmentation demonstrates that humans with both light and dark skin pigmentation have co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years.
A long-standing assumption about the evolution skin color was that Homo sapiens started out in Africa with darkly pigmented skin, full of melanin to protect from the intense ultraviolet radiation from the sun. As humans migrated out of Africa, it was believed that mutations led to lighter skin that can supposedly regulate vitamin D production in lower sunlight levels. But the new study, published in the journal Science, shows that the evolution of skin color is much more complex.
A team of researchers led by Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania and her postdoctoral fellow Nicholas Crawford measured the skin pigmentation of over 2,000 genetically and ethnically diverse people across Tanzania, Ethiopia and Botswana. They analyzed the genome of nearly 1,600 of those people, which allowed them to identify eight key areas in the DNA associated with skin pigmentation.
[bAs Colin Barras at New Scientist reports, each of these sites had genetic variants associated with paler skin and ones associated with darker skin. Seven genetic variants associated with lighter skin developed at least 270,000 years ago and four more than 900,000 years ago. Considering our species, Homo sapiens, did not evolve until around 200,00 to 300,000 years ago, the discovery suggests that the genes responsible for lighter skin tones were present into the genetic material of our hominin ancestors—hundreds of thousands of years before the first humans walked the Earth.[/b]
In order for this neanderthal or denisovan mixture model to even make sense, there would have to have been sex breeding camps right on the route where Africans left Africa. And every group of Africans leaving would have had to have mated with the Neanderthals at this camp in order to guarantee that every surviving future Eurasian passed on these neanderthal or denisovan genes. Otherwise it is impossible for such a thing to have happened because we know there was more than one wave of migration out of Africa and they all didn't follow the same routes making it extremely difficult to see how this mixture would be passed on to all Eurasian OOA descendants.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Well, seems like different researchers came to somewhat different conclusions. We just have to wait and see what future studies lead to.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Well, seems like different researchers came to somewhat different conclusions. We just have to wait and see what future studies lead to.
They may have come to different conclusions of mixture sure but the skeletal evidence from Africa shows clearly multiple archaic types coexisted there as well with HSS. The problem is the lack lack of widespread coverage for all regions of Africa in terms of skeletal remains.
quote: In order to establish the affinities of the Hofmeyr fossil, team member Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, used 3-dimensional measurements of the skull known to differentiate recent human populations according to their geographic distributions and genetic relationships. She compared the Hofmeyr skull with contemporaneous Upper Paleolithic skulls from Europe and with the skulls of living humans from Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa, including the Khoe-San (Bushmen). Because the Khoe-San are represented in the recent archeological record of South Africa, they were expected to have close resemblances to the South African fossil. Instead, the Hofmeyr skull is quite distinct from recent sub-Saharan Africans, including the Khoe-San, and has a very close affinity with the European Upper Paleolithic specimens.
And the Khoe San are an example of lighter skin among Africans not necessarily tied to Eurasian mixture.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: They may have come to different conclusions of mixture sure but the skeletal evidence from Africa shows clearly multiple archaic types coexisted there as well with HSS. The problem is the lack lack of widespread coverage for all regions of Africa in terms of skeletal remains.
I think that no one denies that there have been multiple archaic types in Africa. After all humans (in a wide meaning) have existed there the longest time.
Outside Africa humans (including archaic humans) have existed maybe two million years. And now and then new skeletons pop up (like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis) But since humans been in Africa longer time we can expect more archaic humans there and a longer time of coexistence. It is a field open for more research.
And now a new generation of African paleoanthropologists are emerging who can further enhance research in the area.
quote: Generations of scholars from around the world have converged to study human evolution in East Africa. Now a new training program seeks to bring more African students into the field.
Hopefully there will also be findings of ancient DNA which will further clarify ancestry and relatedness and similar issues.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: "lighter skin" has always existed to some degree in parts of Africa and does not require Eurasian mixture to explain it. Human diversity originates in Africa not Eurasia.
where are these parts of Africa?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
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Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: They may have come to different conclusions of mixture sure but the skeletal evidence from Africa shows clearly multiple archaic types coexisted there as well with HSS. The problem is the lack lack of widespread coverage for all regions of Africa in terms of skeletal remains.
I think that no one denies that there have been multiple archaic types in Africa. After all humans (in a wide meaning) have existed there the longest time.
Outside Africa humans (including archaic humans) have existed maybe two million years. And now and then new skeletons pop up (like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis) But since humans been in Africa longer time we can expect more archaic humans there and a longer time of coexistence. It is a field open for more research.
And now a new generation of African paleoanthropologists are emerging who can further enhance research in the area.
quote: Generations of scholars from around the world have converged to study human evolution in East Africa. Now a new training program seeks to bring more African students into the field.
Hopefully there will also be findings of ancient DNA which will further clarify ancestry and relatedness and similar issues.
A lot of these issues simply boils down to trying to make definitive statements about ancient times with little data, especially in Africa. This happpens all the time though mostly because of overconfidence in statistical models which invariably get shown to be wrong as new data is uncovered.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: "lighter skin" has always existed to some degree in parts of Africa
what parts of Africa?
Posted by IichadHuck (Member # 23762) on :
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Posted by Clyde Winters (Member # 10129) on :
White people did not introduce light skin into North Africa, or Africa generally.
Light skin has always been in Africa because the pigmentation center is SLC24A5. The ancestral gene for light skin rs1426L54 is “predominante” among sub-Saharan African (SSA) populations (Canfield et al., 2014). The derived allele from this coding polymerphism for light skin is A111T alleles (Canfield et al., 2014).
Presence of these genes make it clear that light skin Blacks would have always been found in Africa, since light skin is common among Black people.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Hopefully better techniques to retrieve and analyze DNA from human remains will help to also see how those ancient people looked like. Already now they start to try to assess phenotype from DNA out of just fragments of skeletons, and soon perhaps also from eDNA.
Interesting is that they tried to make some kind of reconstructions from the autosomal DNA from three of the Abusir specimens.
Even the phenotype of the Denisovans has been predicted by DNA analysis
quote: Now, in an impressive feat, Gokhman and his colleagues have mapped out a proposed Denisovan skeleton using information for 32 skeletal features encoded in DNA that was extracted from a pinky bone. The research, published today in the journal Cell, doesn’t give exact values for Denisovan proportions, but it does offer a comparative look at how this mysterious kind of hominin measured up against Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
Many anthropologists have questioned how Egyptian the Abusir individuals really were. Even Egyptologists like Kara Cooney say that Abusir especially in the Late Period from whence these samples come from was settled by foreigners, mostly Asiatics.
As explained earlier in this thread, light skin was introduced to the Maghreb during the Late Neolithic in association with the introduction of Cardial Ware from Europe. Before that, the Early Neolithic peoples of that region as exemplified by IAM remains seem to have had dark that is melanated skin judging by their autosomal genes. Hence the reconstructions below.
Here is Fregel's PCA chart showing population relations via autosomes.
^ Note that IAM is closest to Taforalt and both are intermediate between East African Luxmanda on end and Natufians on the other.
Speaking of which, Natufian autosomal DNA also indicates that melanated skin was also not uncommon and that this complexion was even conserved by some Neolithic individuals (PPB).
So you had dark skin in Northwest Africa in one end and dark skin in the Levant on the other end yet the indigenous people of Northeast Africa/Egypt are somehow light-skinned?
Especially since a German team back in 2005 did a melanin dosage test on mummies:
A-M Mekota1 and M Vermehren2 Skin sections showed particularly good tissue preservation, although cellular outlines were never distinct. Although much of the epidermis had already separated from the dermis, the remaining epidermis often was preserved well (Fig. 1). The basal epithelial cells were packed with melanin as expected for specimens of Negroid origin... Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Skin tones in the Levant seem to have varied over time, the Natufians had probably another skin tone than the chalcolithic people in the Peki’in cave in Israel (who had a higher content of Iranian ancestry). Then the genetic makeup changed again during the Bronze age. We have had some threads about it here on ES.
If one see the reconstructions made of these peoples skin tones, they varied, but not always so enormously. It seems more to have been a gradual scale of tones. Maybe more autosomal ancient samples will give a more comprehensive picture of the human color scale in these regions. Would also be interesting to know more about things like hair structure. As in these reconstructions the Natufian (from Ancestral Whispers) and the Jericho man have straight hair. What do we know about that?
But best not to forget that even if skin color is interesting it was maybe not so important for the peoples of those ancient times. Probably things like family, relations, wealth, power, religion, traditions and culture were considered far more important.
Seems skin color is way more important for us modern people than for the ancients, which for example the heated debate about Netflix Cleopatra has shown.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Would be interesting to see some facial reconstructions of at least one or two of the Abusir specimens based on actual skulls, not only DNA.
For the pictures above, the Natufian is probably based on photos of a Natufian skull. The Jericho picture is based on an actual skull and the Judaean is based on three skulls.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
Lighter skin has always existed among various African groups as there is no single skin color in Africa and there never has been. So we can safely say that among certain populations in Northern parts of Africa there has always been an indigenous lighter skinned component. However, because coastal areas of Northern Africa are close to Europe and the Levant, then lighter skin from migrations of Europeans and others into these areas have also had an impact.But again, the main area of impact would have been in those coastal areas, while the Sahara, Sahel and Nile Valley always had black populations. And it is only in recent times that the population densities of coastal communities such as Egypt and so forth have risen to the point where those populations with lighter skin are numerically more dominant. That did not exist 5,000 years ago. Case in point, the population of Egypt 2,000 years ago is said to have been between 2 and 4 million people and has risen steadily since due to migration and reproduction, mostly in the northern parts of the country.
As for those reconstructions they are guessing. Because any kind of facial reconstruction depends on databases of features of populations to use as a references for soft facial features. And most of these databases are based on modern European populations.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Lighter skin has always existed among various African groups as there is no single skin color in Africa and there never has been. So we can safely say that among certain populations in Northern parts of Africa there has always been an indigenous lighter skinned component.
what are the names of some of these groups?
Posted by Ibis (Member # 23674) on :
Oh, I assumed that this was already common knowledge by now? In short the origins of the "White North African" stems from an invasion conducted by a Syrio-Palestinian invading group known as the Meshwesh.
These men ruled over the Libyans and mixed with them to produce soldiers that would eventually invade Egypt during the 18th dynasty. Thus the in the tomb of Kherouef
the "White North African makes their debut" and they initiate what we now refer to as the "Sea people invasions"
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ibis: Oh, I assumed that this was already common knowledge by now? In short the origins of the "White North African" stems from an invasion conducted by a Syrio-Palestinian invading group known as the Meshwesh.
No, "common knowledge" is not credible you need a reference for the above theory, to a published article or page number in a book which discusses evidence for the theory
Doug was talking about an indigenous lighter skinned population
Scholars often discuss Libyans and Sea people as separate groups
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Lighter skin has always existed among various African groups as there is no single skin color in Africa and there never has been. So we can safely say that among certain populations in Northern parts of Africa there has always been an indigenous lighter skinned component.
Posted by Tazarah (Member # 23365) on :
Lioness why are you avoiding me
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Entertaining video with a debate about if Black people are indigenous to North Africa or not
^ Why is there even a debate when we have genetic evidence showing that light skin was introduced to North Africa by foreign populations.
Ancient Genomes of North Africa IAM (Early Neolithic) people did not possess any of the European SNPs associated with light pigmentation, and most likely had dark skin and eyes. IAM samples contain ancestral alleles for pigmentation-associated variants present in SLC24A5 (rs1426654), SLC45A2 (rs16891982), and OCA2 (rs1800401 and 12913832) genes. On the other hand, KEB (Late Neolithic) individuals exhibit some European-derived alleles that predispose individuals to lighter skin and eye color, including those on genes SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and OCA2 (rs1800401).
Neolithic (Josef Eiwanger 1987) Orange: Cardial and Impressoceramics Brown: Neolithic Capsian tradition light green: Saharo-Sudanese cultures (Khartoum culture, Shaheinab culture) red: Neolithic of the Niger purple: Levant - Old Neolithic (Fayum Neolithic, Merimde) green: Upper Egyptian Neolithic (Badari)
^ As for northeast Africa we have not only historical accounts from Greeks, Hebrews, and Assyrians, but genetic samples from Egyptians showing them to be melanated, and ironically the same is shown with some Natufian DNA in the Levant. Natufians were Dark-skinned?
So it is the presence of light-skin that needs an explanation not dark-skin. Although how dark the complexion is a different issue.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Most of the Saharan rock art show brown people but there are some exceptions. How to interpret the exceptions is another matter. Are they a sign of more light skinned groups that are not well known? Maybe they are a result of artistic conventions? Do they descend from later immigrants?
About 3000 BC we have a couple of such pictures in Sahara, like the light bovine riding ladies from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria). I seen others too, belonging at least to the later parts of the bovine style/period.
Four ladies on a painting from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria)
Their authenticity has been questioned, but at least the rock art expert Jean-Loïc Le Quellec says they are authentic,
An interesting detail on the painting is the cone or pot on the head of at least one of the women. It looks like similar headgear in Egypt and other places. But it can of course be a coincident.
When it comes to later time we have well known Egyptian pictures of relatively light skinned Libyans, and later in history there are even mentionings in the literature of light haired Libyans. Among such mentionings are the 3rd century BC Greek author Callimachus and the 4th century BC author of the Pseudo-Scylax who both talk about yellow haired Libyan women.
But it is maybe hard to pinpoint exactly when light skin first existed in North Africa. We need more DNA.
Posted by Firewall (Member # 20331) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Entertaining video with a debate about if Black people are indigenous to North Africa or not
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Most of the Saharan rock art show brown people but there are some exceptions. How to interpret the exceptions is another matter. Are they a sign of more light skinned groups that are not well known? Maybe they are a result of artistic conventions? Do they descend from later immigrants?
About 3000 BC we have a couple of such pictures in Sahara, like the light bovine riding ladies from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria). I seen others too, belonging at least to the later parts of the bovine style/period.
Four ladies on a painting from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria)
Their authenticity has been questioned, but at least the rock art expert Jean-Loïc Le Quellec says they are authentic,
An interesting detail on the painting is the cone or pot on the head of at least one of the women. It looks like similar headgear in Egypt and other places. But it can of course be a coincident.
When it comes to later time we have well known Egyptian pictures of relatively light skinned Libyans, and later in history there are even mentionings in the literature of light haired Libyans. Among such mentionings are the 3rd century BC Greek author Callimachus and the 4th century BC author of the Pseudo-Scylax who both talk about yellow haired Libyan women.
But it is maybe hard to pinpoint exactly when light skin first existed in North Africa. We need more DNA.
Yes as a general rule Tassili Rock art shows human figures painted in brown color but there are exceptions. I'm not discounting the possibility that the ladies were light-skinned but neither am I discounting that this depiction could possibly be stylistic in the similar manner ancient Egyptians rendered women in a yellow color.
What's funny is that the four ladies all seem to sport Fulani hairstyles as Tukuler has often pointed out.
I love how this picture is spammed the world over as proof of wondering KaKazoids below the magical SSA barrier, but let someone use a historical photo of dark skinned folks in Europe, Asia or the Americas and whole nations melt down and clutch pearls calling those folks Afrocentrics…the hypocrisy is astounding.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Most of the Saharan rock art show brown people but there are some exceptions. How to interpret the exceptions is another matter. Are they a sign of more light skinned groups that are not well known? Maybe they are a result of artistic conventions? Do they descend from later immigrants?
About 3000 BC we have a couple of such pictures in Sahara, like the light bovine riding ladies from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria). I seen others too, belonging at least to the later parts of the bovine style/period.
Four ladies on a painting from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria)
Their authenticity has been questioned, but at least the rock art expert Jean-Loïc Le Quellec says they are authentic,
An interesting detail on the painting is the cone or pot on the head of at least one of the women. It looks like similar headgear in Egypt and other places. But it can of course be a coincident.
When it comes to later time we have well known Egyptian pictures of relatively light skinned Libyans, and later in history there are even mentionings in the literature of light haired Libyans. Among such mentionings are the 3rd century BC Greek author Callimachus and the 4th century BC author of the Pseudo-Scylax who both talk about yellow haired Libyan women.
But it is maybe hard to pinpoint exactly when light skin first existed in North Africa. We need more DNA.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
Lioness's correction to my confusing the ancient Greek melanchroes to the modern racial classification of melanochroi has reminded me that even racist anthropologist Carleton Coon in his Races of Africa classified the coastal Maghreb and Atlas area to be predominantly of "Aryan" extraction that is European and not like the indigenous North African Mediterranean types that skin color wise would be called "melanochroi".
This is why Antalas who is from that region looks like this.
And why his people look like this.
quote:Originally posted by Antalas: There is barely any berber diaspora in the US and egyptians aren't representative of all north africans, they in general are significantly darker than berbers. Most north africans live along the coast and look like me :
Meanwhile, according to Coon Maghrebi Berbers are the result of European (Aryan types) immigrating and absorbing the original melanochroi population which he describes as "gracile Mediterranean types".
Coon’s photo of a “gracile Mediterranean” Shluh Berber of Morocco
modern day Shluh Moroccan
Of course melanocrhoi are not the same as 'negroes' as the map above shows.
ADMIN WARNING: DO NOT repeat DO NOT post pictures of people without their consent even if said picture has their faces crossed out.
[ 24. November 2023, 05:08 PM: Message edited by: Askia_The_Great ]
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Dr Keita discusses questions about skin color, phenotype and relatedness among Africans
^ Although most of Africans' genetic diversity is indigenous there is a obviously a fraction that is due to foreign influence.
In the case of North Africa there were indeed white European types with red and blonde hair.
At present, and until a great mass of new and scientifically gathered evidence shall have been collected, only one main fact is indisputable—viz. that the so-called Hamitic race has absorbed a number of foreign ethnic elements, which it has not succeeded in wholly assimilating physically, though it has imposed upon them this or that Hamitic dialect. The original pure Hamitic type seems to be that found among the Saharan Berbers—a type tall, spare, long-limbed, and dark (brun); hair black or dark brown, straight or wavy; head dolichocephalic, orthognathous; nose slightly aquiline or straight; eyes dark and piercing, set rather widely apart; mouth well-defined; facial capillary system slightly developed; movements generally slow and dignified. In the west, between the Wady Dra'ah ("Wed Draa") and the Senegal, this type has become fused with the Negro elements from the south, the resultant type sharing the physical peculiarities of both progenitors. The same thing appears to have happened in the case of the various Hamitic peoples of East Africa.
The most important extra-African elements among the Hamites are the brachycephalic Berbers and the blonds. Both, as one would a priori expect, are found in the north. The brachycephals are, almost certainly, invaders, since they form but a small group near the northern seaboard of the dolichocephalic African continent. The blonds are much more numerous, but are even more clearly of extra-African origin. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of this xanthochroid element in Africa, it even having been asserted that the blonds owed their origin to the Vandals. This is, however, not only in itself incredible, owing to the number and distribution of the xanthochroids in the fastnesses of Morocco, but is even flatly contradicted by the ancient evidence. Whatever may be the true significance of the word Tehenu, which some would have to mean "fair" or "bright " (scil. "people"), evidence of a more satisfactory nature is to be found in the Egyptian monuments. For whereas the Libyan in earlier Egyptian art is regularly a brun, later representations exist showing Libyans not only blond, but even with red hair and blue eyes." Classical notices of blond Africans also exist; and though they are few, they are explicit. The Greek colonists of Cyrene are mentioned by Callimachus as dancing with the blond Libyan women.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: The most important extra-African elements among the Hamites are the brachycephalic Berbers and the blonds. Both, as one would a priori expect, are found in the north. The brachycephals are, almost certainly, invaders, since they form but a small group near the northern seaboard of the dolichocephalic African continent. The blonds are much more numerous, but are even more clearly of extra-African origin. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of this xanthochroid element in Africa, it even having been asserted that the blonds owed their origin to the Vandals. This is, however, not only in itself incredible, owing to the number and distribution of the xanthochroids in the fastnesses of Morocco, but is even flatly contradicted by the ancient evidence. Whatever may be the true significance of the word Tehenu, which some would have to mean "fair" or "bright " (scil. "people"), evidence of a more satisfactory nature is to be found in the Egyptian monuments. For whereas the Libyan in earlier Egyptian art is regularly a brun, later representations exist showing Libyans not only blond, but even with red hair and blue eyes." Classical notices of blond Africans also exist; and though they are few, they are explicit. The Greek colonists of Cyrene are mentioned by Callimachus as dancing with the blond Libyan women.[/i]
Thanks for the link to that book, especially since I had questions on how ancient Libyans related to western Amazigh the other day. Skimming through the chapter on dress and ornamentation, it's funny how these European-admixed Libyans still shared some customs with darker-skinned African groups in addition to speaking African languages. They're almost the Bronze Age equivalent of Vanilla Ice or Iggy Azalea.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Yes, unlike the much later Afrikaners of South Africa, this was truly a case of European immigrants assimilating into an African culture.
But the converse also took place in the Iberian Peninsula with African immigrants assimilating into the local cultures there.
Speaking of which...
White Berbers visa vi Black Vikings! LOL Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Yes, unlike the much later Afrikaners of South Africa, this was truly a case of European immigrants assimilating into an African culture.
But the converse also took place in the Iberian Peninsula with African immigrants assimilating into the local cultures there.
I wonder what that process would have actually looked like. Wouldn't it be more probable for immigrants to adopt an indigenous culture if the indigenous people outnumbered them? Because, if so, that might have implications for how European the resulting Libyans (and other coastal NW Africans in Bronze to Iron Age times) might have actually looked.
The fact that we do have the occasional AE depiction of dark-skinned Tehenu* makes me inclined to think that they could have actually been somewhat variable in skin tone, or at least more than the Book of Gates representations imply.
* BTW, despite how we were talking about them in the 2000s, Tehenu are actually the coastal Libyans whereas Temehu/Tamehou are the interior ones. Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: I wonder what that process would have actually looked like. Wouldn't it be more probable for immigrants to adopt an indigenous culture if the indigenous people outnumbered them? Because, if so, that might have implications for how European the resulting Libyans (and other coastal NW Africans in Bronze to Iron Age times) might have actually looked.
The indigenous majority vs. immigrant minority argument is not always valid. As I pointed out the Dutch Afrikaners (along with the later British) were/are a minority in South Africa but they obviously did not assimilate into the indigenous culture; on the contrary it was the opposite because the Europeans were a colonial presence who imposed their culture on the indigenous populace. So it depends on the cultural views of the immigrant people. Another example would be the Proto-Semites or Pre-proto-Semites in Asia. Depending on what area of SW Asia they were in and likely how much admixture they had with the indigenous populace, there were different levels of assimilation, with Semitic speakers in Mesopotamia perhaps being no different from the other groups except in language.
quote:The fact that we do have the occasional AE depiction of dark-skinned Tehenu* makes me inclined to think that they could have actually been somewhat variable in skin tone, or at least more than the Book of Gates representations imply.[/b]
As Bates pointed out all Tehenu in the Old Kingdom were of the same complexion as the Egyptians. I don't know about the Middle Kingdom, but definitely by the New Kingdom you see variation in types from fair-blonde and red-head types to olive skin types to the original type. The latter are identified with tribes farther west like the Libu and Meshwesh so something was going on in those areas. If not the Sea Peoples, then their predecessors from Europe.
quote:[qb]* BTW, despite how we were talking about them in the 2000s, Tehenu are actually the coastal Libyans whereas Temehu/Tamehou are the interior ones.
Yeah, back then I used to get confused over the names. LOL But I still identify Tehenu with the original Delta people or at least the western part of the Delta. The Temehu are obviously identified with the Waheti (Oases) People of the Western Desert.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
seems to be a blue eyed Libyan, which I have never seen before depicted
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ That reminds me of a phenomenon that Bates or Briggs and other ethnologists spoke of-- that being the 'blue-eyed Tuareg'. It's rare but it occurs. Foreign admixture may not be the cause because it happens among noble, allegedly 'pure-blood' castes who in everything else display the dark 'Hamitic' type. Of course it's not unusual for blue eyes to occur among black populations like those of Melanesia and Australia.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: As Bates pointed out all Tehenu in the Old Kingdom were of the same complexion as the Egyptians. I don't know about the Middle Kingdom, but definitely by the New Kingdom you see variation in types from fair-blonde and red-head types to olive skin types to the original type. The latter are identified with tribes farther west like the Libu and Meshwesh so something was going on in those areas. If not the Sea Peoples, then their predecessors from Europe.
If the identification is accurate, this might indicate a Middle Kingdom-era arrival for lighter-skinned Libyans.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
If the identification is accurate, this might indicate a Middle Kingdom-era arrival for lighter-skinned Libyans.
Thanks, I'll keep this in mind.
Methodology and African Prehistory edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo
Posted by Firewall (Member # 20331) on :
Here is some talk from another youtuber talking about north african and east african dna and phenotypes etc..
ancient egyptian are East African (black)dna @AncestralBrew
quote: #history #africa #egyptian #ancient #ancientcivilization #now #wow #egypt #art #europe this is a breakdown of the genetic history of east Africa in its highest component
quote:Originally posted by Ibis: Oh, I assumed that this was already common knowledge by now? In short the origins of the "White North African" stems from an invasion conducted by a Syrio-Palestinian invading group known as the Meshwesh.
These men ruled over the Libyans and mixed with them to produce soldiers that would eventually invade Egypt during the 18th dynasty. Thus the in the tomb of Kherouef
the "White North African makes their debut" and they initiate what we now refer to as the "Sea people invasions"
Correct! However I will still consider Herodotus claim that the Meshwesh were descendants of the trojans
If the identification is accurate, this might indicate a Middle Kingdom-era arrival for lighter-skinned Libyans.
Thanks, I'll keep this in mind. Some North African
Methodology and African Prehistory edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo
I read this whole article on UNESCO he never sites his source for Old Kingdom references to blonde hair and blue eyes
Some north african " ethiopians" resembled cretans because they were descended from cretans just like the PHilistines were descended from cretans
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Firewall:
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Entertaining video with a debate about if Black people are indigenous to North Africa or not
Chief X is an agent, in all that " agent " means in this here USA. A plant an informant probably FBI to smoke out black identity extremists
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ There are no references to white or blonde Berbers in the Old Kingdom. The first references to such people comes from the Middle Kingdom as Brandon cites.
Also, the idea that the lighter-skinned Berbers--not the Nordic types but the dark-haired ones-- originated from Syria-Palestine is something I've read about before in several sources. This largely stems from not just physical appearance but also certain attire.
And not only appearance and attire...
The Greek Age of Bronze Sea Peoples The Great Karnak inscription of the Pharaoh Merneptah also states that at least three of the Sea Peoples, the Ekwesh, Sheklesh and Sherden, were circumcised. It is interesting to note in any event, the biblical emphasis on the Philistines as uncircumcised and the fact that they are almost the only group so labeled in the biblical corpus suggest that they may have been the archetype of "uncircumcision" for the biblical authors.
This image of Sherden chief closely resembles that of Semites as the Egyptians habitually portrayed them, and also suggests that Sherden were native to the East with its ancient Semitic population. As already mentioned also the Sherden together the Ekwesh, and Sheklesh were circumcised as states in the Great Karnak inscription of the Pharaoh Merneptah.
So it's clear that some of these Sea Peoples adopted the African specifically Afroasiatic custom of circumcision. As for the Meshwesh who were not a Sea People but a Libyan group, that they descend from the Trojans is a curious claim considering Virgil's epic Aeneid which describes how the Trojan prince Aeneas led a group of refugees fleeing the Greek sacking of Troy, and how before their final destination in Latium they stopped in the recently founded Phoenician colony of Carthage in Tunisia.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
The Meshwesh were newcomers from elsewhere and were NOT indigenous Lybians as and neither were Rebu
The fact that the Meshwesh needed head shawls because of the heat unlike other libyans is a clear indication of their origin elsewhere.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ I never said they were indigenous but simply that they were Libyan in that they lived in Libya. As to where they are from is anybody's guess but you seem to act as if you know the answers. Tukuler was the first to post hints that they may be Asiatic, if that's the case then they and likely the some of the Sea People whom they allied with were also Asiatic and I presume to be Phoenicians themselves if not a related people as the Phoenicians were the ones who dominated the Mediterranean before the Greeks and settled in many areas throughout that basin.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
To refer to them as " libyan " is an old mistake and causes modern confusion
It was also Clyde Winters back in 2011 on egyptsearch who sourced good historical quotes for this but he was ignored and I am sure many others have pointed it out.
That people here keep picturing spamming " libyans" without historical context is trolling.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ If they are native to Libya as in being born there though not necessarily originating there what's wrong with using the term Libyan? The elites of Mexico are Castilian Spanish many of whom Nordic looking but they are still Mexican even though they may not descend from the Aztecs.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ If they are native to Libya as in being born there though not necessarily originating there what's wrong with using the term Libyan? The elites of Mexico are Castilian Spanish many of whom Nordic looking but they are still Mexican even though they may not descend from the Aztecs.
Elite Castilian Spanish in Mexico make sure you know they are SPANISH as in the country and not Mexican/mestizaje 500 years after Cortez landed
The same for the Meshwesh who were claiming to be descended from Trojans 600 years after the war of the sea peoples in 1200 bc when Herodotus reported it in 450 BC
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: The most important extra-African elements among the Hamites are the brachycephalic Berbers and the blonds. Both, as one would a priori expect, are found in the north. The brachycephals are, almost certainly, invaders, since they form but a small group near the northern seaboard of the dolichocephalic African continent. The blonds are much more numerous, but are even more clearly of extra-African origin. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of this xanthochroid element in Africa, it even having been asserted that the blonds owed their origin to the Vandals. This is, however, not only in itself incredible, owing to the number and distribution of the xanthochroids in the fastnesses of Morocco, but is even flatly contradicted by the ancient evidence. Whatever may be the true significance of the word Tehenu, which some would have to mean "fair" or "bright " (scil. "people"), evidence of a more satisfactory nature is to be found in the Egyptian monuments. For whereas the Libyan in earlier Egyptian art is regularly a brun, later representations exist showing Libyans not only blond, but even with red hair and blue eyes." Classical notices of blond Africans also exist; and though they are few, they are explicit. The Greek colonists of Cyrene are mentioned by Callimachus as dancing with the blond Libyan women.[/i]
Thanks for the link to that book, especially since I had questions on how ancient Libyans related to western Amazigh the other day. Skimming through the chapter on dress and ornamentation, it's funny how these European-admixed Libyans still shared some customs with darker-skinned African groups in addition to speaking African languages. They're almost the Bronze Age equivalent of Vanilla Ice or Iggy Azalea.
This is how colonizers behave as more recent history shows us. For instance, the sea peoples of the British Isles and their invasion of North America.
Many British men went native, for various reasons. Trade, women, or maybe they just liked the new culture more. More exposure more admiration and adaption to the new environment.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote: Apparently, according to another study, the European gene responsible for blue eyes arose from a single ancestor between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago around the Black Sea, during the expansion of the human population in Europe and the arrival of agriculture from the Middle East. Such date is rather recent when compared to the genetic results suggesting the Temahuq speakers (the Berbers) breaking up from the Afro-Asiatic group between 21,000 and 32,000 years ago
Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom shown "red brown", with a long, lock-like beard, very similar to the beard of Osiris, which the pharaohs also adopted as a sign of royalty. However, the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned (or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces and thick lips ; most of which needless to say are features characteristic of African populations - the ancestors of humanity.
In ancient times men wore single hair locks on one side of the head, and in some cases the side-lock was worn on both sides of the head at once. Libyan chiefs however were found wearing the double side-lock (as seen on two chiefs in a relief at Karnak). Libyan captives often appear as wearing only one side-lock, either on the left or on the right side of the head. Incidentally, writes Oric Bates, the hieroglyph for the "west" iment (the Libyan land) is seemingly a cap with a plume, and two pendants of unequal length which appear to be side-locks; which he compared to modern Berber Imushagh ('Berber Tuareg') women, who sometimes braid their hair in two side-locks on the right and left of the head.
Mass Migration from Europe to the levant and africa during the bronze age collapse discussed in new video. Colonizers! The Bronze age collapse should be called The Destruction of Black civilization.
Ancient Apocalypse - The Sea People: Catalysts of Bronze Age Collapse | Full Documentary
quote:This study showed that the maternal genetic lineage of TAF population is composed of North African and Eurasian haplogroups.
This study showed also that the maternal genetic lineage of TAF population is composed of North African haplogroup (U6) and Eurasian haplogroups (H, U, R0).
The seven individuals of AFA showed five different haplotypes, classified into four haplogroups. Three specimens (AF2, AF13, and AF XXV) presented the same sequence of the reference: rCRS and could belong to H or U haplogroup. Two individuals (AF3 and AF7) were classified as haplogroup J and J1c3f. One individual (AF19) was classified as Haplogroup T2b. The last individual (AF22B) carrying the substitution 16126C could be classified as haplogroup JT or H14b1. Interestingly among the seven samples tested, no Sub-Saharan haplogroups (L0–L7) were identified.
The absence of haplotype belonging to Sub-Saharan haplogroups (L0–L7) would suggest that our sample of Iberomaurusians is not originating from Sub-Saharan region. These results confirm dental, craniofacial, post-cranial comparative studies, and industry investigations which found divergence between Iberomarusian skeletons and their contemporaneous Nubians (Camps 1974; Ferembach 1985; Bermudez de Castro 1991; Irish 2000).
According to our results, the presence of Eurasian haplogroups (JT, J, T, H, R0a1, U) in AFA and in TAF individuals suggests that these lineages were present in North Africa at least 21,000 YBP confirming the estimated coalescence time for these haplogroups (Brandst€atter et al. 2008; Ennafaa et al 2009; Ottoni et al., 2010; Pala et al. 2012; Zheng et al. 2012).
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Mass Migration from Europe to the levant and africa during the bronze age collapse discussed in new video. Colonizers! The Bronze age collapse should be called The Destruction of Black civilization.
Ancient Apocalypse - The Sea People: Catalysts of Bronze Age Collapse | Full Documentary
This documentary is focused mainly on the destruction of Ugarit. You believe these people were Africans or resembling Africans?
Also, the documentary describes destruction not colonization and includes the possibility by invasion, drought, earthquake, possibly a combination of factors
Ugarit was an ancient port city in northern Syria, in the outskirts of modern Latakia, discovered by accident in 1928 with the Ugaritic texts. Its ruins are often called Ras Shamra[note after the headland where they lie.
Ugarit had close connections to the Hittite Empire, sent tribute to Egypt at times, and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus (then called Alashiya), documented in the archives recovered from the site and corroborated by Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery found there. The polity was at its height from c. 1450 BC until its destruction in c. 1185 BC;[5] this destruction was possibly caused by the purported Sea Peoples, or an internal struggle. The kingdom would be one of the many dismantled during the Bronze Age Collapse
History Ras Shamra lies on the Mediterranean coast, some 11 kilometres (7 mi) north of Latakia, near modern Burj al-Qasab.
Origins and the second millennium
A tomb in the Royal palace's courtyard Neolithic Ugarit was important enough to be fortified with a wall early on, perhaps by 6000 BC, though the site is thought to have been inhabited earlier. Ugarit was important perhaps because it was both a port and at the entrance of the inland trade route to the Euphrates and Tigris lands.[citation needed] The city reached its heyday between 1800 and 1200 BC, when it ruled a trade-based coastal kingdom, trading with Egypt, Cyprus, the Aegean, Syria, the Hittites, and much of the eastern Mediterranean.[6]
Baal God, bronze and gold statuette from Ugarit (Ras Shamra), Syria
in your doc Sea People or Philistines are suggested as contributing to the destruction of the Bronze Age
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: [QB]
quote: Apparently, according to another study, the European gene responsible for blue eyes arose from a single ancestor between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago around the Black Sea, during the expansion of the human population in Europe and the arrival of agriculture from the Middle East. Such date is rather recent when compared to the genetic results suggesting the Temahuq speakers (the Berbers) breaking up from the Afro-Asiatic group between 21,000 and 32,000 years ago
Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom shown "red brown", with a long, lock-like beard, very similar to the beard of Osiris, which the pharaohs also adopted as a sign of royalty. However, the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned (or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces and thick lips ; most of which needless to say are features characteristic of African populations - the ancestors of humanity.
In ancient times men wore single hair locks on one side of the head, and in some cases the side-lock was worn on both sides of the head at once. Libyan chiefs however were found wearing the double side-lock (as seen on two chiefs in a relief at Karnak). Libyan captives often appear as wearing only one side-lock, either on the left or on the right side of the head. Incidentally, writes Oric Bates, the hieroglyph for the "west" iment (the Libyan land) is seemingly a cap with a plume, and two pendants of unequal length which appear to be side-locks; which he compared to modern Berber Imushagh ('Berber Tuareg') women, who sometimes braid their hair in two side-locks on the right and left of the head.
So the descendants of the Tehenu are Fula?
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
quote: the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned (or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces and thick lips
where are the beards at?
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: which he compared to modern Berber Imushagh ('Berber Tuareg') women, who sometimes braid their hair in two side-locks on the right and left of the head.
Fula or Tuareg?
Posted by Geometer (Member # 23746) on :
👽
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Mass Migration from Europe to the levant and africa during the bronze age collapse discussed in new video. Colonizers! The Bronze age collapse should be called The Destruction of Black civilization.
Ancient Apocalypse - The Sea People: Catalysts of Bronze Age Collapse | Full Documentary
quote: Libyan Origins: That the Meshwesh were of Libyan origin is explicitly stated in a genealogy contained on the stela of Pasenhor (dated to the reign of Shoshenq V), where the great chiefs of the Meshwesh (including the kings of the 22nd Dynasty) are stated to be the descendants of "Buyuwawa the Libyan." The Libyo-Berber origin of the Meshwesh is also indicated in their personal names (such as Osorkon, Takelot, Nimlot, Shoshenq, etc.) and a handful of non-Egyptian titles used by these people that are related to the Berber languages. After the Egyptians, the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines mentioned various other tribes in Libya. Later tribal names differ from the Egyptian ones but, probably, some tribes were named in the Egyptian sources and the later ones, as well. The Meshwesh tribe represents this assumption. Some scholars argue it would be the same tribe called Mazyes by Hecataeus of Miletus and Maxyes by Herodotus, while the tribe was called Mazices and Mazax in Latin sources.
I keep forgetting that the 22nd Dynasty was ethnically Meshwesh, but from the surviving portraits they did not fit the 'white' type of Libyan.
quote:The Meshwesh are known from ancient Egyptian texts as early as the 18th Dynasty, where they are mentioned as a source of cattle provided to king Amenhotep III's palace at Malkata. This indicates there may have been some trade relations between the Meshwesh and the Egyptians at the time. At the very least, it can be said that the Egyptians were familiar with the Meshwesh. For the remainder of the 18th Dynasty, information about Meshwesh or Libyans in general is sketchy. There are, however, representations of Libyans (perhaps Meshwesh) from the reign of Akhenaten, including a remarkable papyrus depicting a group of Libyans slaying an Egyptian. However, the papyrus is fragmentary, so it is not known what the historical context was. The Meshwesh or Ma were nomad hunter pastoralists, living off their goats, camels and other livestock while hunting and gathering at the same time. Milk, meat, hides and wool were gathered from their livestock for food, tents and clothing.
The first ancient Egyptian sources described the Meshwesh men with tattoos and long hair with longer side locks in the front, while centuries later they appear with shorter hair of Egyptian influence but braided and beaded, neatly parted in both sides from their temples and decorated with one or two feathers attached to leather bands around the crown of the head. They still used the same robes as before, a thin mantle of antelope hide, dyed and printed, crossing one of their shoulders and coming down until mid calf length to make an open robe over a loincloth with an adorned phallus sheath, being the only exception of the new addition of a kilt above the knees and an animal tail in the Egyptian manner of king Narmer and the phallus adornment over it. Men wore facial hair trimmed except at their chin and the older men kept their longer chin tufts braided. Women wore the same robes as men, plaited, decorated hair and both genders wore heavy jewelry. Later images showed them to have accepted and adapted some Greek or Macedonian tunics. Weapons included bows and arrows, hatchets, spears and daggers.
The style of dress is very African but the description fits with these figures as well.
Posted by Geometer (Member # 23746) on :
^ Long time Egyptsearcher. I love your Theory of Relativity, it's BRILLIANT! 🤣
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Nigerian Fula's DNA ancestry test... 1% Greece & Italy is a trace region that matches the SOURCE of bronze age collapse invasions.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Lioness, I am not shocked that you could watch that excellent historical documentary about the sea peoples and the bronze age collapse and come away with such INANE comments.
I truly believe that English is not your first language and AND! Your comprehension is left wanting.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Fula man with beard Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
^ The Fulani have some North African genetic influence and probably some cultural influence as well. But I wouldn't claim them as representing the ancient Libyans if that's what you're trying to do. Most of their ancestry is still West Africa IIRC and their native language is Niger-Congo rather than Libyco-Berber as the Libyans' language appears to have been. They're not quite the same ethnic group.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
Fulani ancestry was discussed here. They are part West African and part Central Saharan.
Posted by Askia_The_Great (Member # 22000) on :
I agree that the Fulanis are still mainly West Africans.
Posted by Shebitku (Member # 23742) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
Apparently, according to another study, the European gene responsible for blue eyes arose from a single ancestor between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago around the Black Sea, during the expansion of the human population in Europe and the arrival of agriculture from the Middle East. Such date is rather recent when compared to the genetic results suggesting the Temahuq speakers (the Berbers) breaking up from the Afro-Asiatic group between 21,000 and 32,000 years ago
Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom shown "red brown", with a long, lock-like beard, very similar to the beard of Osiris, which the pharaohs also adopted as a sign of royalty. However, the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned (or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces and thick lips ; most of which needless to say are features characteristic of African populations - the ancestors of humanity.
In ancient times men wore single hair locks on one side of the head, and in some cases the side-lock was worn on both sides of the head at once. Libyan chiefs however were found wearing the double side-lock (as seen on two chiefs in a relief at Karnak). Libyan captives often appear as wearing only one side-lock, either on the left or on the right side of the head. Incidentally, writes Oric Bates, the hieroglyph for the "west" iment (the Libyan land) is seemingly a cap with a plume, and two pendants of unequal length which appear to be side-locks; which he compared to modern Berber Imushagh ('Berber Tuareg') women, who sometimes braid their hair in two side-locks on the right and left of the head.
quote:
Fula man with beard
Random pictures spams and saying someone has big lips or a beard is of completely no significance and prove nothing. Argue for Tobuou continuation in Libya from ancient times, even though they're native to and have been in Libya from ancient times? Of course not. Argue for Fulani continuation in Libya from ancient times, yet can't name one Fulani tribe native to or that dispersed from Libya? Of course, we know why.....
quote:Originally posted by Brandon Pilcher: ^ The Fulani have some North African genetic influence and probably some cultural influence as well. But I wouldn't claim them as representing the ancient Libyans if that's what you're trying to do. Most of their ancestry is still West Africa IIRC and their native language is Niger-Congo rather than Libyco-Berber as the Libyans' language appears to have been. They're not quite the same ethnic group.
quote:Originally posted by Brandon Pilcher: I agree that the Fulanis are still mainly West Africans.
Although the Fulanis speak a Niger-Congo language, it likely doesn't represent their original tongue and no they don't cluster with most West Africans, but rather with Chadic groups (who are largely of Nilo-Saharan extraction) and Nilo-Saharan groups. The sedentary fulani groups (Toucouleurs, Rimmaaybe etc) are more similair to a average west african, with them being less eurasian, but if you're of the belief that the Ikelan groups aren't real Tuaregs, equally these groups aren't real Fulanis
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
^^ no one should confuse the modern country of Libya with the ancient libya mentioned by the greeks.
From Dana's site Afro-Asiatica blogspot
From my own study I agree with everything she says here
quote: The origins of the Fulani have stirred some lasting controversy over the last several decades due to their physical appearance or phenotype, Arabic records concerning their origins, the presence of Zebu cattle thought to be native to India, certain inconsistencies with regard to their phenotype and their current linguistic affinities which were thought to not match their phenotype. Due to European colonialist ideas about indigenous African origins and especially North African “racial” origins, the notion has gradually evolved – as it has with the Tuareg and other dark-skinned Africans once prevalent in North Africa - that their ethnic roots were “enigmatic” or “unknown”. Yet, in fact, the earliest Fulani were one of the few peoples for whom there is an abundance of evidence for origins in the Sahara oases and North Africa since the Neolithic. The evidence is both archeological and anthropological and tends to show that original Fulani population belonged to a group of neolithic pastoralists in the central and northern Sahara who were spread to Kharga, Kerma and possibly further east in Africa in later times. They appear to have been among the first people to be known to ancient Egyptians as under the names Tjehenu or Temehou. Their presence in stone age north Africa probably led to contact with other groups as far back as the late stone age which has led to their current so–called non-African features such as notably long and less frizzly hair than other west African tribes and perhaps the introduction of a curvature to their innately narrow long noses.
Again, Meshwesh & Libu are NEW libyan groups encounterd by the middle kingdom Egyptians
quote:Egyptian contacts with ‘new’ Libyan groups
Low-intensity contact between Egyptians and Tjemehu/Tjehenu typifies EgyptoLibyan relations from the beginning of the dynastic period to the late eighteenth Dynasty. A second phase may be said to have begun at the end of that period, and is characterized by the attempts of Libyan groups to migrate in large numbers into Egypt itself. This is best attested by the records of the great Libyan war in year 5 of Merenptah, most famously on the so-called 'Israel Stela' and on a companion text at Kamak, and by the textual and pictorial accounts of two major Libyan wars in years 5 and 11 of Ramesses III. In both these reigns 'new' Libyan groups, especially the Meshwesh and Libu, take the lead, although accompanied by other 'older' Libyan groups and smaller new ones of whom little is heard before or after. It is likely that the Meshwesh and Libu were groups which possessed more substantial settlements than the Tjemehu/Tjehenu, probably, at least in part, within Cyrenaica (O'Connor 1990), although this location for the Meshwesh/Libu is far from universally accepted (Spalinger 1979).
To Yatunde, the 22nd Dynasty was Meshwesh but there was no indication that they were white or 'Trojan'. I do believe something was going on during the Bronze Age Collapse that spurred on migrations throughout the Mediterranean which explains the white Libyans even those with brown, red, or blonde hair.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
While we're on the subject of light-skinned ancient North Africans, what I wonder about is what the NW African communities the Carthaginians would have interacted with (and probably assimilated) would have looked like. Many of them were on the coast, so it's not unreasonable to assume many were light-skinned, but I have seen some Carthaginian sculptures with traces of paint that suggests dark skin to me. Such as these:
Which is not to say there weren't lighter-skinned people in the Carthaginian populace as well. Carthage did get its start as a Phoenician trading post, and it would incorporate parts of southern Europe into its empire as well as Northwest Africa.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
__________________________________________Algerian berber
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: _______________________________Algerian berber [/qb]
Stop your no context picture spamming. It's TROLLING
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
To Yatunde, the 22nd Dynasty was Meshwesh but there was no indication that they were white or 'Trojan'. I do believe something was going on during the Bronze Age Collapse that spurred on migrations throughout the Mediterranean which explains the white Libyans even those with brown, red, or blonde hair.
Clyde has a good blog post about this with REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY for doubters to check if they need to read for themselves. However, I highly doubt the trolls here actually 1. read 2. double check references
But I do!
quote:The Meshwesh are different from the Tehenu and the original Tamehu recorded by the Egyptians prior to the New Kingdom. Below we see the traditional depiction of a Tamehu, the sidelock, shoulder cape and clean face note absence of feathers in the hair.
The Meshwesh wore Tehenu traditional costumes but they are not believed to be real Tehenu. The Tehenu and the Temehu usually wore different costumes. In the New Kingdom depictions of the Temehu, the Meshwesh have "long chin beards", like the Syrian-Palestinians and Peoples of the Sea. They wear kilts, sheaths and capes open at the front tied at one shoulder. Like the earlierTehenu they wore feathers as a sign of High Status.
David O'Connor makes it clear that there was "marked hetergeneity of the Tjemhu" (p.41). The first attack by Libyans on Egypt were led by the Libu during the 5th year of Ramses III's reign. Diop has provided convincing evidence that the Libu, later migrated into Senegal, where they presently live near Cape Verde.
The difference in dress among the Meshwesh and Tehenu, and their hostility toward the Tehenu, have led many researchers to see the Temehu of the New Kingdom as a different group from the original Temehu of Egyptian traditions. O'Connor (p.74) in the work cited above makes it clear that the Temehu in Ramses III day--"[have] hairstyles, dress and apparently ethnic type [that] are markedly different from the Tjehnyu/tjemhu of the Old Kingdom (Osing, 1980,1018-19).
quote:Various explanations have been offered: Wainwright, for example, concluded that 'Meshwesh was a mixed tribe of Libu like tribesmen with their native chiefs who become subject to a family of Tjehnu origin'(1962,p.92), while Osing suggested that the New Kingdowm Tjemhu had displaced or absorbed the earlier Tjehnyu but had selectively taken over or retained some Tjehnyu traits, in the case of the rulers for Meshwesh (1980,1019-1020). Dr. O'Connor is of the opinion "that some rulers of the later New Kingdom Tjemhu deliberately adopted traits they discovered from the Egyptians to be characteristic of ancient Tjehnyu/ Tjemhu, so as to increase there prestige, or in some way had these rtraits imposed upon them by the Egyptians" (p.74).
In her masters dissertation from 2023 Kathrine M. Gosnell gives a historical Background to some Libyan identities
quote:The Libyans were originally semi-nomadic and came into Egypt for grazing ground for their cattle, a practice possibly documented in Egypt as far back as the Early Dynastic (2900 BCE – 2590 BCE).1 The designation “Libyan” is an umbrella term for all the smaller groups together and includes the Meshwesh (the shortened version of which is the Ma), the Libu, and the Mahasun.2 Imagery of Libyans prior to the Third Intermediate Period portrayed them in a stereotypical fashion as a way to “other” them, or separate them from the Egyptians.3 They were generally shown with lighter, yellowish, tattooed skin, wearing colorful garments often made of animal hides, or penis sheaths. They wore a sidelock of hair and a feathered headdress which indicated not only their Libyan heritage and high status but the group with which they were affiliated. A vertical feather showed a connection to the Libu people while a horizontal feather designated the Meshwesh people.4 A combination of a vertical and a horizontal feather indicated a person who was a dual chief; or someone who identified as a chief over multiple groups of people.5
The eventual relations to the Sea peoples is also touched upon:
quote:As a result of those defeats, Libyan mercenaries made up a significant portion of the Egyptian army under the Ramesside kings.19 Later on, large numbers began settling in Egypt, possibly due to food shortages or pressures from the Sea Peoples, groups of peoples from the eastern Mediterranean that besieged Egypt at the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BCE).20
quote:Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom shown "red brown", with a long, lock-like beard, very similar to the beard of Osiris, which the pharaohs also adopted as a sign of royalty. However, the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned (or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces and thick lips ; most of which needless to say are features characteristic of African populations - the ancestors of humanity.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: _______________________________Algerian berber
Stop your no context picture spamming. It's TROLLING [/QB]
No, the photos are examples of yellowish skin for reference. We sees a similar skin tone but different features, don't get upset about that. That yellowish tone is more common in North Africa, somewhat light. Sometimes Libyans are depicted with this tone
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
How much ancient DNA do they have from ancient Libya? From which periods? Can one see how the genetics change over time, or how it varies geographically within the area which today is called Libya?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
quote:Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom shown "red brown", with a long, lock-like beard, very similar to the beard of Osiris, which the pharaohs also adopted as a sign of royalty. However, the Tehenu were portrayed as tall, dark skinned (or bronze-skinned, as I noted above), with long black hair, short pointed beards, slender faces and thick lips ; most of which needless to say are features characteristic of African populations - the ancestors of humanity.
This relief from Sahure's pyramid complex in Abusir (not the same Abusir el-Meleq of the mummy study) is probably the only known depiction of a Libyan in the Old Kingdom. (On the relief there is a second figure looking the same but in poorer condition and no color at all left)
The figures on the Narmer Palette could be a Libyan.
Instead of all theses author's interpretations we can look at the art for ourselves and with the internet more broadly than ever
Your quote says "Generally speaking the Libyans were in the Old Kingdom shown "red brown"
I don't see support for the statement "generally" which implies there is more than the above depiction from Sahure's complex and on top of that in good enough condition to still have paint on it.
Fragment from Ramesses III
We see a similar type in the 20th dynasty as to the 5th dynasty both with the crossing chest straps
My opinion on this Fragment from Ramesses III is that the condition of the color could be so bad as to not be able to no the original skin tone
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: [QB] How much ancient DNA do they have from ancient Libya?
there are no sites in Libya that archeologists have correlated to the Libyans depicted in this Egyptian art
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
To Yatunde, the 22nd Dynasty was Meshwesh but there was no indication that they were white or 'Trojan'. I do believe something was going on during the Bronze Age Collapse that spurred on migrations throughout the Mediterranean which explains the white Libyans even those with brown, red, or blonde hair.
Clyde has a good blog post about this with REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY for doubters to check if they need to read for themselves. However, I highly doubt the trolls here actually 1. read 2. double check references
But I do!
quote:The Meshwesh are different from the Tehenu and the original Tamehu recorded by the Egyptians prior to the New Kingdom. Below we see the traditional depiction of a Tamehu, the sidelock, shoulder cape and clean face note absence of feathers in the hair.
The Meshwesh wore Tehenu traditional costumes but they are not believed to be real Tehenu. The Tehenu and the Temehu usually wore different costumes. In the New Kingdom depictions of the Temehu, the Meshwesh have "long chin beards", like the Syrian-Palestinians and Peoples of the Sea. They wear kilts, sheaths and capes open at the front tied at one shoulder. Like the earlierTehenu they wore feathers as a sign of High Status.
David O'Connor makes it clear that there was "marked hetergeneity of the Tjemhu" (p.41). The first attack by Libyans on Egypt were led by the Libu during the 5th year of Ramses III's reign. Diop has provided convincing evidence that the Libu, later migrated into Senegal, where they presently live near Cape Verde.
The difference in dress among the Meshwesh and Tehenu, and their hostility toward the Tehenu, have led many researchers to see the Temehu of the New Kingdom as a different group from the original Temehu of Egyptian traditions. O'Connor (p.74) in the work cited above makes it clear that the Temehu in Ramses III day--"[have] hairstyles, dress and apparently ethnic type [that] are markedly different from the Tjehnyu/tjemhu of the Old Kingdom (Osing, 1980,1018-19).
quote:Various explanations have been offered: Wainwright, for example, concluded that 'Meshwesh was a mixed tribe of Libu like tribesmen with their native chiefs who become subject to a family of Tjehnu origin'(1962,p.92), while Osing suggested that the New Kingdowm Tjemhu had displaced or absorbed the earlier Tjehnyu but had selectively taken over or retained some Tjehnyu traits, in the case of the rulers for Meshwesh (1980,1019-1020). Dr. O'Connor is of the opinion "that some rulers of the later New Kingdom Tjemhu deliberately adopted traits they discovered from the Egyptians to be characteristic of ancient Tjehnyu/ Tjemhu, so as to increase there prestige, or in some way had these rtraits imposed upon them by the Egyptians" (p.74).
Djehuti, before replying to this I recommend you read Clyde's full article on this at the above link, it's not long
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
To Yatunde, the 22nd Dynasty was Meshwesh but there was no indication that they were white or 'Trojan'. I do believe something was going on during the Bronze Age Collapse that spurred on migrations throughout the Mediterranean which explains the white Libyans even those with brown, red, or blonde hair.
Clyde has a good blog post about this with REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY for doubters to check if they need to read for themselves. However, I highly doubt the trolls here actually 1. read 2. double check references
But I do!
That's what you need to do, go to the references which you haven't done
not the second hand interpretations quote from those, with page numbers
> stop bluffing, you haven't read this stuff yourself !
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: While we're on the subject of light-skinned ancient North Africans, what I wonder about is what the NW African communities the Carthaginians would have interacted with (and probably assimilated) would have looked like. Many of them were on the coast, so it's not unreasonable to assume many were light-skinned, but I have seen some Carthaginian sculptures with traces of paint that suggests dark skin to me. Such as these:
Which is not to say there weren't lighter-skinned people in the Carthaginian populace as well. Carthage did get its start as a Phoenician trading post, and it would incorporate parts of southern Europe into its empire as well as Northwest Africa.
Well we have the Romans in particular Manilius who groups (indigenous) Maghrebi in his list of dark/black races. ...The Ethiopians stain the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness; less sun-burnt are the natives of India; the land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile, darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its fields: it it a country nearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone. The Sun-God dries up with dust the tribes of Afrorum amid their desert lands; the Moors derive their name from their faces, and their identity is proclaimed by the colour of their skins.
- Mauretania_____coloured - Afrorum______pulvere terre (sandy) - Aegyptia ____ infuscat - India _______ tostos - Aethiopes ___ tenebrisque
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Well we have the Romans in particular Manilius who groups (indigenous) Maghrebi in his list of dark/black races. ...The Ethiopians stain the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness; less sun-burnt are the natives of India; the land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile, darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its fields: it it a country nearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone. The Sun-God dries up with dust the tribes of Afrorum amid their desert lands; the Moors derive their name from their faces, and their identity is proclaimed by the colour of their skins.
^ LOL The only one projecting is YOU. What in what context do you think I was using the word 'races', other than the same that Manilius was?! The Latin word gentes is equivalent to 'races'.
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: __________________________________________Algerian berber
Tunisians Berbers.
Coon mushots
Of course modern day Maghrebi are heterogeneous.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
To Yatunde, the 22nd Dynasty was Meshwesh but there was no indication that they were white or 'Trojan'. I do believe something was going on during the Bronze Age Collapse that spurred on migrations throughout the Mediterranean which explains the white Libyans even those with brown, red, or blonde hair.
Clyde has a good blog post about this with REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY for doubters to check if they need to read for themselves. However, I highly doubt the trolls here actually 1. read 2. double check references
But I do!
quote:The Meshwesh are different from the Tehenu and the original Tamehu recorded by the Egyptians prior to the New Kingdom. Below we see the traditional depiction of a Tamehu, the sidelock, shoulder cape and clean face note absence of feathers in the hair.
The Meshwesh wore Tehenu traditional costumes but they are not believed to be real Tehenu. The Tehenu and the Temehu usually wore different costumes. In the New Kingdom depictions of the Temehu, the Meshwesh have "long chin beards", like the Syrian-Palestinians and Peoples of the Sea. They wear kilts, sheaths and capes open at the front tied at one shoulder. Like the earlierTehenu they wore feathers as a sign of High Status.
David O'Connor makes it clear that there was "marked hetergeneity of the Tjemhu" (p.41). The first attack by Libyans on Egypt were led by the Libu during the 5th year of Ramses III's reign. Diop has provided convincing evidence that the Libu, later migrated into Senegal, where they presently live near Cape Verde.
The difference in dress among the Meshwesh and Tehenu, and their hostility toward the Tehenu, have led many researchers to see the Temehu of the New Kingdom as a different group from the original Temehu of Egyptian traditions. O'Connor (p.74) in the work cited above makes it clear that the Temehu in Ramses III day--"[have] hairstyles, dress and apparently ethnic type [that] are markedly different from the Tjehnyu/tjemhu of the Old Kingdom (Osing, 1980,1018-19).
quote:Various explanations have been offered: Wainwright, for example, concluded that 'Meshwesh was a mixed tribe of Libu like tribesmen with their native chiefs who become subject to a family of Tjehnu origin'(1962,p.92), while Osing suggested that the New Kingdowm Tjemhu had displaced or absorbed the earlier Tjehnyu but had selectively taken over or retained some Tjehnyu traits, in the case of the rulers for Meshwesh (1980,1019-1020). Dr. O'Connor is of the opinion "that some rulers of the later New Kingdom Tjemhu deliberately adopted traits they discovered from the Egyptians to be characteristic of ancient Tjehnyu/ Tjemhu, so as to increase there prestige, or in some way had these rtraits imposed upon them by the Egyptians" (p.74).
Djehuti, before replying to this I recommend you read Clyde's full article on this at the above link, it's not long
What's there to reply to. She cites of all people Clyde Winters who claims Berber is Indo-European while Dravidian is African.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: What's there to reply to. She cites of all people Clyde Winters who claims Berber is Indo-European while Dravidian is African.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Well we have the Romans in particular Manilius who groups (indigenous) Maghrebi in his list of dark/black races.
come on, you are rolling with the "dark/black races"?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Yes because that was the point that Manilius was making in ranking all the light/fair skinned races against the dark-skinned races and ranking them from whitest to least white and then blackest to least black, with the Mediterranean Sea being the divider between the two groups.
This was explained to in multiple threads. If you don't like the term 'races' then about about the Greek equivalent of gentes being ethne.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: [QB] ^ Yes because that was the point that Manilius was making in ranking all the light/fair skinned races against the dark-skinned races and ranking them from whitest to least white and then blackest to least black, with the Mediterranean Sea being the divider between the two groups.
This is projection. I have posted the book pages which includes what you quoted. As we can see there are eight ethnicities mentioned not "ranked" from Germans to Moors. The Mediterranean or an analogous word is not mentioned. There is no categorizing in the text of these groups into two racial (or any word you like) category. There is no Mediterranean or any dividing line indicated It's time to admit Tukular projected that modern racial paradigm on the text >but it's not there
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
To Yatunde, the 22nd Dynasty was Meshwesh but there was no indication that they were white or 'Trojan'. I do believe something was going on during the Bronze Age Collapse that spurred on migrations throughout the Mediterranean which explains the white Libyans even those with brown, red, or blonde hair.
Clyde has a good blog post about this with REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY for doubters to check if they need to read for themselves. However, I highly doubt the trolls here actually 1. read 2. double check references
Djehuti, before replying to this I recommend you read Clyde's full article on this at the above link, it's not long
What's there to reply to. She cites of all people Clyde Winters who claims Berber is Indo-European while Dravidian is African.
Dude! You believe that Jesus is needed to save your soul, you believe that Abraham was a real person from Mesopotamia, I can now discount everything you say because you believe in fairy tales
Newton believed in Alchemy and it did not make his theory of gravity wrong.
Clyde might have his theories but his blog post on the Meshwesh is solid historical analysis
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
Clyde has a good blog post about this with REFERENCES & BIBLIOGRAPHY for doubters to check if they need to read for themselves. However, I highly doubt the trolls here actually 1. read 2. double check references
But I do!
quote:The Meshwesh are different from the Tehenu and the original Tamehu recorded by the Egyptians prior to the New Kingdom. Below we see the traditional depiction of a Tamehu, the sidelock, shoulder cape and clean face note absence of feathers in the hair.
The Meshwesh wore Tehenu traditional costumes but they are not believed to be real Tehenu.
The Tehenu and the Temehu usually wore different costumes. In the New Kingdom depictions of the Temehu, the Meshwesh have "long chin beards", like the Syrian-Palestinians and Peoples of the Sea. They wear kilts, sheaths and capes open at the front tied at one shoulder. Like the earlierTehenu they wore feathers as a sign of High Status.
David O'Connor makes it clear that there was "marked hetergeneity of the Tjemhu" (p.41). The first attack by Libyans on Egypt were led by the Libu during the 5th year of Ramses III's reign. Diop has provided convincing evidence that the Libu, later migrated into Senegal, where they presently live near Cape Verde.
The difference in dress among the Meshwesh and Tehenu, and their hostility toward the Tehenu, have led many researchers to see the Temehu of the New Kingdom as a different group from the original Temehu of Egyptian traditions. O'Connor (p.74) in the work cited above makes it clear that the Temehu in Ramses III day--"[have] hairstyles, dress and apparently ethnic type [that] are markedly different from the Tjehnyu/tjemhu of the Old Kingdom (Osing, 1980,1018-19).
quote:Various explanations have been offered: Wainwright, for example, concluded that 'Meshwesh was a mixed tribe of Libu like tribesmen with their native chiefs who become subject to a family of Tjehnu origin'(1962,p.92), while Osing suggested that the New Kingdowm Tjemhu had displaced or absorbed the earlier Tjehnyu but had selectively taken over or retained some Tjehnyu traits, in the case of the rulers for Meshwesh (1980,1019-1020). Dr. O'Connor is of the opinion "that some rulers of the later New Kingdom Tjemhu deliberately adopted traits they discovered from the Egyptians to be characteristic of ancient Tjehnyu/ Tjemhu, so as to increase there prestige, or in some way had these rtraits imposed upon them by the Egyptians" (p.74).
read this as regards Meshwesh etc, it's edited by David O'Connor 2003, who is the author Clyde quotes. The chapter is by Stephan Snape who also makes references to O'Connor earlier piece on Libyans. It's also followed by a Sea people chapter
6 The Emergence of Libya on the Horizon of Egypt Steven Snape pg 93 In: Mysterious Lands Encounters With Ancient Egypt
David O'Connor (5 February 1938 – 1 October 2022) was an Australian-American Egyptologist who primarily worked in the fields of Ancient Egypt and Nubia.[1]
O'Connor was the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor Emeritus at New York University's Institute of Fine Art, the Curator Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania's Egyptian Museum, and the director emeritus of the Abydos Archaeology expedition in Egypt.[2]
O'Connor was best known for his work in the excavation of the ancient city of Abydos in Egypt beginning in 1967
Stephen Snape is Senior Lecturer at the School of Archaeology, Classics and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool. He has directed archaeological fieldwork for the Egypt Exploration Society and, for the University of Pennsylvania, has directed fieldwork in the Delta, northern Sinai, and at the temple sites of Abydos and Shanhur in Upper Egypt. Since 1994 he has been director of the Liverpool University excavations at the site of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham, a Ramesside fortress in the western desert of Egypt. His publications include Egyptian Temples (1996). He received his doctorate from the University of Liverpool.
Many references to Meshwesh is put into the search
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ibis:
Many of these fragments were found in piles and have no descriptive texts
Not sure what tribe this one is Cannot assume due to the garb he is not a soldier of the same group as above who might be dressed as a dignitary, not sure about this But he's possibly not Meshwesh also
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: This is projection. I have posted the book pages which includes what you quoted. As we can see there are eight ethnicities mentioned not "ranked" from Germans to Moors. The Mediterranean or an analogous word is not mentioned. There is no categorizing in the text of these groups into two racial (or any word you like) category. There is no Mediterranean or any dividing line indicated It's time to admit Tukular projected that modern racial paradigm on the text >but it's not there
That's because you are ignorant about Greco-Roman views on ethnology. Well before the Romans, the Greeks had the myth of Phaeton nearly crashing the sun to earth as their mythological explanation for why the notos ethne (southern nations) had dark skin from being burnt by the sun. The southern nations are all those south of the Mediterranean Sea.
Centuries later Manilius confirms this observation. Idcirco in varias leges variasque figuras dispositum genus est hominum, proprioque colore formantur gentes, sociataque iura per artus materiamque parem privato foedere signant. flava per ingentis surgit Germania partus, Gallia vicino minus est infecta rubore, asperior solidos Hispania contrahit artus. Martia Romanis urbis pater induit ora Gradivumque Venus miscens bene temperat artus, perque coloratas subtilis Graecia gentes gymnasium praefert vultu fortisque palaestras, et Syriam produnt torti per tempora crines.
Aethiopes maculant orbem tenebrisque figurant perfusas hominum gentes; minus India tostos progenerat; tellusque natans Aegyptia Nilo lenius irriguis infuscat corpora campis iam propior mediumque facit moderata tenorem. Phoebus harenosis Afrorum pulvere terris exsiccat populos, et Mauretania nomen oris habet titulumque suo fert ipsa colore.
The first paragraph he lists nations fair-skinned nations from lightest to darkest i.e. Germans to Syrians while in the second paragraph he lists the dark skinned races from darkest to lightest i.e. Ethiopians to Mauretanians. The Mare Centalis (Central Sea) i.e. Mediterranean is the border between these two divisions hence the Syrians in the eastern end and the Mauretanians in the western end are outliers at the conjunction.
Any Classicists knows this like Dr. Sally Anne Ashton or better yet Dr. Rebecca Kennedy as was explained here: Colorlines in Classical North Africa.
So no "projecting" at all. This was what the Greeks and Romans held.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Dude! You believe that Jesus is needed to save your soul, you believe that Abraham was a real person from Mesopotamia, I can now discount everything you say because you believe in fairy tales
Newton believed in Alchemy and it did not make his theory of gravity wrong.
Clyde might have his theories but his blog post on the Meshwesh is solid historical analysis
LMAO Apparently my remark got your panties in a bunch that you resort to ad-hominem. And what pray tell does my religious beliefs have anything to do with what is discussed. It's simple. Is Berber part of Indo-European or not?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: [qb] This is projection. I have posted the book pages which includes what you quoted. As we can see there are eight ethnicities mentioned not "ranked" from Germans to Moors. The Mediterranean or an analogous word is not mentioned. There is no categorizing in the text of these groups into two racial (or any word you like) category. There is no Mediterranean or any dividing line indicated It's time to admit Tukular projected that modern racial paradigm on the text >but it's not there
That's because you are ignorant about Greco-Roman views on ethnology. Well before the Romans, the Greeks had the myth of Phaeton nearly crashing the sun to earth as their mythological explanation for why the notos ethne (southern nations) had dark skin from being burnt by the sun. The southern nations are all those south of the Mediterranean Sea.
Centuries later Manilius confirms this observation.
quote: Idcirco in varias leges variasque figuras dispositum genus est hominum, proprioque colore formantur gentes, sociataque iura per artus materiamque parem privato foedere signant. flava per ingentis surgit Germania partus, Gallia vicino minus est infecta rubore, asperior solidos Hispania contrahit artus. Martia Romanis urbis pater induit ora Gradivumque Venus miscens bene temperat artus, perque coloratas subtilis Graecia gentes gymnasium praefert vultu fortisque palaestras, et Syriam produnt torti per tempora crines.
Aethiopes maculant orbem tenebrisque figurant perfusas hominum gentes; minus India tostos progenerat; tellusque natans Aegyptia Nilo lenius irriguis infuscat corpora campis iam propior mediumque facit moderata tenorem. Phoebus harenosis Afrorum pulvere terris exsiccat populos, et Mauretania nomen oris habet titulumque suo fert ipsa colore.
The first paragraph he lists nations fair-skinned nations from lightest to darkest i.e. Germans to Syrians while in the second paragraph he lists the dark skinned races from darkest to lightest i.e. Ethiopians to Mauretanians. The Mare Centalis (Central Sea) i.e. Mediterranean is the border between these two divisions hence the Syrians in the eastern end and the Mauretanians in the western end are outliers at the conjunction.
Any Classicists knows this like Dr. Sally Anne Ashton or better yet Dr. Rebecca Kennedy as was explained here: Colorlines in Classical North Africa.
So no "projecting" at all. This was what the Greeks and Romans held.
There aren't two paragraphs in the text, you are misrepresenting the text by creating your own paragraphs I already posted the book page
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: you are ignorant about Greco-Roman views on ethnology. Well before the Romans, the Greeks had the myth of Phaeton nearly crashing the sun to earth as their mythological explanation for why the notos ethne (southern nations) had dark skin from being burnt by the sun. The southern nations are all those south of the Mediterranean Sea.
You need a primary source for that Not the above Manilius which makes no mention of the Mediterranean or any geographic dividing line
quote:
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 154 : (last half of the second century)
"Phaethon, son of Clymenus, son of Sol [Helios], and the nymph Merope, who, as we have heard was and Oceanid, upon being told by his father that his grandfather was Sol [Helios], put to bad use the chariot he asked for. For when he was carried too near the earth, everything burned in the fire that came near, and, struck by a thunderbolt, he fell into the river Po. This river is called Eridanus by the Greeks; Pherecydes [Greek mythographer C5th B.C.] was the first to name it. The Indians became black, because their blood was turned to a dark colour from the heat that came near.The sister of Phaethon, too, in grieving for their brother, were changed into poplar trees. Their tears, as Hesiod tells, hardened into amber' in spite of the change they are called Heliades. They are, then, Merope, Helie, Aegle, Lampetia, Phoebe, Aetherie, Dioxippe."
[N.B. In this version of the myth Phaethon's mother is the eponym of the Aithiopian (Ethiopian) kingdom of Merope on the upper reaches of the Nile. When Phaethon loses control of the sun-chariot he scorches his countrymen black.]
The thread is about "When did North Africans acquire light skin color? "
These Roman mythological poems are irrelevant to the topic. It refers to Indians and Ethiopians being "black" We know these people are dark, this adds nothing.
Book of Gates detail, Tomb of Rameses III d. 1155 BC
Taforalt and Afalou Morocco, 15kya Eurasian mtDNA
maybe these are actual clues to answer the question
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Dude! You believe that Jesus is needed to save your soul, you believe that Abraham was a real person from Mesopotamia, I can now discount everything you say because you believe in fairy tales
Newton believed in Alchemy and it did not make his theory of gravity wrong.
Clyde might have his theories but his blog post on the Meshwesh is solid historical analysis
LMAO Apparently my remark got your panties in a bunch that you resort to ad-hominem. And what pray tell does my religious beliefs have anything to do with what is discussed. It's simple. Is Berber part of Indo-European or not?
Literally nothing you say gets me twisted you delusional pseudo intellectual and yes, I guess you do believe Jesus is god or something. That belief shows that your " intellectual" curiosity and rigor is determined by what you WANT to believe instead of what you could discover to be truth and reality.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: you believe that Abraham was a real person from Mesopotamia, I can now discount everything you say because you believe in fairy tales
without quoting, I'm asking you:
Do you believe that it is certain that Abraham was not a real person or that it's possible he may have been?
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Literally nothing you say gets me twisted you delusional pseudo intellectual and yes, I guess you do believe Jesus is god or something. That belief shows that your " intellectual" curiosity and rigor is determined by what you WANT to believe instead of what you could discover to be truth and reality.
This isn't really the thread to debate religion. I will report this to the mods.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Brandon, it's okay. You don't have to report anything since I'm not even going to debate religion with 'her' anyway.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Literally nothing you say gets me twisted you delusional pseudo intellectual and yes, I guess you do believe Jesus is god or something. That belief shows that your " intellectual" curiosity and rigor is determined by what you WANT to believe instead of what you could discover to be truth and reality.
What my personal spiritual beliefs are is irrelevant to the discussion which is why I find it odd you bring it up. If you're an atheist that's fine. I actually have valid reasons based on truth why I believe what I do. I don't have to share it with you but you are obviously triggered when I bring up something so simple as to the nature of Berber languages which is something widely available to all academic formats. So anyone can see who is not interested in truth.
By the way, I understand skepticism in Jesus or any man being God, but I do find it odd how you so easily dismiss the legendary person of Abraham being a real person. Is it somehow so hard to fathom that an ancestral figure could be real? Forget the fact that he was a figure in the Bible. Would you scoff at the millions of Chinese who venerate their ancient ancestor Huangdi, or the dozens of ethnic groups in northern India who acknowledge their ancient Aryan ancestor Pururavas, or all the Tuareg tribes of the Sahara who honor their ancestress Tin Hinan?? I mean seriously, does every ancient ancestor figure from legends have to totally fictional?
I ask this since you claim to be someone seeking truth.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: There aren't two paragraphs in the text, you are misrepresenting the text by creating your own paragraphs I already posted the book page.
You're right. We all can see it's one paragraph but that doesn't change the facts I pointed out. I didn't misrepresent anything unlike YOU. I merely took Tukuler's approach by dividing the single paragraph into two showing how Manilius devised his list. He goes from whitest to least white and blackest to least black.
quote:You need a primary source for that Not the above Manilius which makes no mention of the Mediterranean or any geographic dividing line.
Again, all one needs to know is the Roman and Greek view of geography and that it was Mediterranean centered.
Note all the light skinned nations are shown in within the map of the Roman empire while the only dark nation not shown is India because it was outside the empire.
quote:
quote: Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 154 : (last half of the second century)
"Phaethon, son of Clymenus, son of Sol [Helios], and the nymph Merope, who, as we have heard was and Oceanid, upon being told by his father that his grandfather was Sol [Helios], put to bad use the chariot he asked for. For when he was carried too near the earth, everything burned in the fire that came near, and, struck by a thunderbolt, he fell into the river Po. This river is called Eridanus by the Greeks; Pherecydes [Greek mythographer C5th B.C.] was the first to name it. The Indians became black, because their blood was turned to a dark colour from the heat that came near.The sister of Phaethon, too, in grieving for their brother, were changed into poplar trees. Their tears, as Hesiod tells, hardened into amber' in spite of the change they are called Heliades. They are, then, Merope, Helie, Aegle, Lampetia, Phoebe, Aetherie, Dioxippe."
[N.B. In this version of the myth Phaethon's mother is the eponym of the Aithiopian (Ethiopian) kingdom of Merope on the upper reaches of the Nile. When Phaethon loses control of the sun-chariot he scorches his countrymen black.]
The thread is about "When did North Africans acquire light skin color? "
These Roman mythological poems are irrelevant to the topic. It refers to Indians and Ethiopians being "black" We know these people are dark, this adds nothing.
Don't bother sidestepping the point I bring up. There are different versions of the Phaethon myth as in different editions with the most recent versions cutting out certain details. One of the oldest versions I've read back in high school make it clear that before Phaethon's incident, North Africa, Arabia, Iran and India were green grasslands and forests, until they were scorched to deserts. So all the natives of those desert lands became black not just Meroite Nubians and Indians but Egyptians Arabs and others.
quote: Book of Gates detail, Tomb of Rameses III d. 1155 BC
Taforalt and Afalou Morocco, 15kya Eurasian mtDNA
maybe these are actual clues to answer the question [/QB]
That was addressed in the first page.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Brandon, it's okay. You don't have to report anything since I'm not even going to debate religion with 'her' anyway.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Literally nothing you say gets me twisted you delusional pseudo intellectual and yes, I guess you do believe Jesus is god or something. That belief shows that your " intellectual" curiosity and rigor is determined by what you WANT to believe instead of what you could discover to be truth and reality.
What my personal spiritual beliefs are is irrelevant to the discussion which is why I find it odd you bring it up. If you're an atheist that's fine. I actually have valid reasons based on truth why I believe what I do. I don't have to share it with you but you are obviously triggered when I bring up something so simple as to the nature of Berber languages which is something widely available to all academic formats. So anyone can see who is not interested in truth.
By the way, I understand skepticism in Jesus or any man being God, but I do find it odd how you so easily dismiss the legendary person of Abraham being a real person. Is it somehow so hard to fathom that an ancestral figure could be real? Forget the fact that he was a figure in the Bible. Would you scoff at the millions of Chinese who venerate their ancient ancestor Huangdi, or the dozens of ethnic groups in northern India who acknowledge their ancient Aryan ancestor Pururavas, or all the Tuareg tribes of the Sahara who honor their ancestress Tin Hinan?? I mean seriously, does every ancient ancestor figure from legends have to totally fictional?
I ask this since you claim to be someone seeking truth.
Again quit claiming I was " triggered " I was and am not.
I am just pointing out your COGNITIVE DISSONANCE...
As I said, Newton believed and practiced Alchemy but that did not make his theory of gravity wrong. You can't dismiss everything a person writes or theorizes because they hold some false belief or some mythical belief.
If you do then be consistent. Your spiritual belief is based on myths and fairy tales you can't PROVE your spiritual beliefs as facts, and so therefore according to you I cant believe anything else you write about on this site or take it at face value.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
The fact that lioness keeps posting this picture of a Libyan to prove that Libyans were not black ( I think that is his/her intention) just shows that Lioness believes in a true negro and if a picture does not look like a true negro then that person is not black african. And always posting white libyans as if that proves all libyan were white or non black is also a constant troll Lioness does without context. A picture of a Masai is very similar to this " libyan"
According to Oric Bates some " Libyans had ear plugs" Very similar to this Masai also
quote:Fig. 38 shows the ear ot a Lybian prince from a relief
at Beyt el-Waly. In this case not only is there an ear-ring, hut also a plug so
inserted as to change the shape of the ear
I also find the similarities in the Nok figurines to Libyans interesting. Small pointy bears, phallic sheaths etc.
What this demonstrates to me is that these Libyans are just Africans. As to the blonds and blue eyed Libyans it is anecdotal evidence and just shows what people who migrate do and that is dress like the host country they now reside in order to do business, trade, get along and adapt to a new environment
say for instance Africans in Tudor England.
And as I already pointed out... many English went native after they lived in North America
First English settlers survived and joined Native Americans Artefacts offer clues to fate of the lost Roanoke Colony.
quote:Ever since, explorers, historians, archaeologists, and enthusiasts have sought to discover the fate of the 115 men, women, and children who were part of England’s first attempt to settle the New World. Efforts to solve America’s longest running historical mystery, dubbed the Lost Colony, produced dozens of theories but no clear answers.
Now two independent teams say they have archaeological remains that suggest at least some of the abandoned colonists may have survived, possibly splitting into two camps that made their homes with Native Americans.
Remember this is all happening during the upheavals of a bronze age collapse. People are starving in Europe and some that have arrived from Europe to North Africa are still having a hard time and are hungry for food and land.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
A dude named Rob Black posted this on Twitter today. Anyone recall which study it's from? Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
The fact that lioness keeps posting this picture of a Libyan to prove that Libyans were not black ( I think that is his/her intention) just shows that Lioness believes in a true negro and if a picture does not look like a true negro then that person is not black african. And always posting white libyans as if that proves all libyan were white or non black is also a constant troll Lioness does without context. A picture of a Masai is very similar to this " libyan"
I don't care about "white " and "black". I prefer in between I don't know what "race" the above person is or care
The color of the above, you can see most of it on the shoulder is brown for whatever that is worth
I keep posting this because it's getting ignored. I'm seeing remarks about depictions of Libyans in the Old Kingdom but this above and a nearly duplicate figure in the same scene at Sahure might be the only one known from the Old Kingdom, unless you include the figure on the Narmer palette about to be clubbed by him
The topic is When did North Africans acquire light skin color?
Why are you spamming the Nok and black Tudors?
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: A dude named Rob Black posted this on Twitter today. Anyone recall which study it's from?
Yeah, that seems to be the one.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ The study looks familiar and I think we have discussed it in another thread. But that some Maghrebi populations are genetically closer to Western Europeans than other North Africans is not surprising. I'm still trying to figure out how these 'white' Libyans documented by Middle Kingdom times came about. We know Western European geneflow into the Maghreb began by at least the Neolithic along with Cardial Ware Culture. I suspect there were other waves of migration going on in the Western Mediterranean.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
I don't see evidence that old 2011 Cherni article was discussed here before although maybe somebody used figure 3
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: I'm still trying to figure out how these 'white' Libyans documented by Middle Kingdom times came about. We know Western European geneflow into the Maghreb began by at least the Neolithic along with Cardial Ware Culture. I suspect there were other waves of migration going on in the Western Mediterranean.
That's one thing I wonder about too. Do those "white" Libyans trace their ancestry to Cardial Ware populations too, or to a separate migration from Europe?
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
@lioness the fact that you miss the point about black tudors ( a migrant group to England dressing like the English) and europeans arriving on the shores of North Africa dressing like native north africans shows me that you have very low comprehension.
The Nok comparisons to Libyans is an apt one and I am not surprised you are missing it.
Lol
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
Again, the arrival of light skin in North Africa predates the arrival of Europeans. There have likely always been a Northern "San like" population in Northern Africa that was relatively lighter than those in other areas. I don't think the question was about when skin color based on European mixture became dominant even though it is related. And by default, most European studies on Northern Africa are focusing on European migration, which has happened in waves over time up to the current day. But the origin of Berber or any other indigenous North African language or culture did not start with Europe nor lighter skin complexions.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: ^ The Fulani have some North African genetic influence and probably some cultural influence as well. But I wouldn't claim them as representing the ancient Libyans if that's what you're trying to do. Most of their ancestry is still West Africa IIRC and their native language is Niger-Congo rather than Libyco-Berber as the Libyans' language appears to have been. They're not quite the same ethnic group.
I believe the point is that the Fulani represent modern descendants of ancient trans saharan populations of which part also existed in Libya. They have the closest cultural similarities to the depictions of those populations of the Western lands seen in the ancient art. I do not believe those traditions originated in Eurasia even if there was Eurasian migration.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: There have likely always been a Northern "San like" population in Northern Africa
no evidence
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M:
I believe the point is that the Fulani represent modern descendants of ancient trans saharan populations of which part also existed in Libya. They have the closest cultural similarities to the depictions of those populations of the Western lands seen in the ancient art.
what depiction of a Libyan in Egyptian art has resemblance to Fulani strong enough to suggest to you they are the ancestors of Fulani?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: There have likely always been a Northern "San like" population in Northern Africa
no evidence
This has been a popular theory held in anthropology for a long while. But if by San-like you mean having the light complexion caused by SLC24A5 mutation, so far the earliest remains tested (epipaleolithic) in the Maghreb lack it and had dark skin. And thus far all the evidence for SLC24A5 in North Africa is associated with Eurasian population influence.
As to what Yatunde pointed out about Nok Culture, early West African cultures have strong ties to the Central Sahara.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: Again, the arrival of light skin in North Africa predates the arrival of Europeans. There have likely always been a Northern "San like" population in Northern Africa that was relatively lighter than those in other areas.
That's not necessarily impossible, since skin color is a polygenic trait and we may not have identified all mutations for lighter skin. However, I don't think there's evidence for such mutations in pre-Neolithic North African aDNA either. So the prevalence of any skin-lightening alleles in North Africa prior to late Neolithic and later admixture with Europeans and West Asians will have to remain speculative for the time being.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
I don't know what "San-like" means Their haplogroups are A and B and maternally L
Comparatively Iberomaurusians were E and maternally H,U, M1, R0, J nd T still common in North Africa
Much Earlier remains, Aterian etc, no recovered DNA
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Lioness has spent over a decade on this forum trying to imply that white skin, red/blone hair and blue eyes were indigenous to North Africa and Ancient Egypt. Implying this by mostly spamming pictures of blonde mummies, blue eyed Egyptian statues, and Egyptian depictions of blonde or white european like libyans.
Now DNA science has disproved this, blonde hair and blue eyes is a late development in Europe subject to selective sweep in the last 5000k years. and truth be told it was the pre historic europeans who where dark skinned lol
And yet still Lioness is allowed to troll with pics of the supposed blonde north africans and say stupid crap like it's not about black or white it's about " RED "
There are Red/brown skinned Africans all over the continent and the San are TAN! So ancient depictions of Red/brown skinned Africans do not mean they were not Indigenous " black " Africans
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
One can wonder when very light people first can be seen in North Africa, like this girl:
Blonde haired Libyans are mentioned from more than 2000 years back
The 3rd century BC cyrenaican poet Callimachus in his Hymns to Apollo talked about greek men dancing with yellow haired libyan women :
quote:Greatly, indeed, did Phoebus rejoice as the belted warriors of Enyo danced with the yellow-haired Libyan women , when the appointed season of the Carnean feast came round. But not yet could the Dorians approach the fountains of Cyre,28 but dwelt in Azilis29 thick with wooded dells.
In the Periplous of the Pseudo-Scylax (4th century BC), he mentions blonde haired libyans known as the Gyzantes :
quote:The Gyzantes Libyans live around it, a nation, with a city to the west. For these Gyzantes Libyans are said to be all blond and handsome. And this country is the best and most fertile, with huge flocks, and the richest
Blondes came to North Africa during the Bronze age collapse
Blondes came to North America during the 14th Century ad.. now look how prevalent blonde and blue eye is in North America now 2024
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: There have likely always been a Northern "San like" population in Northern Africa
no evidence
This has been a popular theory held in anthropology for a long while. But if by San-like you mean having the light complexion caused by SLC24A5 mutation, so far the earliest remains tested (epipaleolithic) in the Maghreb lack it and had dark skin. And thus far all the evidence for SLC24A5 in North Africa is associated with Eurasian population influence.
As to what Yatunde pointed out about Nok Culture, early West African cultures have strong ties to the Central Sahara.
I wasn't speaking SAN related DNA as opposed to complexion. We know all Africans don't have the same skin color and that variation is not due to Eurasian mixture.
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: That's not necessarily impossible, since skin color is a polygenic trait and we may not have identified all mutations for lighter skin. However, I don't think there's evidence for such mutations in pre-Neolithic North African aDNA either. So the prevalence of any skin-lightening alleles in North Africa prior to late Neolithic and later admixture with Europeans and West Asians will have to remain speculative for the time being.
I posted this on page 1 of this thread yet people still keep posting misinformation:
quote: As Colin Barras at New Scientist reports, each of these sites had genetic variants associated with paler skin and ones associated with darker skin. Seven genetic variants associated with lighter skin developed at least 270,000 years ago and four more than 900,000 years ago. Considering our species, Homo sapiens, did not evolve until around 200,00 to 300,000 years ago, the discovery suggests that the genes responsible for lighter skin tones were present into the genetic material of our hominin ancestors—hundreds of thousands of years before the first humans walked the Earth.
The study suggests that genes of light and dark skin are more fluid than we once thought. Three of the genes associated with the darkest skin are likely to have evolved from genes for lighter skin tones, Barras reports, meaning that people with the darkest skin tones, like herdsmen who live in the Sahara, may have developed that deep pigmentation in the evolutionarily recent past.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: 3rd & 4th century BC
The Bronze age collapse happened 1100 BC
Blondes came to North Africa during the Bronze age collapse
Blondes came to North America during the 14th Century ad.. now look how prevalent blonde and blue eye is in North America now 2024
Remember though that before 1492 America was more or less isolated from the so called Old World, even if some Norse people actually visited, and built a farm on Newfoundland already in the 11th century AD.
North Africa was not as isolated from Europe. So it can be hard to know exactly when the first blonde person from Europe came to set his/her foot on African soil.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: 3rd & 4th century BC
The Bronze age collapse happened 1100 BC
Blondes came to North Africa during the Bronze age collapse
Blondes came to North America during the 14th Century ad.. now look how prevalent blonde and blue eye is in North America now 2024
Remember though that before 1492 America was more or less isolated from the so called Old World, even if some Norse people actually visited, and built a farm on Newfoundland already in the 11th century AD.
North Africa was not as isolated from Europe. So it can be hard to know exactly when the first blonde person from Europe came to set his/her foot on African soil.
I don't want to get into a extended discussion of blondes and blondism, because they are the exception and not the rule. Especially, when the discussion is really a back door way of establishing that white Europeans established Egyptian culture or a psuedo hamitic theory.
Again you miss the point about the 14th century sea people/european invasions and colonization of North America. And you are missing the point about how because whites are now present in North America and dominant on this continent does not make said white people indigenous
THE SAME GOES FOR ANCIENT NORTH AFRICA
Of course if you are caught in climate change and always hungry as it seems the Europeans in the eastern Mediterranean where the option is to move and colonize.
Yes blonde hair is probably not so old in North Africa (even if it at least 8000 years or older in Northern Europe).
When it comes to lighter skin it seems the alleles for it existed already in the late Neolithic Morocco (c 3000 BC)
quote:IAM (Early Neolithic) people did not possess any of the European SNPs associated with light pigmentation, and most likely had dark skin and eyes. IAM samples contain ancestral alleles for pigmentation-associated variants present in SLC24A5 (rs1426654), SLC45A2 (rs16891982), and OCA2 (rs1800401 and 12913832) genes. On the other hand, KEB (Late Neolithic) individuals exhibit some European-derived alleles that predispose individuals to lighter skin and eye color, including those on genes SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and OCA2 (rs1800401).
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: One can wonder when very light people first can be seen in North Africa, like this girl:
Blonde haired Libyans are mentioned from more than 2000 years back
The 3rd century BC cyrenaican poet Callimachus in his Hymns to Apollo talked about greek men dancing with yellow haired libyan women :
quote:Greatly, indeed, did Phoebus rejoice as the belted warriors of Enyo danced with the yellow-haired Libyan women , when the appointed season of the Carnean feast came round. But not yet could the Dorians approach the fountains of Cyre,28 but dwelt in Azilis29 thick with wooded dells.
In the Periplous of the Pseudo-Scylax (4th century BC), he mentions blonde haired libyans known as the Gyzantes :
quote:The Gyzantes Libyans live around it, a nation, with a city to the west. For these Gyzantes Libyans are said to be all blond and handsome. And this country is the best and most fertile, with huge flocks, and the richest
If the identification is accurate, this might indicate a Middle Kingdom-era arrival for lighter-skinned Libyans.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Lioness has spent over a decade on this forum trying to imply that white skin, red/blone hair and blue eyes were indigenous to North Africa and Ancient Egypt. Implying this by mostly spamming pictures of blonde mummies, blue eyed Egyptian statues, and Egyptian depictions of blonde or white european like libyans.
Now DNA science has disproved this, blonde hair and blue eyes is a late development in Europe subject to selective sweep in the last 5000k years. and truth be told it was the pre historic europeans who where dark skinned lol
stop the BS. Other people, since page 1 people have mentioned blonds, me not once
All you are doing is to try to pretend I did to try to discredit with fakery
Any genuine critique of me will need to include a quote of me. The thread title is "When did North Africans acquire light skin color?"
I don't care about that
Nevertheless blue eyes in the region is kind of interesting. Sometimes dark skinned Africans have them also dark skinned Solomon Islanders (as well as kids with 5-10% blond hair) and I noticed them on a brown skinned Libyan of the 18th dynasty and then Brandon showed a 12th dynasty image from Beni Hasan which seems to be Libyan and show a person with green or blue eyes.
This is around 15Kya, North Africa Haplogroups maternal haplogroups H, U, R0, JT, J, T,
These are considered originating outside of Africa That may have implications for physical appearance assuming that's important
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
Blondes came to North Africa during the Bronze age collapse
You're just making that up it may or may might be true. And if it is there could have been earlier periods also
The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC, between c. 1200 and 1150
The Vandal Kingdom or Kingdom of the Vandals and Alans was a confederation of Vandals and Alans, which is one of the barbarian kingdoms established under Gaiseric, a Vandal warrior probably born near Lake Balaton (present-day Hungary), though this is uncertain. He became king of the Vandals in Spain and the confederation ruled in North Africa and the Mediterranean from 435 to 534 AD.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
Now DNA science has disproved this, blonde hair and blue eyes is a late development in Europe subject to selective sweep in the last 5000k years. and truth be told it was the pre historic europeans who where dark skinned lol
Now DNA science has disproved this, blonde hair and blue eyes is a late development in Europe subject to selective sweep in the last 5000k years. and truth be told it was the pre historic europeans who where dark skinned lol
Bronze Age collapse 1,150 + now, 2024 = about 3,000 year ago If the selective sweep was 5000k and Eurasian DNA in North Africa goes back at a least to 15K there could have been some blonds and blue eyed within that going back to the 5,000 year point but it is unknown But this is assuming European genetics. The blue eyes and blond hair in the Solomon Islands are are caused by a different gene than the one that makes it occur in Europeans However Europe is much closer to Africa
Ok, lets say about 1960 BC + now, 2024 = about 4,000 years ago
Doug, Yatunde thinks these are Europeans what do you think?
I'm not sure about it. This stuff is basically guessing since all we know about the Libyans depicted in Egyptian art is only from their art and a little bit of Egyptian writing
At minimum some of the Iberomaurusian are dated 10K others, 12-15K or perhaps even earlier. That data above if from Rym Kefi, they had samples from 23 Taforalt and 8 Afalou, whereas Loosdrecht study was only 7, all were U6 except one was M1 but his article had the Y-DNA which was E1b1b1a1 (M-78) Iberomaurusians may or may not have been dark, could have been caramels or anything but skin color ain't everything, it's just skin deep (not even to the deeper layers)
Some San here, Southern Africa Some are mixed with bantus which might make some darker
But many are somewhat light like this, however with features unlike the 18th dynasty representations of Libyans or Europeans
Yatunde, how long do you think many of these San people have been light-ish like this? I don't think it's due to Eurasian admixture, their features and hair don't look like it. Some have mixed with Europeans in recent times but probably less so with people like this apparently still living in the bushlands
looked for the original in that Bates illustration but wasn't able to find it
info ____________________________________________
At Beit el-Wali, a temple begun by Ramesses close to the end of the reign of his father, and certainly sculpted during the brief coregency of Sethos and himself, least three, if not four, separate wars are recorded.w In particular, the young Ramesses had commissioned on the walls of that temple war-scenes depicting himself in Nubia, Asia, against a Libyan, and against the Shasu, all of which link up rather well with the corresponding scenes on the south wall at Abu Simbel (see fig. 2)...
To the west of the Asiatic scene is another smiting-relief. This time it is the Libyans who are the enemy.w Ramesses II is carved trampling upon one Libyan, ready for the coup de graceagainst a second. The texts surrounding the scene refer to Asiatics as well as Libyan enemies (!JJswt nw mhty, Hirt», "mn», and Rlnw), Nubians, and the Shasu. The text states that Ramesses transported the Nubians to the north and the Asiatics to the south, as well as the Shasu to the west and the Libyans to the hilltops (tst), probably indicating the common practice of the New Kingdom Pharaohs of moving captives to various sites for corvee labour or for military service...
. The Libyan-warscene on the south wall of the columned hall at Abu Simbel corresponds to the same event recorded in scene 14 at Beit el-Wali and the Libyan-war register of Sethos I at Karnak.
Scene 14 at Beit el-Wali records a Libyan war in which Ramesses places himself as the main participant. Again, at Karnak Sethos records a Libyan war (the middle register of the outer wall of the hypostyle court) in which Ramesses later had himself (plus name and titles) inserted." Therefore, the same reasoning employed with respect to the Shasu-warfare can be employed for the Libyan campaign, namely, the Karnak warscenes of Sethos can be associated with war-reliefs of Ramesses.
Spalinger, A. J. (1980). Historical Observations on the Military Reliefs of Abu Simbel and Other Ramesside Temples in Nubia. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 66(1), 83–99. doi:10.1177/030751338006600110
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ You cited the genetic samples from Taforalt but as Brandon pointed out the autosomal results showed that Taforalt and Early Neolithic Maghrebis (at least from the samples tested) had dark skin and no SCL4A mutation for light skin. The latter was only found in Late Neolithic samples.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ You cited the genetic samples from Taforalt but as Brandon pointed out the autosomal results showed that Taforalt and Early Neolithic Maghrebis (at least from the samples tested) had dark skin and no SCL4A mutation for light skin. The latter was only found in Late Neolithic samples.
a Berber man in Ouanskra, a Berber village in the High Atlas Mountains, Morocco
Who knows what their deep ancestry is
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Yes, we've seen those examples before. Here is more: Rif Archives Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
@lioness keeps posting this picture of a libyan because LIONESS believes this is a picture of a Caucasian north african and and has an apriori ASSumption that this person is a white north african. And this one picture wipes out all the other evidence of BLack African libyans. It's trolling and its the same exact thing of people who post negroid looking bhuddist statues or negroid olmec statues and say they must have been black africans.
But these are faulty ASSumptions. First, how do we know this person is not a black african person? Or even how do we know this person is not a European migrant who has adopted Libyan dress? Especially since his features are Atypical of all the other representations of Libyans from the old to middle kingdom.
Here is a Fulani in Northern Nigeria... he has the small nose, no prothaganism and requisite small pointy beard just like the " Libyan " on Tut's stool.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
Oric Bates the Eastern Libyians
He probably saw a tile that look liked this
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: He probably saw a tile that look liked this
what is the source of this? I looked, can't find it
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: When did North Africans acquire light skin color?
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: I will still consider Herodotus claim that the Meshwesh were descendants of the trojans
is this your answer to the thread topic question?
Show us an artifact depicting a Meshwesh then
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
You know I have seen this picture before but I have never really really looked at it.
But the texture of the beber hair on the top is 4c
quote:4C hair is a type of hair that is naturally curly, tightly coiled, and high in density. 4C hair is the coarsest and tightest curl type, with coils that are tightly packed and have a "Z" pattern. 4C hair is also prone to shrinkage and breakag
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ I don't know how you came to the conclusion that the man in the photo has type 4c hair, when most of his head is shaved and what hair remains doesn't look like it.
In fact the typical hair texture of most Berbers including dark skinned or black types is loose curls to wavy hair as example below:
Tuareg boy
Ironically kinky hair type hair occurs more in modern Egyptians than in Amazigh (Berbers).
"The place which was called El Gazie, ( 2 ) was a low sandy beach, having no trees in sight, nor any verdure. There was no appear-ance of mountain or hill ; nor (excepting only the rock on which the ship was wrecked) any thing but sand as far as the eve could reach. The Moors [of Mauritania] were straight haired, but quite black; their dress consisted of little more than a rug or a skin round their waist, their upper parts and from their knees downwards, being wholly naked."--Robert Adams (African American explorer in 1810)
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ I don't know how you came to the conclusion that the man in the photo has type 4c hair, when most of his head is shaved and what hair remains doesn't look like it.
In fact the typical hair texture of most Berbers including dark skinned or black types is loose curls to wavy hair as example below:
Tuareg boy
Ironically kinky hair type hair occurs more in modern Egyptians than in Amazigh (Berbers).
"The place which was called El Gazie, ( 2 ) was a low sandy beach, having no trees in sight, nor any verdure. There was no appear-ance of mountain or hill ; nor (excepting only the rock on which the ship was wrecked) any thing but sand as far as the eve could reach. The Moors [of Mauritania] were straight haired, but quite black; their dress consisted of little more than a rug or a skin round their waist, their upper parts and from their knees downwards, being wholly naked."--Robert Adams (African American explorer in 1810)
as with any admixed population that has black african ancestry, textures can vary even with siblings of the same parents.
It is EASY to see his texture if you look at it closely
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ I don't know how you came to the conclusion that the man in the photo has type 4c hair, when most of his head is shaved and what hair remains doesn't look like it.
In fact the typical hair texture of most Berbers including dark skinned or black types is loose curls to wavy hair as example below:
Tuareg boy
Ironically kinky hair type hair occurs more in modern Egyptians than in Amazigh (Berbers).
"The place which was called El Gazie, ( 2 ) was a low sandy beach, having no trees in sight, nor any verdure. There was no appear-ance of mountain or hill ; nor (excepting only the rock on which the ship was wrecked) any thing but sand as far as the eve could reach. The Moors [of Mauritania] were straight haired, but quite black; their dress consisted of little more than a rug or a skin round their waist, their upper parts and from their knees downwards, being wholly naked."--Robert Adams (African American explorer in 1810)
as with any admixed population that has black african ancestry, textures can vary even with siblings of the same parents.
It is EASY to see his texture if you look at it closely
I will also have you know that mixed hair types or loose curl hair types can change texture with age so a young childs hair can be straight but as puberty hits it can change to different textures
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: When did North Africans acquire light skin color?
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: I will still consider Herodotus claim that the Meshwesh were descendants of the trojans
Yatunde show us an artifact please, depicting a Meshwesh
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: When did North Africans acquire light skin color?
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: I will still consider Herodotus claim that the Meshwesh were descendants of the trojans
Yatunde show us an artifact please, depicting a Meshwesh
you do it
Posted by Shebitku (Member # 23742) on :
lol
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
GENESIS 10
quote:2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah. And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.
quote:Ramesses III calls them “foreign countries (who) made a conspiracy in their isles ” and also “northern countries who were in their isles” or even “the countries who came from their land in the isles in the midst of the sea” Hence the name coined for them, Sea Peoples which aptly describes their surroundings.Another source, the Papyrus Harris places the Danuna “in their isles” and the Shardana as well as the Washosh “of the sea”.
quote:The Meshwesh tribe , another supposed Sea People group, was allied with the Libyans and was according to Drews “often identified with the area around Tunis, [NorthAfrica] where Herodotus locates people whom he calls Maxyes”.167nLibyans are often talked of as invading the Egyptian Delta. There were many invasions of Egypt one in 1220 BC, Merneptah’s reign, known as the Libyan war; and again in 1189BC, and again in 1183BC, both in Ramesses III’s reign.168 They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western borderWhen invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
quote:A conglomeration of different tribal names has been mentioned in the previous chapter. Egyptian Pharaoh Amenophis III names the Lukka, Sharden, Danuna, and Meshwesh . Pharaoh Ramesses II talks of the Lukka, Sharden, Quarqisha, and the Labu . Pharaoh Merenptah, who inscribed much about his victory over the Sea Peoples,lists them as Lukka, Sharden, Eqwesh, Teresh, Shekelesh, Labu and Meshwesh .
Pharaoh Ramesses III, in his fifth reigning year, inscribes the following tribes: Qayqisha, Labu, Meshwesh , Asbata, Shayu, Hasa, and Baqan.81 Pharaoh Ramesses III, again in his eighth reigning year, battles these Sea Peoples and names them: Shekelesh, Weshesh, Danyen, Tjakker, and Peleset.82 These are all Egyptian sources naming foreign enemies from the north. We have been referring to them as simply the Sea Peoples.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western border When invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
During this time “the foreign invaders included women and children in carts, and there can be no doubt that what we see was not just a military force but a population on the move”.4 This population was seeking food, wealth, trade and sustainability. They found all of it in Egypt and the Levant. Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western border When invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
During this time “the foreign invaders included women and children in carts, and there can be no doubt that what we see was not just a military force but a population on the move”.4 This population was seeking food, wealth, trade and sustainability. They found all of it in Egypt and the Levant.
Where are you quoting this? I think a population movement into the Libyan coast from the central Balkans during the Bronze Age would be worth looking into. I was under the impression that most of the European ancestry in the Maghrebi littoral would have come from Iberia, but maybe there were migrations from other regions along the northern Mediterranean?
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western border When invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
During this time “the foreign invaders included women and children in carts, and there can be no doubt that what we see was not just a military force but a population on the move”.4 This population was seeking food, wealth, trade and sustainability. They found all of it in Egypt and the Levant.
Where are you quoting this? I think a population movement into the Libyan coast from the central Balkans during the Bronze Age would be worth looking into. I was under the impression that most of the European ancestry in the Maghrebi littoral would have come from Iberia, but maybe there were migrations from other regions along the northern Mediterranean?
A really good paper, read it, she gave tons of research notes
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western border When invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
During this time “the foreign invaders included women and children in carts, and there can be no doubt that what we see was not just a military force but a population on the move”.4 This population was seeking food, wealth, trade and sustainability. They found all of it in Egypt and the Levant.
Where are you quoting this? I think a population movement into the Libyan coast from the central Balkans during the Bronze Age would be worth looking into. I was under the impression that most of the European ancestry in the Maghrebi littoral would have come from Iberia, but maybe there were migrations from other regions along the northern Mediterranean?
A really good paper, read it, she gave tons of research notes
Thanks!
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western border When invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
During this time “the foreign invaders included women and children in carts, and there can be no doubt that what we see was not just a military force but a population on the move”.4 This population was seeking food, wealth, trade and sustainability. They found all of it in Egypt and the Levant.
Where are you quoting this? I think a population movement into the Libyan coast from the central Balkans during the Bronze Age would be worth looking into. I was under the impression that most of the European ancestry in the Maghrebi littoral would have come from Iberia, but maybe there were migrations from other regions along the northern Mediterranean?
A really good paper, read it, she gave tons of research notes
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY THE SEA PEOPLE AND THEIR MIGRATION PRESENTING AN HONORS THESIS THAT HAS BEEN SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE RUTGERS UNIVERSITY HISTORY DEPARTMENT. BY SHELL PECZYNSKI NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY MARCH 2009
The debate has settled somewhat and most scholars agree that the Sea Peoples hailed from Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Balkans, and Cyprus. [124]
There is today agreement that the Sea Peoples came from the Balkans and the Aegean world, with Cyprus as the last stop on the way before the invasion into the Levant. [1]
quote: [1] 1. Strange (1980) 157-65; Dothan (1982) 21-23; Dothan and Dothan (1992) 191-98; Stone (1995) 17-19; Killebrew (1998). _______________________________________
Strange, J. 1980. Caphtor/Keftiu (Leiden)
Dothan, T. 1982. The Philistines and their Material Culture (Jerusalem).
Dothan, T. & Dothan M. 1992. People of the Sea. The Search for the Philistines (New York).
Stone, B.J. 1995. “The Philistines and Acculturation: Cultural Change and Ethnic Continuity in the Iron Age,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 298, 7-32.
Killebrew, A. 1998. “Ceramic Typology and Technology of the Late Bronze and Iron I. Assemblages from Tel Miqne-Ekron: The Transition from Canaanite to Philistine Culture,” in S. Gitin
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: They originally were from the central Balkans and migrated at some point in the past to become Libyans in Africa, flanking Egypt’s western border When invading Egypt the whole family came with the warriors, along with their possession, with an intention to settle. This was no ordinary war.
During this time “the foreign invaders included women and children in carts, and there can be no doubt that what we see was not just a military force but a population on the move”.4 This population was seeking food, wealth, trade and sustainability. They found all of it in Egypt and the Levant.
Initially blood typing and then later genetics has proven that white Berbers of the Maghreb are actually descended from populations from the Iberian Peninsula.
As far as the islands of the Sea Peoples, these too need not be the Aegean but could also be the Tyrrhenian or Balearic Islands.
We know the Sherden Sea People were most likely Sardinians since their attire including their horned headdresses match the Nuragic peoples of that area.
Hypothetical Sea Peoples Origins and Routes
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Nigerian Fula's DNA ancestry test... 1% Greece & Italy is a trace region that matches the SOURCE of bronze age collapse invasions.
^ Ululation is a common custom throughout Africa and among Semitic (Afro-asiatic) speakers of the Middle East.
As far as the Fulani, their ancestry was recently discussed here.
As far as their connections to ancient Greeks that was first exposed by Arnaiz Villena ages ago with his HLA genetic findings.
Posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey (Member # 22253) on :
Fulani documented as far north as Siwa Oasis was my point. And the even the possibility of Hausas that far north is interesting.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
As far as their connections to ancient Greeks that was first exposed by Arnaiz Villena ages ago with his HLA genetic findings.
Seems that Arnaiz Villena´s findings have been criticized through the years. Wiki made a summary of the debate:
quote:Greeks and Sub-Saharans
Arnaiz-Villena et al. published five scientific articles, where, among other claims, they concluded that the Greek population originates from Sub-Saharan Africa and do not cluster with other Mediterraneans. The explanation they offered is that a large number of Sub-Saharans had migrated to Greece (but not to Crete) during Minoan times i.e. predating both Classical and Mycenaean Greece. Those conclusions were related to the "Black Athena" debate and became embroiled in disputes between Greek and ethnic Macedonian nationalists.
They cited Dörk et al. for having found a marker on Chromosome 7 that is common to Black Africans and, among Caucasoid populations, is found only in Greeks. Dörk et al. did find an African-type of cystic fibrosis mutation in Greeks, however this mutation was extremely rare; it was detected only in three Greek families. The explanation they offered is quite different from Arnaiz-Villena's. Dörk et al. state: "Historical contacts—for example, under Alexander the Great or during the ancient Minoan civilization—may provide an explanation for the common ancestry of disease mutations in these ethnically diverse populations."
Hajjej et al. claimed to have confirmed the genetic relatedness between Greeks and Sub-Saharans. However they used the same methodology (same gene markers) and same data samples like Arnaiz-Villena et al.
Other authors contradict Arnaiz-Villena's results. In The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994), Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza grouped Greeks with other European and Mediterranean populations based on 120 loci (view MDS plot). Then, Ayub et al. 2003 did the same thing using 182 loci (view dendrogram. Another study was conducted in 2004 at Skopje's University of Ss. Kiril and Metodij, using high-resolution typing of HLA-DRB1 according to Arnaiz-Villena's methodology. Contrary to Arnaiz-Villena's conclusion, no sub-Saharan admixture was detected in the Greek sample.
In a sample of 125 Greeks from Thessaloniki and Sarakatsani, 2 Asian-specific mtDNA sequences (M and D) were detected (1.6%). No sub-Saharan African genes were observed in this population, therefore, non-Caucasoid maternal ancestry in Greece is very low, as elsewhere in Europe. Additionally, in a sample of 366 Greeks from thirteen locations in continental Greece, Crete, Lesvos and Chios, a single African haplogroup A Y Chromosome was found (0.3%). This marks the only instance to date of sub-Saharan DNA being discovered in Greece. In another sample of 42 Greeks, one sequence of the Siberian Tat-C haplogroup turned up, while other studies with larger sample populations have failed to detect this paternal marker in the Greek gene pool and while its frequencies are actually much higher in Scandinavian and Slavic populations. Also, a paper has detected clades of haplogroups J and E3b that were likely not part of pre-historic migrations into Europe, but rather spread by later historical movements. Greeks possess none of the lineages denoting North African ancestry within the last 5000 years and have only 2% (3/148) of the marker J-M267, which may reflect more recent Middle Eastern admixture.
Jobling et al., in their genetics textbook "Human Evolutionary Genetics: Origins, Peoples & Disease", state that Arnaiz-Villena's conclusions on the Sub-Saharan origin of Greeks, is an example of arbitrary interpretation and that the methodology used is not appropriate for this kind of research. Karatzios C. et al., made a systematic review of genetics and historical documents, showing great flaws in Arnaiz-Villena's methodology and theory on the Greeks/Sub-Saharan genetic relationship.
Three respected geneticists, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Alberto Piazza and Neil Risch, criticised Arnaiz-Villena's methodology. They stated that "Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics. The limitations are made evident by the authors' extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups." Arnaiz-Villena et al. countered this criticism in a response, stating "single-locus studies, whether using HLA or other markers, are common in this field and are regularly published in the specialist literature".
A 2017 archaeogenetic study concluded concerning the origin of both the Minoans and Mycenaeans, that:
Other proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists are not discernible in our data, as there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Myceneans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilizations of these regions.
The other proposed migrations that is mentioned and disproved by the paper pertain to Black Athena's positions that Arnaiz-Villena also tried to support with his work.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Initially blood typing and then later genetics has proven that white Berbers of the Maghreb are actually descended from populations from the Iberian Peninsula.
True, but I don't know if that disproves contributions to ancient Libyan ancestry from other European regions. We would probably need aDNA from Bronze Age Libyans to assess that. I do think it is possible that some of the ANF-like ancestry in the Abusir el-Meleq samples is from Libyan sources though, especially since that part of Egypt had a lot of immigrants from Libya after the New Kingdom.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
"white Berbers of the Maghreb" is not a quantifiable term
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: True, but I don't know if that disproves contributions to ancient Libyan ancestry from other European regions. We would probably need aDNA from Bronze Age Libyans to assess that. I do think it is possible that some of the ANF-like ancestry in the Abusir el-Meleq samples is from Libyan sources though, especially since that part of Egypt had a lot of immigrants from Libya after the New Kingdom.
As far as I know the first Europeans to settle Libya just west of Egypt were the Greeks, but even they spoke of blonde or red head natives.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey: Fulani documented as far north as Siwa Oasis was my point. And the even the possibility of Hausas that far north is interesting.
Well the Fulani are nomadic not so much Hausa but they get around too. Most Fulani tend to range the Sahel west to east with the latter up to the Nile Valley, though some may cross the desert with camels. Mind you this is with the Sahara today so imagine how far their ancestors ranged during the Green Holocene. We have genetic evidence of this too as I will show..
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Seems that Arnaiz Villena´s findings have been criticized through the years. Wiki made a summary of the debate:
quote:Greeks and Sub-Saharans
Arnaiz-Villena et al. published five scientific articles, where, among other claims, they concluded that the Greek population originates from Sub-Saharan Africa and do not cluster with other Mediterraneans. The explanation they offered is that a large number of Sub-Saharans had migrated to Greece (but not to Crete) during Minoan times i.e. predating both Classical and Mycenaean Greece. Those conclusions were related to the "Black Athena" debate and became embroiled in disputes between Greek and ethnic Macedonian nationalists.
They cited Dörk et al. for having found a marker on Chromosome 7 that is common to Black Africans and, among Caucasoid populations, is found only in Greeks. Dörk et al. did find an African-type of cystic fibrosis mutation in Greeks, however this mutation was extremely rare; it was detected only in three Greek families. The explanation they offered is quite different from Arnaiz-Villena's. Dörk et al. state: "Historical contacts—for example, under Alexander the Great or during the ancient Minoan civilization—may provide an explanation for the common ancestry of disease mutations in these ethnically diverse populations."
Hajjej et al. claimed to have confirmed the genetic relatedness between Greeks and Sub-Saharans. However they used the same methodology (same gene markers) and same data samples like Arnaiz-Villena et al.
Other authors contradict Arnaiz-Villena's results. In The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994), Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza grouped Greeks with other European and Mediterranean populations based on 120 loci (view MDS plot). Then, Ayub et al. 2003 did the same thing using 182 loci (view dendrogram. Another study was conducted in 2004 at Skopje's University of Ss. Kiril and Metodij, using high-resolution typing of HLA-DRB1 according to Arnaiz-Villena's methodology. Contrary to Arnaiz-Villena's conclusion, no sub-Saharan admixture was detected in the Greek sample.
In a sample of 125 Greeks from Thessaloniki and Sarakatsani, 2 Asian-specific mtDNA sequences (M and D) were detected (1.6%). No sub-Saharan African genes were observed in this population, therefore, non-Caucasoid maternal ancestry in Greece is very low, as elsewhere in Europe. Additionally, in a sample of 366 Greeks from thirteen locations in continental Greece, Crete, Lesvos and Chios, a single African haplogroup A Y Chromosome was found (0.3%). This marks the only instance to date of sub-Saharan DNA being discovered in Greece. In another sample of 42 Greeks, one sequence of the Siberian Tat-C haplogroup turned up, while other studies with larger sample populations have failed to detect this paternal marker in the Greek gene pool and while its frequencies are actually much higher in Scandinavian and Slavic populations. Also, a paper has detected clades of haplogroups J and E3b that were likely not part of pre-historic migrations into Europe, but rather spread by later historical movements. Greeks possess none of the lineages denoting North African ancestry within the last 5000 years and have only 2% (3/148) of the marker J-M267, which may reflect more recent Middle Eastern admixture.
Jobling et al., in their genetics textbook "Human Evolutionary Genetics: Origins, Peoples & Disease", state that Arnaiz-Villena's conclusions on the Sub-Saharan origin of Greeks, is an example of arbitrary interpretation and that the methodology used is not appropriate for this kind of research. Karatzios C. et al., made a systematic review of genetics and historical documents, showing great flaws in Arnaiz-Villena's methodology and theory on the Greeks/Sub-Saharan genetic relationship.
Three respected geneticists, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Alberto Piazza and Neil Risch, criticised Arnaiz-Villena's methodology. They stated that "Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics. The limitations are made evident by the authors' extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups." Arnaiz-Villena et al. countered this criticism in a response, stating "single-locus studies, whether using HLA or other markers, are common in this field and are regularly published in the specialist literature".
A 2017 archaeogenetic study concluded concerning the origin of both the Minoans and Mycenaeans, that:
Other proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists are not discernible in our data, as there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Myceneans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilizations of these regions.
The other proposed migrations that is mentioned and disproved by the paper pertain to Black Athena's positions that Arnaiz-Villena also tried to support with his work.
Yes, I am well aware. This was discussed before in the forum. His HLA work was shoddy considering that at that time it was harder to pin point HLA alleles as those are the most genetically diverse genes. That said, he did identify certain markers which were later verified.
Here is another study more recent than Villena.
HLA-DRB1 and -DQB1 loci in three west African ethnic groups: Genetic relationship with sub-Saharan African and European populations (2008) Abstract The Fulani of west Africa have been shown to be less susceptible to malaria and to mount a stronger immune response to malaria than sympatric ethnic groups. The analysis of HLA diversity is useful for the assessment of the genetic distance between the Fulani and sympatric populations, which represents the necessary theoretical background for the investigation of genetic determinants of susceptibility to malaria. We assessed the polymorphism of HLA-DRB1 and -DQB1 loci and analyzed the distribution of alleles/haplotypes in Fulani, Mossi, and Rimaibé from Burkina Faso. We then investigated the genetic relationship of these three ethnic groups with other sub-Saharan African populations as well as with Europeans. We confirmed that the Fulani from Burkina Faso are genetically distinct from sympatric Mossi and Rimaibé. Furthermore the Fulani from Burkina Faso are close to those from The Gambia and, intriguingly, share the distribution of specific alleles with east African populations (Amhara and Oromo). It is noteworthy that the HLA-DRB1*04 and -DQB1*02 alleles, which are implicated in the development of several autoimmune diseases, are present at high frequency in the Fulani, suggesting their potential involvement in the enhanced immune reactivity observed in this population.
HLA-DRB1*04 is what links ancient Egyptians to West Africans like Mandenka.
And one of the most common autoimmune disorders it causes is rheumatoid arthritis.
quote:As far as I know the first Europeans to settle Libya just west of Egypt were the Greeks, but even they spoke of blonde or red head natives.
What are the dates of these reports?
1700bc 1300bc 400bc
quote:Berbers are undoubtedly the descendants of the races known to the Greeks and Romans under the generic name of Libyans. The Kabyles of the hills between Algiers and Bougie, and the Shawia of the Aures Mountains are very similar to one another and may be taken as typical Berbers. They are distinctly white-skinned, even when sunburned. Usually they have black hair and brown or hazel eyes, some have yellow hair and blue eyes. In the royal necropolis of Thebes of about 1300 B.C., certain Libyans are depicted as having a white skin, blue eyes and fair beards. Blonds are represented on Egyptian monuments from 1700 B.C. and were noted by the Greeks in the fourth century B.C. In the east the blonds have quite died out, but there are patches of this race in the west of North Africa. This fair race still remain an unsolved problem. Some students bring them from Spain, other authors from Italy, others again from the east. Perhaps they were a sporadic invasions and formed an aristocratic class. One suggestion is that they were Proto-Nordics who formed a part of the various groups of Asiatics who raided Egypt about 1300 B.C. and moved westwards. Alfred Cort Haddon, The Races of Man and Their Distribution (1924), University Press, 1924, p. 36
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,:
"white Berbers of the Maghreb" is not a quantifiable term
No, look at the thread title. It says "light skin"
"white" is a race term
"light skin" is not
Look at any journal article on berbers. They don't say "white Berbers"
DNA could tell us more
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ The older journal and anthropological articles do distinguish white Berbers from darker Berbers. And if you're trying to compare that white Berber woman to Nofret the two have different features and Nofret was actually painted in the conventional yellow color which was brushed off her face.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ The older journal and anthropological articles do distinguish white Berbers from darker Berbers. And if you're trying to compare that white Berber woman to Nofret the two have different features and Nofret was actually painted in the conventional yellow color which was brushed off her face.
Older journal articles is not a good argument. It means you are trying to justify racial terminology with potentially outdated sources. The thread title says "light skin" which is not a race word. Black and white are race words.
There are many photos of the Nofret/Rahotep sculpture so, without standing in front of it we cannot be certain that the color in this one is more accurate then others but regardless, arbitrarily using this one and comparing to a typical color yellow
The color in the photo is what is. I have sampled the color and put it in the squares, call the color what you want
Sometimes a more saturated yellow color is used depicting goddesses, to represent gold (they did not have gold paint) rather than real people depicted who might be a yellowish sand-like color
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Nofret was actually painted in the conventional yellow color which was brushed off her face.
You have no evidence of someone on modern times brushing off color
And if someone brushed off color you don't know which color was brushed off, the lighter or darker color
Whatever the case may be the condition is a bit streaky looking on the face's skin tone You don't know the reason, it may just be decay of the paint If this is the case the darker streaks might be the ones more similar to the original color. To speak to condition you can't just look at a photo and make assumptions, you would have to have some art conservationist or restorer's remarks who may have handled this sculpture There is also potential for inconsistences in the chemistry of the paint or if they painted in mire than one layer and these could have later caused the streakiness
Without standing in front of the sculpture we also don't know if this less yellowish color is more accurate than the other photo. I have seen a many this beige color
and of the great contrast in their skin tones are we to assume that that could not their actual skin tones? Are we to assume that she was the same color as Rahotep but they made her light for symbolic reasons? If that was the case it would have to be proven by Egyptian text not color theories of Egyptologists
Also this art is Old Kingdom Try finding any other color depiction of a female real person (not a goddess)
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
What do you think of Ygor Coelhos commentary on Berber history on the site Quora? Ygor Coelho is a recurring writer on Quora and he often writes about history and genetics. He is no professional geneticist or historian but he often writes quite interesting posts.
quote: Question: Since the Berbers are Middle Eastern people who invaded Africa 10,000 years ago, and they expelled the black people who lived there earlier, does it mean that they are not real Africans?
Answer by Ygor Coelho
That isn't what happened. Berbers are a group of populations — a very heterogeneous one, I add — that emerged in North Africa itself when indigenous North African hunter-gatherers, early Anatolian farmers and later their European descendants, Levantine farmers and herders, West African farmers and East African herders met successively and gradually mixed to form new populations.
Of course, other African population clusters were native to their own core areas (e.g. West Africans, Nilotic East Africans, Horn African hunter-gatherers, Khoisan Southern Africans, at least two highly distinct clusters of Central African rainforest hunter-gatherers so-called “pygmies”). North Africa already had its own distinctive indigenous African population, which mixed with later waves of immigrants from several parts of Eurasia and Africa and is now ancestral to modern North Africans.
In fact, that’s such an ancient process of Eurasia-Africa interaction that the indigenous North African cluster itself was also a combination of an even older North African population (*not* identical nor even ancestral to any other extant African population cluster, either) with an also older and divergent layer of a West Eurasian population — a mixing event that may have happened even before the Last Glacial Maximum around 20,000–25,000 years ago.
No Berber-like population existed in the Middle East at any time in the past, nor even 10,000 years ago. You can’t find any Berber-like people among the ancient DNA samples from the entire Middle East, except, in later times, when they are evident genetic outliers, that is, obvious (i.e because they differ too much from the other samples in ancestry composition) immigrants or unmixed descendants of immigrants.
The typical Berber-like genetic makeup is the result of historical events that took place in North Africa itself from the onset of the Neolithic Period onward, and the modern populations that carry the most ancestral admixture from the Late Paleolithic inhabitants of Northwest Africa are the Berbers (average around ~25–35%), not any other African or non-African people.
Actually, Berbers tend to have MORE ancestry from the Late Paleolithic (i.e. ~10–20 kya) inhabitants of the broad zone where their current homelands are located than the large majority of Western and Central Europeans, Central Africans, East Africans, Southern Africans, Southeast Asians, Central Asians, West Siberians, and North Americans do. That is no small feat in a rapidly changing Holocene Era.
That kind of periodic renovation of the genetic ancestry composition of the inhabitants of a land is no novelty. It’s happened all over the world several times, and it didn’t happen in the last 10,000 years or so only in the most isolated parts of the world (at least not until the contemporary era).
Anyway, is there anything more racist and xenophobic than claiming a people is not “really from here” even if they and their ancestors have been living and evolving in that same area for the last 10,000 years? What's this obsession with racial/ethnogeographic purity? What’s up with this segregation between “real Africans” and “fake/illegitimate Africans” 10,000 years after an alleged invasion? Should then the descendants of African immigrants that moved to Europe, regardless of how mixed they might be, be still considered aliens and non-Europeans even 2,000 years from now? It’s really sad how often the oppressed one just seems to dream of becoming the oppressor eventually.
How long do you think a population needs to be living in some region to be considered native to it and to be viewed by modern foreigners moving to it as the indigenous population of the land that is receiving them? Because, if you think the minimum time required is longer than 2,000 years — or even 3,000 years — , then the overwhelming majority of the Bantu-speaking Africans are not any more indigenous and native to their current lands than the Chinese are native to Iraq just because they both happen to live in Africa.
Now, I bet that would be considered outrageous by a lot of Africans south of the Sahara… and yet we keep hearing those extreme ideas about what makes a people indigenous (or even just native) when it comes to Berbers, obviously just because of their physical appearance that does not fit within the very narrow and originally racist stereotype about what an “African is supposed to be/look like”, whereas everyone finds it perfectly fine that Asia is natively inhabited by totally different people like Georgians, Tamils, Yemenis, Malays and Koreans.
But it happens that the large majority of the ancestors of the Berbers were already living in North Africa before any typical Bantu African was living in, say, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania or South Africa. I hope that does not mean that you want us to say that those are not real natives of the lands thet have been inhabiting for dozens or even hundreds of generations.
Supplementary Figure S3: Plot of the D statistic in the form D(Fulani, Mandenka, Eurasia/Northern Africa, Chimpanzee), where the two clusters FulaniA and FulaniB are represented separately (blue and purple respectively).
So for dna studies when talking about mandinka they are talking about the Mandinka sub-group Mandinka/Mandenka.
Even Mandingo and Mandinka could be another word just for mande and Bambara,Malinke etc..and are not included as alternate word even if they are mande and they are too.
Yes i saw that too recently and that even adds more confusion.I was trying to find that website today but can't find it now.
There is someone or groups etc.. deliberately trying to add to this confusion.
Anybody else notice the deliberate confusion?
Posted by Firewall (Member # 20331) on :
Edited above or last page.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa Bey:
That's because the Turkish Ottoman Empire included North Africa and part of the Ottoman's policies was migration of peoples into different parts of the empire. Balkan peoples were not only transported to North Africa but also Palestine and Syria.
quote:
This shows that the European influence in Tunisia was from nearby Italian Peninsula.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: What do you think of Ygor Coelhos commentary on Berber history on the site Quora? Ygor Coelho is a recurring writer on Quora and he often writes about history and genetics. He is no professional geneticist or historian but he often writes quite interesting posts.
quote: Question: Since the Berbers are Middle Eastern people who invaded Africa 10,000 years ago, and they expelled the black people who lived there earlier, does it mean that they are not real Africans?
Answer by Ygor Coelho
That isn't what happened. Berbers are a group of populations — a very heterogeneous one, I add — that emerged in North Africa itself when indigenous North African hunter-gatherers, early Anatolian farmers and later their European descendants, Levantine farmers and herders, West African farmers and East African herders met successively and gradually mixed to form new populations.
Of course, other African population clusters were native to their own core areas (e.g. West Africans, Nilotic East Africans, Horn African hunter-gatherers, Khoisan Southern Africans, at least two highly distinct clusters of Central African rainforest hunter-gatherers so-called “pygmies”). North Africa already had its own distinctive indigenous African population, which mixed with later waves of immigrants from several parts of Eurasia and Africa and is now ancestral to modern North Africans.
In fact, that’s such an ancient process of Eurasia-Africa interaction that the indigenous North African cluster itself was also a combination of an even older North African population (*not* identical nor even ancestral to any other extant African population cluster, either) with an also older and divergent layer of a West Eurasian population — a mixing event that may have happened even before the Last Glacial Maximum around 20,000–25,000 years ago.
No Berber-like population existed in the Middle East at any time in the past, nor even 10,000 years ago. You can’t find any Berber-like people among the ancient DNA samples from the entire Middle East, except, in later times, when they are evident genetic outliers, that is, obvious (i.e because they differ too much from the other samples in ancestry composition) immigrants or unmixed descendants of immigrants.
The typical Berber-like genetic makeup is the result of historical events that took place in North Africa itself from the onset of the Neolithic Period onward, and the modern populations that carry the most ancestral admixture from the Late Paleolithic inhabitants of Northwest Africa are the Berbers (average around ~25–35%), not any other African or non-African people.
Actually, Berbers tend to have MORE ancestry from the Late Paleolithic (i.e. ~10–20 kya) inhabitants of the broad zone where their current homelands are located than the large majority of Western and Central Europeans, Central Africans, East Africans, Southern Africans, Southeast Asians, Central Asians, West Siberians, and North Americans do. That is no small feat in a rapidly changing Holocene Era.
That kind of periodic renovation of the genetic ancestry composition of the inhabitants of a land is no novelty. It’s happened all over the world several times, and it didn’t happen in the last 10,000 years or so only in the most isolated parts of the world (at least not until the contemporary era).
Anyway, is there anything more racist and xenophobic than claiming a people is not “really from here” even if they and their ancestors have been living and evolving in that same area for the last 10,000 years? What's this obsession with racial/ethnogeographic purity? What’s up with this segregation between “real Africans” and “fake/illegitimate Africans” 10,000 years after an alleged invasion? Should then the descendants of African immigrants that moved to Europe, regardless of how mixed they might be, be still considered aliens and non-Europeans even 2,000 years from now? It’s really sad how often the oppressed one just seems to dream of becoming the oppressor eventually.
How long do you think a population needs to be living in some region to be considered native to it and to be viewed by modern foreigners moving to it as the indigenous population of the land that is receiving them? Because, if you think the minimum time required is longer than 2,000 years — or even 3,000 years — , then the overwhelming majority of the Bantu-speaking Africans are not any more indigenous and native to their current lands than the Chinese are native to Iraq just because they both happen to live in Africa.
Now, I bet that would be considered outrageous by a lot of Africans south of the Sahara… and yet we keep hearing those extreme ideas about what makes a people indigenous (or even just native) when it comes to Berbers, obviously just because of their physical appearance that does not fit within the very narrow and originally racist stereotype about what an “African is supposed to be/look like”, whereas everyone finds it perfectly fine that Asia is natively inhabited by totally different people like Georgians, Tamils, Yemenis, Malays and Koreans.
But it happens that the large majority of the ancestors of the Berbers were already living in North Africa before any typical Bantu African was living in, say, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania or South Africa. I hope that does not mean that you want us to say that those are not real natives of the lands thet have been inhabiting for dozens or even hundreds of generations.
Coelho is absolutely correct! This topic of Berbers being of 'Middle Eastern' extraction has been discussed in this forum numerous times before (check the archives). Such identification makes little sense when the Egyptians who live right next to said Middle East do not get the same type of genetic identification, or the fact that Berbers not only display lighter phenotypes than Egyptians but even 'Nordic' or 'Aryan' type features. Not to mention that Maghrebi possess genetic alleles and markers that are unique to them and not even shared with Egyptians let alone Middle Easterners.
Carleton Coon's racial classifications of Africans based on his anthropometric observations.
At present, and until a great mass of new and scientifically gathered evidence shall have been collected, only one main fact is indisputable—viz. that the so-called Hamitic race has absorbed a number of foreign ethnic elements, which it has not succeeded in wholly assimilating physically, though it has imposed upon them this or that Hamitic dialect. The original pure Hamitic type seems to be that found among the Saharan Berbers—a type tall, spare, long-limbed, and dark (brun); hair black or dark brown, straight or wavy; head dolichocephalic, orthognathous; nose slightly aquiline or straight; eyes dark and piercing, set rather widely apart; mouth well-defined; facial capillary system slightly developed; movements generally slow and dignified. In the west, between the Wady Dra'ah ("Wed Draa") and the Senegal, this type has become fused with the Negro elements from the south, the resultant type sharing the physical peculiarities of both progenitors. The same thing appears to have happened in the case of the various Hamitic peoples of East Africa.
The most important extra-African elements among the Hamites are the brachycephalic Berbers and the blonds. Both, as one would a priori expect, are found in the north. The brachycephals are, almost certainly, invaders, since they form but a small group near the northern seaboard of the dolichocephalic African continent. The blonds are much more numerous, but are even more clearly of extra-African origin. Various theories have been advanced to account for the presence of this xanthochroid element in Africa, it even having been asserted that the blonds owed their origin to the Vandals. This is, however, not only in itself incredible, owing to the number and distribution of the xanthochroids in the fastnesses of Morocco, but is even flatly contradicted by the ancient evidence. Whatever may be the true significance of the word Tehenu, which some would have to mean "fair" or "bright " (scil. "people"), evidence of a more satisfactory nature is to be found in the Egyptian monuments. For whereas the Libyan in earlier Egyptian art is regularly a brun, later representations exist showing Libyans not only blond, but even with red hair and blue eyes." Classical notices of blond Africans also exist; and though they are few, they are explicit. The Greek colonists of Cyrene are mentioned by Callimachus as dancing with the blond Libyan women.
Orange: Cardial and Impressoceramics Brown: Neolithic Capsian tradition light green: Saharo-Sudanese cultures (Khartoum culture, Shaheinab culture) red: Neolithic of the Niger purple: Levant - Old Neolithic (Fayum Neolithic, Merimde) green: Upper Egyptian Neolithic (Badari)
genetic evidence IAM (Early Neolithic) people did not possess any of the European SNPs associated with light pigmentation, and most likely had dark skin and eyes. IAM samples contain ancestral alleles for pigmentation-associated variants present in SLC24A5 (rs1426654), SLC45A2 (rs16891982), and OCA2 (rs1800401 and 12913832) genes. On the other hand, KEB (Late Neolithic) individuals exhibit some European-derived alleles that predispose individuals to lighter skin and eye color, including those on genes SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and OCA2 (rs1800401).
I agree with Coelho that one problem with North Africa is that people tend to homogenize the area when genetics shows that the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) and Northeast Africa (Libya & Egypt) have very different population histories. Not to mention the fact that there were multiple admixture events between African and Eurasian populations on both sides some which go back very far to right after Out-of-Africa as to not clearly differntiate which markers are Africa or Eurasian.
Posted by Firewall (Member # 20331) on :
quote:Originally posted by Firewall:
Correction- Looking at the study again for the mande and the map above, it's only two sub-groups they are talking about,the mende and mandenka.
Posted by Firewall (Member # 20331) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Coelho is absolutely correct!
For the most part I suppose. Imo they neglected what facilitates the xenophobia that is rampant around North Africa, which from what I've seen, seems to be the non-black North Africans discriminating against the Black ones.
If we are to fully embrace the *everyone is African* mentality that Coelho proposes, why on Earth are such well documented events of racial discrimination occurring?
Personally, I don't support any racial discrimination or xenophobia of any kind, and I am open towards Coelho's mentality, but I'd argue that these skin colour debates will continue to be facilitated by the racial discrimination going on in modern North Africa.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ The colorism/racism you see in North Africa-- both in the Maghreb and in Northeast Africa is purely the result of cultural influence from both the Middle East and especially Europe. It's the same issue you see in India for example where 'fair skinned' peoples are upheld as ideal even though the majority are the opposite.
In regards to the Maghreb, from what I understand the majority of people tend to look like mixed 'mulatto' types no different from Puerto-Ricans and Dominicans whom they often get mistaken for in America. Of course those around the coasts tend to be lighter and more European looking while those in the south in the desert areas tend to look blacker.
Also, I'm not sure if you're aware that the so-called 'one-drop rule' in Africa (both North and Sub-Sahara) is the opposite of America where one drop of non-black/white blood makes one non-black/white.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ The colorism/racism you see in North Africa-- both in the Maghreb and in Northeast Africa is purely the result of cultural influence from both the Middle East and especially Europe. It's the same issue you see in India for example where 'fair skinned' peoples are upheld as ideal even though the majority are the opposite.
In regards to the Maghreb, from what I understand the majority of people tend to look like mixed 'mulatto' types no different from Puerto-Ricans and Dominicans whom they often get mistaken for in America. Of course those around the coasts tend to be lighter and more European looking while those in the south in the desert areas tend to look blacker.
Also, I'm not sure if you're aware that the so-called 'one-drop rule' in Africa (both North and Sub-Sahara) is the opposite of America where one drop of non-black/white blood makes one non-black/white.
Hostility towards dark-skinned groups predates any European or Middle Eastern influence. The Berber Almohads made distinctions between the Mallul (meaning the White), symbolizing purity, and the mixed or dark "Agnaw." Isamgan, which literally meant slaves, was synonymous with Black. Despite being Islamized, the Masmudas refused to grant rights to children born of black mothers, unlike the Arabs for whom the paternal Nasab was sufficient. This argument was used, for instance, by the Almohad sheikhs to depose the Almohad Caliph al Sa'id, who was the son of a black concubine from the imperial harem.
Additionally, the pre-Islamic code of the Berber tribal confederation of the Ait Atta included discriminatory rules that kept the Haratin in an inferior status, such as prohibiting them from owning land or a house. The social category of Iklan among the Tuaregs, which means "to be black," essentially equated to being slaves or serfs.
Therefore, racism towards blacks in modern North Africa stems from the historical association of blacks with inferior status and slavery, whether in coastal North Africa or the Sahara.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Yes but if you noticed that in my post you quoted, right before I wrote European, I wrote Middle Eastern. Everything you described referred to the Islamic traditions that were introduced into the area. I've read original scholarly works on the Moors years back and when they use 'white' vs. 'black' it is not the simplistic racial situation you see in say Jim Crow segregation. While it's true that other Africans to the south of the Moors had darker complexions and different features, that didn't make the Moors themselves 'white'. The Moors were obviously not 'white' by any means of our modern racial definitions and that includes both the Al-Mohad dynasty and definitely their Al-Moravid predecessors who originate as far south as Senegal, which is why traditionally in the Romance speaking countries of the Western Europe 'Moor' is synonymous with black person. 'White' and 'Black' are often symbolic terms in Islam for purity vs. impurity or heavenly vs. earthly, or even Islam vs. idolatry. You often see the last analogy used in jihadic literature with the Ummah al Islam described as 'white nations' while the ummah alwathania (nations of heathens) as black nations. 'The Moors who are nomadic Berbers adopted many Arabic concepts and some Moorish elites even intermarried with Arab tribes. For them being 'white' meant being a desert nomad and thus having a 'pure' or noble status than being a settled agricultural serf which made one impure or 'black'. Interestingly you see the same exact situation in Sudan with northern Sudanese 'Arabs' who are simply Arabized Nubians who contrast themselves as 'white' as opposed to their southern neighbors whom they call 'black' even though there is little to no difference in color. Are you aware the same situation was originally found in Arabia itself?? In early Islamic literature many Arab tribes before and during their Islamization were also called 'black' by the 'white' Muslims. What's more is that when European literature described the first invaders from the Middle East, they never used the words 'Muslim' or even 'Arab' but simply referred to them as Saracens and that they too were described as black in skin color!!
And yes even before Islam the Moors discriminated against other Africans like Haratin who they saw as inferior, but it wasn't just due to color. Again it was due to their negative views on settled agriculturalists. You see the same discrimination in Ethiopia exhibited by the pastoral Oromo against agricultural tribes who are inferior to them in their caste system which is very similar to that of the Moors and other Saharan Berbers.
"The place which was called El Gazie, ( 2 ) was a low sandy beach, having no trees in sight, nor any verdure. There was no appear-ance of mountain or hill ; nor (excepting only the rock on which the ship was wrecked) any thing but sand as far as the eve could reach. The Moors [of Mauritania] were straight haired, but quite black; their dress consisted of little more than a rug or a skin round their waist, their upper parts and from their knees downwards, being wholly naked."--Robert Adams (1810)
Moors Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: [QB] ^ Yes but if you noticed that in my post you quoted, right before I wrote European, I wrote Middle Eastern. Everything you described referred to the Islamic traditions that were introduced into the area. I've read original scholarly works on the Moors years back and when they use 'white' vs. 'black' it is not the simplistic racial situation you see in say Jim Crow segregation. While it's true that other Africans to the south of the Moors had darker complexions and different features, that didn't make the Moors themselves 'white'. The Moors were obviously not 'white' by any means of our modern racial definitions and that includes both the Al-Mohad dynasty and definitely their Al-Moravid predecessors who originate as far south as Senegal, which is why traditionally in the Romance speaking countries of the Western Europe 'Moor' is synonymous with black person. 'White' and 'Black' are often symbolic terms in Islam for purity vs. impurity or heavenly vs. earthly, or even Islam vs. idolatry. You often see the last analogy used in jihadic literature with the Ummah al Islam described as 'white nations' while the ummah alwathania (nations of heathens) as black nations. 'The Moors who are nomadic Berbers adopted many Arabic concepts and some Moorish elites even intermarried with Arab tribes. For them being 'white' meant being a desert nomad and thus having a 'pure' or noble status than being a settled agricultural serf which made one impure or 'black'. Interestingly you see the same exact situation in Sudan with northern Sudanese 'Arabs' who are simply Arabized Nubians who contrast themselves as 'white' as opposed to their southern neighbors whom they call 'black' even though there is little to no difference in color. Are you aware the same situation was originally found in Arabia itself?? In early Islamic literature many Arab tribes before and during their Islamization were also called 'black' by the 'white' Muslims. What's more is that when European literature described the first invaders from the Middle East, they never used the words 'Muslim' or even 'Arab' but simply referred to them as Saracens and that they too were described as black in skin color!!
And yes even before Islam the Moors discriminated against other Africans like Haratin who they saw as inferior, but it wasn't just due to color. Again it was due to their negative views on settled agriculturalists. You see the same discrimination in Ethiopia exhibited by the pastoral Oromo against agricultural tribes who are inferior to them in their caste system which is very similar to that of the Moors and other Saharan Berbers.
"The place which was called El Gazie, ( 2 ) was a low sandy beach, having no trees in sight, nor any verdure. There was no appear-ance of mountain or hill ; nor (excepting only the rock on which the ship was wrecked) any thing but sand as far as the eve could reach. The Moors [of Mauritania] were straight haired, but quite black; their dress consisted of little more than a rug or a skin round their waist, their upper parts and from their knees downwards, being wholly naked."--Robert Adams (1810)
Moors
Did you even pay attention to what I wrote? I literally showed you a case where the Berber custom went against the Middle Eastern one. Also, I mentioned "pre-Islamic" for a reason. Your claim about "Middle Eastern" influence is conjectural and not substantiated.
I'm not sure why you bring up modern Moors from countries such as Senegal or Mauritania, as those groups are known for being mixed and Arabic-speaking.
The Masmudas, like the Almohads, were from the High Atlas in Morocco. Here is a Berber from this region next to a black tourist:
Here videos of those secluded berber communities :
^ Berber is not the same as 'Moor' and Berbers are heterogeneous. I can post images of blonde and red head Berbers but that does not make them Moors nor represent all Berbers.
Did you read the Ygor Coelho post that Archaeopteryx cited?
"Berbers are a group of populations — a very heterogeneous one, I add — that emerged in North Africa itself when indigenous North African hunter-gatherers, early Anatolian farmers and later their European descendants, Levantine farmers and herders, West African farmers and East African herders met successively and gradually mixed to form new populations."
Posted by Ibis (Member # 23674) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ The colorism/racism you see in North Africa-- both in the Maghreb and in Northeast Africa is purely the result of cultural influence from both the Middle East and especially Europe. It's the same issue you see in India for example where 'fair skinned' peoples are upheld as ideal even though the majority are the opposite.
In regards to the Maghreb, from what I understand the majority of people tend to look like mixed 'mulatto' types no different from Puerto-Ricans and Dominicans whom they often get mistaken for in America. Of course those around the coasts tend to be lighter and more European looking while those in the south in the desert areas tend to look blacker.
Also, I'm not sure if you're aware that the so-called 'one-drop rule' in Africa (both North and Sub-Sahara) is the opposite of America where one drop of non-black/white blood makes one non-black/white.
Hostility towards dark-skinned groups predates any European or Middle Eastern influence. The Berber Almohads made distinctions between the Mallul (meaning the White), symbolizing purity, and the mixed or dark "Agnaw." Isamgan, which literally meant slaves, was synonymous with Black. Despite being Islamized, the Masmudas refused to grant rights to children born of black mothers, unlike the Arabs for whom the paternal Nasab was sufficient. This argument was used, for instance, by the Almohad sheikhs to depose the Almohad Caliph al Sa'id, who was the son of a black concubine from the imperial harem.
Additionally, the pre-Islamic code of the Berber tribal confederation of the Ait Atta included discriminatory rules that kept the Haratin in an inferior status, such as prohibiting them from owning land or a house. The social category of Iklan among the Tuaregs, which means "to be black," essentially equated to being slaves or serfs.
Therefore, racism towards blacks in modern North Africa stems from the historical association of blacks with inferior status and slavery, whether in coastal North Africa or the Sahara.
I know that the Arabs/Islamists where racist towards Black Africans, but I'm suprised that the Masmuda were involved in it. I recall recording descriptions of the Masmuda from an old Moor thread on this site(that I can't find the link of). Regardless, the sources seem to state that the Masmuda were black africans.
The quotes:
Coat of Arms of Sardinia. As with the heraldry of families named with variants of Mori or Moor, several countries in Europe have flags and coat of arms with the heads of Moors on them. Military historian, Yaacov Lev in the article , “Army Regime and Society in Fatimid Egypt” (1987) wrote of Nasir Khusroes of the 11th century who speaks of the "20,000" Masmuda men that made up part of the Fatimid troops in Egypt in his time saying, “Masamida were Berbers from the Western Maghreb.Nasir-i Khusrau, however, says that they were blacks and characterized them as infantry who used lances and swords”
(from International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19(3), 337-365).
13th c. A.D.--Abu Shama refers to the Masmuda as "blacks" in his Kitab al-Ravdatayn (B. Lewis, Islam: Religion and Society, 2; 1974, p. 217)
I suspect that the Black Africans that were discriminated against may have been of a non-islamic background.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Berber is not the same as 'Moor' and Berbers are heterogeneous. I can post images of blonde and red head Berbers but that does not make them Moors nor represent all Berbers.
Did you read the Ygor Coelho post that Archaeopteryx cited?
"Berbers are a group of populations — a very heterogeneous one, I add — that emerged in North Africa itself when indigenous North African hunter-gatherers, early Anatolian farmers and later their European descendants, Levantine farmers and herders, West African farmers and East African herders met successively and gradually mixed to form new populations."
We were talking about the hostility towards dark skin, and you claimed it was "purely the result of cultural influence from both the Middle East and especially Europe."
However, it is evident that such racism is also endogenous :
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ibis:I know that the Arabs/Islamists where racist towards Black Africans, but I'm suprised that the Masmuda were involved in it. I recall recording descriptions of the Masmuda from an old Moor thread on this site(that I can't find the link of). Regardless, the sources seem to state that the Masmuda were black africans.
The quotes:
Coat of Arms of Sardinia. As with the heraldry of families named with variants of Mori or Moor, several countries in Europe have flags and coat of arms with the heads of Moors on them. Military historian, Yaacov Lev in the article , “Army Regime and Society in Fatimid Egypt” (1987) wrote of Nasir Khusroes of the 11th century who speaks of the "20,000" Masmuda men that made up part of the Fatimid troops in Egypt in his time saying, “Masamida were Berbers from the Western Maghreb.Nasir-i Khusrau, however, says that they were blacks and characterized them as infantry who used lances and swords”
(from International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19(3), 337-365).
13th c. A.D.--Abu Shama refers to the Masmuda as "blacks" in his Kitab al-Ravdatayn (B. Lewis, Islam: Religion and Society, 2; 1974, p. 217)
I suspect that the Black Africans that were discriminated against may have been of a non-islamic background. [/QB]
How reliable is the first quote? It's the first time I have read about such troops in the Fatimid armies, especially since the Masmudas were Sunnis, so it doesn't make sense for them to fight for the Shias...
Also I couldn't find the "blacks" of Abu Shama in the source you posted, here is the p. 217 :
In any case, those quotes would contradict this :
Also, the Masmudas made extensive use of black soldiers in their armies :
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Again, I am not denying that the Moors or other Berber groups did not discriminate against other Africans however it is not based simply on color. For example in the sources you cite they speak of 'blacks', the problem is what do they mean by 'blacks' since the Moors themselves were called black by Europeans.
From Dana's blog Though it may be true that many of the black Moroccans of today are not Berbers there are many still near black Moroccans who in fact represent the black-skinned peoples once designated Berbers and “Mauri” right up until the 15 and 16th centuries. It is interesting and fascinating that the West's academics are not curious about what happened to these “black” Africans of the Maghreb i.e. the Berbers, so vividly described by early authors with words and in terms that could not be confused with the "swarthiness" of modern Europeans or Mediterraneans.
What happened to those "Moors" of the Riff mountains of Tangiers - horse-riding wearers of loin-cloths who St. Isidore of Seville told us were "black as night" and the 8th century Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 claimed were of a color so horrifying that it scared away the horses of their enemies. What happened to the javelin-throwing "Ethiopians" called "Mauri Mazazeces" and "Mazices" in Tripolitania of the Byzantine writers whose name has only in the 20th century been adopted by all Berber-speakers. Perhaps, some believe they'd be better off not knowing, but that is what this post is attempting to address.
The So-Called Blackamoor vs Moor Divide
In his book Iberia published in 1968, James Michener spouted the prevalent postcolonial perspective that “the word blackamoor was invented to describe Negroes; the great bulk of the Moors must have been white men tanned by the sun, like Arabs” (Michener, J., Iberia, 1968, p. 163). In fact the name blackamoor in Western Europe appears to have been applied not just to anybody black as a Moor, but to anyone thought to be descended from one that wasn't necessarily black in color. The name was frequently used for European individuals who were considered of black African, i.e. Moorish in “blood” or origin, but not Muslim. Thus, in 1945 Austrian author and composer Max Graf quotes novelist Heinrich Laube who described fellow Austrian Johann Strauss Senior (famous like his sons for his Waltzes) upon seeing him for the first time. He wrote of him as ”black as a Moor with curly hair, the typical King of the Blackamoors” (Graf, Max, 2015). Such descriptions contradict the view promoted by some that a Moor usually referred to any Muslim from Spain or North Africa and that a "Blackemore" was a black Muslim. They suggest rather that it signified any man that showed descendancy from a Moor, i.e. black man. Witness the description of Strauss by Laube. “The man is completely black like a Moor, the hair frizzy, the mouth melodious. One has only to regret that he has a white face... ” he adds, otherwise he would look like Balthasar(Lang, Zoe, 2014, p. 115). Laube even goes so far as to ascribe the music of Strauss to “Africanly hot-bloodedness” saying he conducted a dance “in an African manner”. He clearly saw Strauss as a fair-skinned descendant of “black Africans” as he was consistent in comparing his features to them (Lang, Zoe A., 2014, p. 116). Strauss had according to the same author a brother who was olive-skinned and one ivory-skinned with jet black hair. Strauss's grandmother was born in Spain, but we can surmise that in his day one had to be darker than “olive-skinned” to be likened to Moors. Similarly, the pianist and composer Hadyn was described by a Prince Esterhazy (a Hungarian nobleman he worked for) as a “fine blackamoor” (Stapert, C., 2014, p. 40) and even as a “blacky” according to one translation. Such instances of the use of blackamoor seem to convey more of a meaning of being black like a Moor as put forth by J.A. Rogers, rather than a black Muslim, and like the word Moor, had the sense of being either a “black man”, or descended from one. Like Strauss, Beethoven was also called a "Moor" and "a black Spaniard" because of his dark skin and "flat" "thick nose" possession of of other traits described in his time by other Europeans as “Negroid” and "resembling a mulatto"– whether one likes it, or not.
On the other hand the phrase "white Moor" in Europe seems to have been used for Muslims who were not typically Moorish in complexion. A diverse array of scholars have become unnecessarily deluded over the usage of the word Moor and the appearance of the early Berbers in ancient times. In her article “Delicious Traffick': Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern stages” an Ania Loomba notes that Shakespeare used the word simultaneously with Negro in texts like the Merchant of Venice. According to Loomba “The Spanish derived the word 'moro' from the Latin 'maurus' which in turn came from the Greek 'mavros' meaning black...” Then she makes the point that “they used it to designate their conquerors who were not black at all but a mixture of Arab and Berber Muslims” (Loomba, A., 2000, p. 210). Thus, she is another one of the many scholars curiously supposing the two people, which as we have shown, once epitomized blackness to be “not black at all”. Of course one must wonder what “not black at all” may mean for this modern professor of post-colonial studies. One doesn't know whether to understand her use of the word black in a literal sense or in a cultural sense. But, as we have seen from references on this blog the complexion of the earliest Berber and Arab Muslims was most certainly the reason Moors were characteristically depicted as black. Both populations, but especially the former, were part and parcel of the peoples considered black in Africa by outsiders up until the 15th century. But, at least Professor Loomba acknowledges where the word “Moor” came from. There are many specialists in ancient history that don't even know or admit to the original meaning and use of the word. The question then arises as to why so many have been led to make assumptions about early documented inhabitants of the world they've evidently not done much learning about. As we have shown these views were largely influenced by the present day demographic situation of North Africa and the Middle East, as well as a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of historians. It was the wont or desire of certain colonial and some post-colonial era scholars to make the people there into the unmodified descendants of palaeolithic European populations, i.e. the “Mediterranean race” of Gabriel Camps and other anthropologists. The people designated in North Africa “Berbers” in the early periods were explicitly referred to in almost all sources as black-skinned. This includes not only Latin and later European texts, but early sources of the Arab-speaking Middle Eastern and Central Asian world. There was certainly no tribe of fair-skinned Moors/Berbers that is spoken about in early histories. And, in actuality the people who have used the term Berber or “Beriberi” for themselves were and are still for the most part black Africans. Thus, it should not be surprising that certain individuals claiming Berber nationality and that they speak for modern Berbers will comment that they have actually never used the word for themselves and that it is in fact a term invented for them by others. And essentially they are right. The word Berber obviously is and was originally used by and for the Zaghawa-related and then Tuareg-related people who in North Africa have since mixed with North African Vandals, Lombards, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs, Normans, Franks, Syrians, Arabians, Genoans, Andalusians, Turks, Bosnians, Persians and numerous renegade European converts to Islam - and that's not even taking into account abundant supply of documented highly-sought-after Byzantine, Circassian and western European concubines. : ) The Kabyles of Algeria are a good example of the heterogeneity characterising modern North Africa. Earlier observers were well aware of this diversity. As mentioned in earlier postings although certain modern Western specialists like to pretend Berber-speakers along the coast in our time are the least modified representatives of early Berbers, that wasn't the case 100 years ago. For example, an 1895 (first printing 1874) Handbook for Travellers in Algeria and Tunis speaks of inhabitants of Kabylia: "It is certain that this race has at various epochs been much mixed with other elements, and the debris of the Greek and Roman colonies must have constituted a considerable portion of this mixture. The religious persecutions of the Arians and Donatists, which so effectually prepared the way for Islamism, no doubt drove many of the poorer members of these colonies for safety to the mountains, where they soon became mixed up with the aboriginal inhabitants. There can still be traced among their customs the traditions of Roman law and municipal institutions, and one frequently meets amongst them types, easily recognisable, of the Latin and Germanic races." (Playfair, Robert Lambert, 1895, p. 7)
Studies have in fact shown that the current inhabitants of the coastal regions of North Africa as well as peninsular Arabia are genetically tied to populations of the modern Levant and Iberia. This would actually make sense since the same people that are known to have played a dominant part in populating the Levant also came to populate Spain and Portugal and have immigrated from these regions within the past several centuries into North Africa. One study done using both SNP and STR analysis has shown that up to 60 percent of the gene pool of modern Maghrebis is from the Levant while another 23 percent is from Iberia. The only problem with the study is that they suggest the Levant influence was due to the Phoenicians when in fact it was likely due to the influx of later peoples coming from the Levant both as slaves, concubines and later populations from Syria (not to be confused with the Sulaym-Hilal invasion) that fought against the Berbers. DNA Tribes Genetic Analysis of North African STRs Other genetic studies have come to nearly the same conclusion - modern Berberphones of North Africa are biologically more Near Eastern than African.
I really don't want to get into a debate on the Moors because that issue has been beaten to death too many times in this forum. So I suggest you look into the archives. But my point is because the Moors discriminated against other Africans who may have been more or less darker does not make them non-white.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
That quote is so ironic considering that Walata was itself created by non berber so called "Blacks"...but anyway ...
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
In any case, those quotes would contradict this :
Also, the Masmudas made extensive use of black soldiers in their armies :
^^^^
What gets me is how were these armies of black slaves maintained if blacks were treated so low? How is his personal protection army, the very unit whose sole mission was his and his families personal safety, composed of people who were treated as lower class?
Makes no sense to me
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
As far as I can tell this history of N/A is complicated. People trying to pretend that various Berbers did not discriminated against so called blacks are simply deluded. At the same time there was def. a more complicated history with so called "Blacks" and Berbers that is not so easily represented on chest beating online debates.
For example as far as I can tell the position of the Haratini(Who are an indigious NA people) were not just that of low caste, Ive read so many conflicting reports of how degraded they are in places like Mauritania but others where Berbers admit they are a "Berber" people who dwelled in the Oaisis, Places like the Draa Valley(IDK I can't really get a clear picture, I tried with folks like Sage Al, but its still very unclear and very complicated as far as I can tell, for example Antalas claimed the Saharan Bebers were more "Racist" to darker Africans esp. toward the Haratani" ...Idk man)
Also some Berber tribes were mixed esp. if you go into the Sahran Berber confederations, which even Anti-Hotep Berber-Apologists like Antalas admits were darker skinned than Mahgrebi Berbers
Also lets stop trying to Equate North African Identity with "Berber" the Tread is about North Africans, and there exists a whole range of non-Berber North Africans who include so called Blacks who were native to that region, the Mehgreb is not the sole identity for the whole region of North Africa.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
This is something I have always tried to stress...Here is a video that shows this clearly...
The start shows a black moor (slave) and the white moors...
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Again, I am not denying that the Moors or other Berber groups did not discriminate against other Africans however it is not based simply on color. For example in the sources you cite they speak of 'blacks', the problem is what do they mean by 'blacks' since the Moors themselves were called black by Europeans.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ The problem is that there were Euronut academics who tried to rewrite history where the Moors whose name is synonymous with 'black' are no longer black and 'black' becomes limited to Sub-Saharan types who were often slaves of the Moors. However, anyone who studies the old literature and 1st hand accounts can see that it is mere white-washing. What makes things worse is that the same Medieval European authors even noted a difference between the Moors who were blacks of Africa vs. Saracens who were blacks of the Middle East. Both Moors and Saracens also enslaved white Europeans so again the identification of 'slave' with black or Sub-Saharan is also a joke.
Posted by -Just Call Me Jari- (Member # 14451) on :
Yeah its pretty ironic, like I said even folks like Antalas does'nt try to claim no "Black" Berbers existed esp. in the Saharan regions he was mostly concerned about the Megrebi ones, but yeah the relationship is so complicated
Also as I said Ive tried hard to understand the relationship between the "Moors", as far as I can tell the Black Moors are still considered "Moor" thus "Berber" similar to the relationship with the Gnwaw and Haritani of the Oasis and Draa Valley...so posting that they were considered low caste or slaves, doe'snt take way that they were not native or in some cases like the Black Moors..."Moors" thus "Berbers" unlike SSAs.
Like I said this sh#t is complicated and confusing as hell...
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ The problem is that there were Euronut academics who tried to rewrite history where the Moors whose name is synonymous with 'black' are no longer black and 'black' becomes limited to Sub-Saharan types who were often slaves of the Moors. However, anyone who studies the old literature and 1st hand accounts can see that it is mere white-washing. What makes things worse is that the same Medieval European authors even noted a difference between the Moors who were blacks of Africa vs. Saracens who were blacks of the Middle East. Both Moors and Saracens also enslaved white Europeans so again the identification of 'slave' with black or Sub-Saharan is also a joke.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Berber is a linguistic or linguo-cultural group while 'Moor' is more of a racial category applied to black North Africans in general regardless of language of culture, thus while 'Moors' most accurately describe those black Berber groups of the Western Sahara, long before them the term 'Moor' could be applied to any black North African including Egyptians. Hence the most famous black Saint in the Christianity is Saint Morius of of Thebes Upper Egypt. In later Arthurian legend there was a foreigner from North Africa who became one of King Arthur's knights named Sir Morien 'the black'. It's only later literature that Europeans began noticing differences among Moors with terms like 'Black-a-Moor' and 'Tawny-Moor' and later 'White Moor' but it does not change the original meaning of the root word 'moor' which comes from teh Latin maure meaning very dark or black.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-:
What gets me is how were these armies of black slaves maintained if blacks were treated so low? How is his personal protection army, the very unit whose sole mission was his and his families personal safety, composed of people who were treated as lower class?
Makes no sense to me [/QB]
Think about it : The vast majority of the army isn't Black, and neither is the population you live with. What do you think would happen if you killed the Caliph? Actually, there was a similar case in the 18th century with the massive army of Abid al-Bukhari, who took control of Morocco. They were so hated that Berber and Arab tribes united and defeated them.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Berber is a linguistic or linguo-cultural group while 'Moor' is more of a racial category applied to black North Africans in general regardless of language of culture, thus while 'Moors' most accurately describe those black Berber groups of the Western Sahara, long before them the term "Moor" could be applied to any black North African including Egyptians. Hence the most famous black Saint in the Christianity is Saint Morius of of Thebes Upper Egypt. In later Arthurian legend there was a foreigner from North Africa who became one of King Arthur's knights named Sir Morien 'the black'. It's only later literature that Europeans began noticing differences among Moors with terms like 'Black-a-Moor' and 'Tawny-Moor' and later 'White Moor' but it does not change the original meaning of the root word 'moor' which comes from teh Latin maure meaning very dark or black.
Both "Berber" and "Moor" were not originally mere linguistic or racial categories but were primarily cultural. The "barbar" mentioned in Arabic sources referred to non-Romanized tribes living west of what is now modern Tunisia, who were opposed to the Rums (Byzantines) and Ifriqyans (Romano-Africans). "Moor" was originally applied to the inhabitants of Mauretania (later divided into two provinces), and "Mauri" is simply the Latin transliteration of the tribal name. It was only the Greeks, with their fondness for puns, who associated it with "mavros", meaning "black" or "dark", and this association appeared only in late antiquity. Later, the term "Moor" came to designate any Muslim from Africa, or even just any Muslim. Therefore, any Muslim European living in Spain, any black African, or any North African could be designated as a Moor.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Again, I am not denying that the Moors or other Berber groups did not discriminate against other Africans however it is not based simply on color. For example in the sources you cite they speak of 'blacks', the problem is what do they mean by 'blacks' since the Moors themselves were called black by Europeans.
I really don't want to get into a debate on the Moors because that issue has been beaten to death too many times in this forum. So I suggest you look into the archives. But my point is because the Moors discriminated against other Africans who may have been more or less darker does not make them non-white.
The sources explicitly mention skin colors, and I don't believe that Black people living in regions like the Draa Valley were culturally vastly different from the neighboring Berber tribes.
Regarding the complexion of those Berbers, look above I have already posted videos of the Masmudas. Here is a tribal map of modern Morocco, showing that tribes of the High Atlas are still part of the Masmuda confederation:
quote:Originally posted by -Just Call Me Jari-: As far as I can tell this history of N/A is complicated. People trying to pretend that various Berbers did not discriminated against so called blacks are simply deluded. At the same time there was def. a more complicated history with so called "Blacks" and Berbers that is not so easily represented on chest beating online debates.
For example as far as I can tell the position of the Haratini(Who are an indigious NA people) were not just that of low caste, Ive read so many conflicting reports of how degraded they are in places like Mauritania but others where Berbers admit they are a "Berber" people who dwelled in the Oaisis, Places like the Draa Valley(IDK I can't really get a clear picture, I tried with folks like Sage Al, but its still very unclear and very complicated as far as I can tell, for example Antalas claimed the Saharan Bebers were more "Racist" to darker Africans esp. toward the Haratani" ...Idk man)
Also some Berber tribes were mixed esp. if you go into the Sahran Berber confederations, which even Anti-Hotep Berber-Apologists like Antalas admits were darker skinned than Mahgrebi Berbers
Also lets stop trying to Equate North African Identity with "Berber" the Tread is about North Africans, and there exists a whole range of non-Berber North Africans who include so called Blacks who were native to that region, the Mehgreb is not the sole identity for the whole region of North Africa.
The problem here is the word "berber" has been appropriated as a racial marker for ancient light skinned Eurasian presence in NOrth Africa since prehistory starting with people the Frenchman Gabriel Camps. And as a result created this modern concept of "berber" as a monolithic racial identity going back tens of thousands of years. This is completely fake and made up. Ancient populations in the Sahara who spoke Berber languages did not identify as "Berber" and didn't all speak the same Berber dialect or write the same scripts. And beyond that, these kinds of people ignore the fact that Berber language originated in North East Africa, likely between Upper Egypt and Lower Sudan. Which would mean among black African populations. Not to mention there were many other various black populations in and around ancient North Africa that have been identified by numerous sources. But again, the problem is the racialists who consistently try and impose a racial distinction on ancient North Africans.
And you see that in books like "Black Morocco: A history of slavery, Race and Islam" which is nothing but racialist nonsense. That is where those quotes by Serapis came from and they have no actual anthropological value to the topic of this thread. I mean how can you tell the history of Morocco and ignore that the capital used to be at Marrakesh which had important trade routes with the South and Southern "berber" tribes of the Almoravids, which predates the modern nation state of Morocco. In fact the term Morocco derives from Marrakesh.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
Taforalt, or Grotte des Pigeons, is a cave in the province of Berkane, Aït Iznasen region, Morocco, possibly the oldest cemetery in North Africa.[1] It contained at least 34[2]: 347 Iberomaurusian adolescent and adult human skeletons, as well as younger ones, from the Upper Palaeolithic between 15,100 and 14,000 calendar years ago. There is archaeological evidence for Iberomaurusian occupation at the site between 23,200 and 12,600 calendar years ago, as well as evidence for Aterian occupation as old as 85,000 years
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ I think those maps are based in large part on the findings of Schlebusch et al.
Though the first map does contradict the Lazaridis finding that Ancestral North Africa and OOA share common ancestry.
The Lazaridis tree chart (with added color) is from an article where he does not mention "Ancestral North Africa" except on one of these model hypotheses charts (the one at the top of this post) He also doesn't use "ANA" nor do other professional researchers. The large blue oval chart above that map is from a blog
He should not even have used the term on this chart because there are no recovered DNA samples of the much older Aterian period
You can see that the dotted line coming down from "Ancestral North Africa" The Lazaridis tree chart to Taforalt says 45% on it That corresponds to Y-DNA E1b1b predominating the Iberomaurusians and in the Maghreb today
Following straight up from Taforalt on the chart we see 55% coming in from Eurasia and that corresponds to the mitochondrial DNA
Yet if at some point Aterian DNA is recovered, that becomes "Ancestral North Africa" instead (at least before the Iberomaurusians)
and the Aterians may have had zero of the below linages
They are lighter skinned than equatorial Africans but have features and hair that overlap many other places in Africa
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
Regarding the complexion of those Berbers, look above I have already posted videos of the Masmudas. Here is a tribal map of modern Morocco, showing that tribes of the High Atlas are still part of the Masmuda confederation:
Who knows what his deep ancestry but he does not look entirely like someone of a continuum with Sahelians He looks Middle Eastern who could also have a significant part African ancestry corresponding to Iberomaurusians DNA
But he looks to drastically different to believe, in my opinion, entirely African
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ A significant factor is the geneflow from Europe, specifically Iberia which is why anthropologists like Carlton Coon labeled the Maghreb as 'Aryan'
Orange: Cardial and Impressoceramics Brown: Neolithic Capsian tradition light green: Saharo-Sudanese cultures (Khartoum culture, Shaheinab culture) red: Neolithic of the Niger purple: Levant - Old Neolithic (Fayum Neolithic, Merimde) green: Upper Egyptian Neolithic (Badari)
..as well as genetic evidence IAM (Early Neolithic) people did not possess any of the European SNPs associated with light pigmentation, and most likely had dark skin and eyes. IAM samples contain ancestral alleles for pigmentation-associated variants present in SLC24A5 (rs1426654), SLC45A2 (rs16891982), and OCA2 (rs1800401 and 12913832) genes. On the other hand, KEB (Late Neolithic) individuals exhibit some European-derived alleles that predispose individuals to lighter skin and eye color, including those on genes SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and OCA2 (rs1800401). Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ A significant factor is the geneflow from Europe, specifically Iberia which is why anthropologists like Carlton Coon labeled the Maghreb as 'Aryan'
Orange: Cardial and Impressoceramics Brown: Neolithic Capsian tradition light green: Saharo-Sudanese cultures (Khartoum culture, Shaheinab culture) red: Neolithic of the Niger purple: Levant - Old Neolithic (Fayum Neolithic, Merimde) green: Upper Egyptian Neolithic (Badari)
..as well as genetic evidence IAM (Early Neolithic) people did not possess any of the European SNPs associated with light pigmentation, and most likely had dark skin and eyes. IAM samples contain ancestral alleles for pigmentation-associated variants present in SLC24A5 (rs1426654), SLC45A2 (rs16891982), and OCA2 (rs1800401 and 12913832) genes. On the other hand, KEB (Late Neolithic) individuals exhibit some European-derived alleles that predispose individuals to lighter skin and eye color, including those on genes SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and OCA2 (rs1800401).
Funny you should mention "Aryan" because in this context it is no more meaningful than Caucasoid. Because we know historically and anthropologically there is tremendous overlap between ancient indigenous Africans and Europeans (Eurasians) as you go back due to common environmental characteristics in Africa and Europe close to the Mediterranean. Which means there are plenty of aboriginal North Africans with dark skin, straight hair and so called "caucasoid" or Aryan features. And a lot of those old postcards from North African showed that along with other evidence. But all these models of anthropology are designed to deliberately obfuscate that in order to promote this ancient Eurasian model of North African history, which again is hundreds of thousands of years old and doesn't start with Eurasia.... And sometime this is why you have other anthropologists coining the term Eurafrican race or even Hamitic race.
The fact is that North Africa is diverse with diverse features and the idea that Eurasians are the exclusive origin of that diversity is false.
quote:Originally posted by Ibis:I know that the Arabs/Islamists where racist towards Black Africans, but I'm suprised that the Masmuda were involved in it. I recall recording descriptions of the Masmuda from an old Moor thread on this site(that I can't find the link of). Regardless, the sources seem to state that the Masmuda were black africans.
The quotes:
Coat of Arms of Sardinia. As with the heraldry of families named with variants of Mori or Moor, several countries in Europe have flags and coat of arms with the heads of Moors on them. Military historian, Yaacov Lev in the article , “Army Regime and Society in Fatimid Egypt” (1987) wrote of Nasir Khusroes of the 11th century who speaks of the "20,000" Masmuda men that made up part of the Fatimid troops in Egypt in his time saying, “Masamida were Berbers from the Western Maghreb.Nasir-i Khusrau, however, says that they were blacks and characterized them as infantry who used lances and swords”
(from International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19(3), 337-365).
13th c. A.D.--Abu Shama refers to the Masmuda as "blacks" in his Kitab al-Ravdatayn (B. Lewis, Islam: Religion and Society, 2; 1974, p. 217)
I suspect that the Black Africans that were discriminated against may have been of a non-islamic background.
How reliable is the first quote? It's the first time I have read about such troops in the Fatimid armies, especially since the Masmudas were Sunnis, so it doesn't make sense for them to fight for the Shias...
Also I couldn't find the "blacks" of Abu Shama in the source you posted, here is the p. 217 :
In any case, those quotes would contradict this :
Also, the Masmudas made extensive use of black soldiers in their armies :
[/QB]
I'll admit that you have got me...if it weren't for, of course, an Almohad king by the name of Yakub al-Mansur. It's well documented that this king was born from a black African mother as we can see below.
"L'émir des Musulmans, serviteur de Dieu, Yacoub ben Youssef ben Abd el-Moumen, surnommé El-Mansour bi Fadhl Allah (le victorieux par la grâce de Dieu), était fils d'une négresse que avait été donnée à son père, et il naquit dans la maison de son grand-père, Abd el-Moumen, à Maroc, l'an 555." ["The Commander of the Muslims, servant of God, Yacoub ben Youssef ben Abd el-Moumen, nicknamed El-Mansour bi Fadhl Allah (the victorious by the grace of God), was the son of a negress who had been given to her father, and he was born in the house of his grandfather, Abd el-Moumen, in Morocco, in the year 555."]
- Roudh El-Kartas: Histoire des souverains du Maghreb (Espagne et Maroc) et annales de la ville de Fès, pp. 303 - 304
I have to give credit to a user named Ighayere, who provided this information for all of us on this site (https://historum.com/t/why-didn%E2%80%99t-the-moors-conquer-all-of -europe.190905/page-2)
With this in mind, let's assume that the Almohads were racist towards black africans, why on Earth would they accept a king that was born from a black woman's womb? In my opinion this is just another example on how some(not all) North African scholars try to hide black African presence in North African history. We've seen it with the Egyptians, and we're seeing it with the moors. I still fondly remember a person on youtube claiming that the Almoravids looked similar to Pokimane in phenotypic appearance, despite them being very recent Islamic converts from southern Mauritania.
Posted by Ibis (Member # 23674) on :
double post
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ibis:I'll admit that you have got me...if it weren't for, of course, an Almohad king by the name of Yakub al-Mansur. It's well documented that this king was born from a black African mother as we can see below.
"L'émir des Musulmans, serviteur de Dieu, Yacoub ben Youssef ben Abd el-Moumen, surnommé El-Mansour bi Fadhl Allah (le victorieux par la grâce de Dieu), était fils d'une négresse que avait été donnée à son père, et il naquit dans la maison de son grand-père, Abd el-Moumen, à Maroc, l'an 555." ["The Commander of the Muslims, servant of God, Yacoub ben Youssef ben Abd el-Moumen, nicknamed El-Mansour bi Fadhl Allah (the victorious by the grace of God), was the son of a negress who had been given to her father, and he was born in the house of his grandfather, Abd el-Moumen, in Morocco, in the year 555."]
- Roudh El-Kartas: Histoire des souverains du Maghreb (Espagne et Maroc) et annales de la ville de Fès, pp. 303 - 304
I have to give credit to a user named Ighayere, who provided this information for all of us on this site (https://historum.com/t/why-didn%E2%80%99t-the-moors-conquer-all-of -europe.190905/page-2)
With this in mind, let's assume that the Almohads were racist towards black africans, why on Earth would they accept a king that was born from a black woman's womb? In my opinion this is just another example on how some(not all) North African scholars try to hide black African presence in North African history. We've seen it with the Egyptians, and we're seeing it with the moors. I still fondly remember a person on youtube claiming that the Almoravids looked similar to Pokimane in phenotypic appearance, despite them being very recent Islamic converts from southern Mauritania. [/QB]
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to convey here... It is well known that many rulers had black ancestry through black concubines (as most black slaves in North Africa were women). Additionally, in such patriarcal societies, a child's lineage is determined by the father's heritage. However, there are some cases where intense racism even led to opposition against such unions, which is why, for example, the Caliph al-Sa'id was deposed.
Now ask yourself why you don't find any ruler with a black father or any full black ruler...
As for Almoravids, I don't think I have to remind you that neither Berbers or Arabs are indigenous to Mauritania they all came from the North. Almoravids/Sanhaja actually refused to allow children from "mixed" unions to take their mother's name, thus excluding them from inheritance (matrilineal society). There is also for instance the case of the Almoravid governor of Azemmour who refused to listen to the complaints of the saint Abû Shu‘ayb simply because he had dark skin. Almoravids were also the first to use a large number of black slaves in their army because of their non-tribal affiliation, which meant their loyalty could be most trusted.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ This shows the stark differences in culture between Maghrebi or Berber peoples in general. Saharan Berbers like the Tuareg are matrilineal with tribal and clan status coming from the mothers.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Ibis:I'll admit that you have got me...if it weren't for, of course, an Almohad king by the name of Yakub al-Mansur. It's well documented that this king was born from a black African mother as we can see below.
"L'émir des Musulmans, serviteur de Dieu, Yacoub ben Youssef ben Abd el-Moumen, surnommé El-Mansour bi Fadhl Allah (le victorieux par la grâce de Dieu), était fils d'une négresse que avait été donnée à son père, et il naquit dans la maison de son grand-père, Abd el-Moumen, à Maroc, l'an 555." ["The Commander of the Muslims, servant of God, Yacoub ben Youssef ben Abd el-Moumen, nicknamed El-Mansour bi Fadhl Allah (the victorious by the grace of God), was the son of a negress who had been given to her father, and he was born in the house of his grandfather, Abd el-Moumen, in Morocco, in the year 555."]
- Roudh El-Kartas: Histoire des souverains du Maghreb (Espagne et Maroc) et annales de la ville de Fès, pp. 303 - 304
I have to give credit to a user named Ighayere, who provided this information for all of us on this site (https://historum.com/t/why-didn%E2%80%99t-the-moors-conquer-all-of -europe.190905/page-2)
With this in mind, let's assume that the Almohads were racist towards black africans, why on Earth would they accept a king that was born from a black woman's womb? In my opinion this is just another example on how some(not all) North African scholars try to hide black African presence in North African history. We've seen it with the Egyptians, and we're seeing it with the moors. I still fondly remember a person on youtube claiming that the Almoravids looked similar to Pokimane in phenotypic appearance, despite them being very recent Islamic converts from southern Mauritania.
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to convey here... It is well known that many rulers had black ancestry through black concubines (as most black slaves in North Africa were women). Additionally, in such patriarcal societies, a child's lineage is determined by the father's heritage. However, there are some cases where intense racism even led to opposition against such unions, which is why, for example, the Caliph al-Sa'id was deposed.
Now ask yourself why you don't find any ruler with a black father or any full black ruler...
As for Almoravids, I don't think I have to remind you that neither Berbers or Arabs are indigenous to Mauritania they all came from the North. Almoravids/Sanhaja actually refused to allow children from "mixed" unions to take their mother's name, thus excluding them from inheritance (matrilineal society). There is also for instance the case of the Almoravid governor of Azemmour who refused to listen to the complaints of the saint Abû Shu‘ayb simply because he had dark skin. Almoravids were also the first to use a large number of black slaves in their army because of their non-tribal affiliation, which meant their loyalty could be most trusted. [/QB]
All you are doing is proving that these are foreign traditions that entered Africa due to the spread of Islam and you would expect such things to be promoted in writings of Islamic scholars from 1000 years ago. Black Africans have always been in North Africa and they were part of the Islamic presence in Spain and in the Almoravids. European historical sources themselves state this numerous times in their own words. And no, the Almoravids did not come from the North, the bulk of the Almoravid territories in Africa were South of Morocco. Again, Berber language originated in Africa among black people and did not originate with Muslims or other Eurasian cultures who entered into Africa over time. Customs for using concubines of different backgrounds was common across all Islamic kingdoms was not unique to Africa.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
This might be pertinent to the discussion of how far back colorism and melanophobia go back in Northwest Africa:
quote:John Troglita’s military successes led to the honour of becoming the main subject of an epic commemorating his exploits, called the Iohannes or The Libyan War (‘De Bellis Libycis’). Written by the Roman-African author Flavius Cresconius Corippus and composed in the style of the Roman poet Virgil, the Iohannes gives us a detailed look at John’s campaign. Corippus himself gave a local perspective on the conflict between Byzantium and the Moors, but he clearly favoured the former over the latter. Many of his descriptions of the Mauri are defamatory and extremely negative. Some of them turn out to be outright racist.
The most overt example is a passage that describes general John parading through the streets of Carthage with a multitude of Moorish prisoners, captured during the most recent military campaign. The crowds came out in droves to watch the spectacle. It is at this point that Corippus makes a remark on the skin colour of some of the Moorish prisoners:
‘Nor were all the captives of the same color. There sat a woman, horrid to behold, the same color as her black children [illa sedet cum nigris horrida natis]. They were like the young of crows, whom you can see turning black [nigrescere] as their mother sits above them, holding out to their open mouths the food they eat each day and lovingly embracing them with her outstretched wings. And while mothers and fathers took pleasure in showing these horrible faces [horribiles vultus] to their little children, the great-souled leader (general John, red.) passed beneath the threshold of the temple with his standards.’ - Corippus, De Bellis Libycis, 6.92-98, edited and translation by G.W. Shea.
Corippus’ anecdote clearly has a hostile attitude. The black mother and her children are shamed and ridiculed. Corippus uses the dark colour of their skin to depict the Moorish enemies as the quintessential other: different, exotic and even horrifying.
The negative association of dark skin colour is found also in an earlier passage. While general John is sailing from Constantinople to Africa, he is visited by two nightly apparitions. One is a white, angelic spirit who lifts John’s spirits and encourages him. The other is a dark spirit, its grim form ‘akin to darkness. Its face seemed Moorish, fearful in dark colour’ [Maura videbatur facies nigroque colore horrida]. (1.245-6).
On the other hand, these passages also informs us that the skin colour of some North Africans was, indeed, black. This may seem obvious, but it affirms the presence of people of colour in the history of the Byzantine and early medieval world. In Roman times, travel between the provinces was commonplace, but even after the “fall” of the Western Empire in the fifth century, people could travel over large distances.
Maybe this has something to do with negative attitudes toward darker skin tones in the region during later periods?
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
I agree with Doug that there is campaign going on to push the DNA and phenotypes of coastal North Africans back further than the evidence allows. This is taken to its most ridiculous extent by Antalas, whose posting history has revolved around this very objective, and we've seen him dance around the fact that the upcoming dynastic Egyptian aDNA with dark skin pigmentation, shows massive population change at the level of skin pigmentation. The pictures of those Berbers in this thread, presumably meant to show 'real Berbers' show a similar confusion. That is not to say those people are not Berbers (that is not for me to say), or that black-skinned Berbers are automatically 'real Berbers' simply because they have dark skin.
This is simply to say, like Doug said, that there is clearly a limit to how far back those light skinned phenotypes can be attached to the ancient Berber identity and language, before we have to come to grips with the phenotypes of the very first Libyans shown on the Egyptian walls in the Old Kingdom (Tjehenu) and the pigmentation in North African rock art (dark brown and medium brown), before that.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ That should go without saying. The problem is some people try to confuse the issue of whether the aboriginal people of North Africa had complexions similar to Khoisan with fair-skinned or 'white' looking types.
And in regards to what Brandon posted, again I never doubted that there was colorism or racial discrimination against dark/black Maghrebi peoples by light/white ones. My issue is with Sarapis claims that the Moors did the same even though the Moors were themselves black.
People don't understand that the Moors and other Saharan Berbers have a caste system similar to groups in East Africa like the Cushitic speaking Oromo and Somali. This system often included peoples later incorporated through domination and conquest who then became inferior castes. The problem comes when people begin reading their racial biases into these schemes of prejudice and denigration, especially since the dominant group may employ color schemes of 'white' for themselves and 'black' for the subjugated group it does not mean these color meant literal skin complexion.
It's similar to how some early Egyptologists project their racist views on to Egyptians' views on Nubians with Egyptians discriminating against Nehesy because the latter were 'black' and even going so far as to translate Nehesy as 'negro' [sic]!!
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I agree with Doug that there is campaign going on to push the DNA and phenotypes of coastal North Africans back further than the evidence allows. This is taken to its most ridiculous extent by Antalas, whose posting history has revolved around this very objective
Indeed, there's a whole movement of supposed Amazigh nationalists who are hell-bent on erasing darker skin tones (or any other markers of so-called "Blackness") from representations of the most celebrated parts of North Africa's past. The backlash on the part of many Tunisians to the announced Netflix movie casting Denzel Washington as Hannibal is an example of that spilling offline into the real world.
Honestly, it's been my experience that these "White Amazigh" nationalists can be even more aggressive than Egyptians when it comes to melanophobic activism at least online. It makes me wonder what the hell is going on in Northwest Africa that makes race such a sore point for them.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
@Djehuti Like Jari, it's been confusing for me to read the various positions on Moors, Harratin, colorism, etc throughout the years. I have no knowledge in this area to speak of.
@Brandon I would say it's everywhere. Even the bloggers. See the non-African who calls himself by an African name (Perahu), as well as the other accounts that have come here throughout the years, that have tried to push this narrative.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: And in regards to what Brandon posted, again I never doubted that there was colorism or racial discrimination against dark/black Maghrebi peoples by light/white ones. My issue is with Sarapis claims that the Moors did the same even though the Moors were themselves black.
One thing I wanted to highlight with my quote is that the Byzantine-era writer describing the Moors' blackness in derogatory terms is himself a Romanized North African. He very likely would have looked more or less like the very olive-skinned Mediterranean type that has become the region's stereotype. That he considers Moors too black for his liking says to me that those Moors probably were indeed quite dark, or at least substantially darker than the Mediterranean stereotype.
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I would say it's everywhere. Even the bloggers. See the non-African who calls himself by an African name (Perahu), as well as the other accounts that have come here throughout the years, that have tried to push this narrative.
Especially the bloggers, given how many of them overlap with the alt-right or various ethno-nationalist movements. But, as I've said before, I have seen even relatively non-racist people fall for the Eurocentric narrative. To some extent it's the product of cultural conditioning, but there's also an element of discomfort with the idea that people back in the Bronze or Iron Age could have looked significantly different from people in the same regions today. I once had a guy on another forum who is otherwise very anti-racist tell me that the idea of historic population movements impacting the way North Africans look today "is an outdated myth" and that portraying any of them as Black is "erasing non-Black POC". It goes to show how deeply entrenched these narratives are.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I agree with Doug that there is campaign going on to push the DNA and phenotypes of coastal North Africans back further than the evidence allows. This is taken to its most ridiculous extent by Antalas, whose posting history has revolved around this very objective, and we've seen him dance around the fact that the upcoming dynastic Egyptian aDNA with dark skin pigmentation, shows massive population change at the level of skin pigmentation. The pictures of those Berbers in this thread, presumably meant to show 'real Berbers' show a similar confusion. That is not to say those people are not Berbers (that is not for me to say), or that black-skinned Berbers are automatically 'real Berbers' simply because they have dark skin.
This is simply to say, like Doug said, that there is clearly a limit to how far back those light skinned phenotypes can be attached to the ancient Berber identity and language, before we have to come to grips with the phenotypes of the very first Libyans shown on the Egyptian walls in the Old Kingdom (Tjehenu) and the pigmentation in North African rock art (dark brown and medium brown), before that.
That makes no sense. I thought you knew that light skin alleles were introduced to the Maghreb by Early European farmers as early as the mid-6th millennium BC. Doesn’t this genetic component constitute a significant % of both modern and ancient North-West African samples? Moreover, Egyptian depictions of Libyan tribes during the Bronze Age show them as light-skinned, and F. Colin has already demonstrated that they spoke a Berber language.
Who are those people who lived NW of Egypt during the Bronze Age? :
You have the recent paper by Serrano et al., which shows that modern North Africans are genetically similar to the ancient native canary islanders, except that the latter have less SSA admixture. Therefore, shouldn't we logically conclude that modern North Africans are generally darker than their ancestors? There is no genetic evidence of major population replacement in these mountainous Berber communities, so how did they become lighter? Was it due to sexual selection?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
"Moor" is a vague term not used by the ethnic groups called that. It's usage is different in different time periods and places and is not even confined to a particular "race" or skin color despite the etymology of the word. therefore it is a lot more useful to talking about particular ethnic groups in the Maghreb by their tribal names or Muslim dynasties in the Maghreb Talking about the word "Moor" endlessly goes nowhere
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: [qb] I agree with Doug that there is campaign going on to push the DNA and phenotypes of coastal North Africans back further than the evidence allows. This is taken to its most ridiculous extent by Antalas, whose posting history has revolved around this very objective, and we've seen him dance around the fact that the upcoming dynastic Egyptian aDNA with dark skin pigmentation, shows massive population change at the level of skin pigmentation. The pictures of those Berbers in this thread, presumably meant to show 'real Berbers' show a similar confusion. That is not to say those people are not Berbers (that is not for me to say), or that black-skinned Berbers are automatically 'real Berbers' simply because they have dark skin.
This is simply to say, like Doug said, that there is clearly a limit to how far back those light skinned phenotypes can be attached to the ancient Berber identity and language, before we have to come to grips with the phenotypes of the very first Libyans shown on the Egyptian walls in the Old Kingdom (Tjehenu) and the pigmentation in North African rock art (dark brown and medium brown), before that.
That makes no sense. I thought you knew that light skin alleles were introduced to the Maghreb by Early European farmers as early as the mid-6th millennium BC.
You're saying light skin alleles were introduced, as in plural? I only know one allele was introduced, and I know there was a report that it was introduced to the KEB sample (I'm not aware of any report that it was spread rapidly to the rest of the Maghreb). One Libyan you posted comes from Tut's tomb (I think it's part of the chair in his tomb) and the mural is also New Kingdom.
In my last post, I spoke of the first recorded Libyans in the Old Kingdom (not assorted Libyans from the New Kingdom). Specifically, the ones called Tjehenu. Tjehenu were depicted with colors the Egyptians mostly reserved for themselves.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: In my last post, I spoke of the first recorded Libyans in the Old Kingdom (not assorted Libyans from the New Kingdom). Specifically, the ones called Tjehenu. Tjehenu were depicted with colors the Egyptians mostly reserved for themselves.
Correct. Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: [qb] I agree with Doug that there is campaign going on to push the DNA and phenotypes of coastal North Africans back further than the evidence allows. This is taken to its most ridiculous extent by Antalas, whose posting history has revolved around this very objective, and we've seen him dance around the fact that the upcoming dynastic Egyptian aDNA with dark skin pigmentation, shows massive population change at the level of skin pigmentation. The pictures of those Berbers in this thread, presumably meant to show 'real Berbers' show a similar confusion. That is not to say those people are not Berbers (that is not for me to say), or that black-skinned Berbers are automatically 'real Berbers' simply because they have dark skin.
This is simply to say, like Doug said, that there is clearly a limit to how far back those light skinned phenotypes can be attached to the ancient Berber identity and language, before we have to come to grips with the phenotypes of the very first Libyans shown on the Egyptian walls in the Old Kingdom (Tjehenu) and the pigmentation in North African rock art (dark brown and medium brown), before that.
That makes no sense. I thought you knew that light skin alleles were introduced to the Maghreb by Early European farmers as early as the mid-6th millennium BC.
You're saying light skin alleles were introduced, as in plural? I only know one allele was introduced, and I know there was a report that it was introduced to the KEB sample (I'm not aware of any report that it was spread rapidly to the rest of the Maghreb). One Libyan you posted comes from Tut's tomb (I think it's part of the chair in his tomb) and the mural is also New Kingdom.
In my last post, I spoke of the first recorded Libyans in the Old Kingdom (not assorted Libyans from the New Kingdom). Specifically, the ones called Tjehenu. Tjehenu were depicted with colors the Egyptians mostly reserved for themselves.
Again your argument doesn't make sense because all ancient samples available so far, whether from the Copper Age or the Iron Age, show a significant percentage of Early European farmer ancestry. Archaeologically, the Bronze Age in Northwest Africa is marked by intense exchanges with Europe and European population movements towards the Maghreb. Additionally, there is currently no evidence that the "Tjehenu" were Berbers or related to Northwest Africans in the same way as the Bronze Age eastern Libyans were. Those early "libyans" seem to have been replaced by groups like the Libu or Meshwesh who came from further west.
How does this contradict Antalas's point that pre-Islamic Berbers, such as the Moors, Libyans, and Numidians, were not drastically different from modern Berbers physically or genetically? Both ancient and modern samples, as well as anthropological studies, show no drastic changes. So how did the changes in pigmentation occur? The only possible explanation seems to be sexual selection, but do you have any evidence to support this possibility? If anything, modern North Africans are logically darker, not lighter. Countless studies emphasize the impact of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which most likely explains why mountainous Berber groups are generally lighter than the Arabized populations in the plains.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
I would say it's everywhere. Even the bloggers. See the non-African who calls himself by an African name (Perahu), as well as the other accounts that have come here throughout the years, that have tried to push this narrative.
Especially the bloggers, given how many of them overlap with the alt-right or various ethno-nationalist movements. But, as I've said before, I have seen even relatively non-racist people fall for the Eurocentric narrative. To some extent it's the product of cultural conditioning, but there's also an element of discomfort with the idea that people back in the Bronze or Iron Age could have looked significantly different from people in the same regions today. I once had a guy on another forum who is otherwise very anti-racist tell me that the idea of historic population movements impacting the way North Africans look today "is an outdated myth" and that portraying any of them as Black is "erasing non-Black POC". It goes to show how deeply entrenched these narratives are.
As far as the bolded, people also underestimate the rate of population change, as a fact of life. Only long lived and literate civilizations (like Egyptians) have the unique experience of having records of their neighbours that go back thousands of years, allowing them to keep tabs on their neighbours as they get conquered, assimilated, genocided, displaced, etc. Most people not enlightened by history do not understand how normal it is to read records from explorers in the last 500 years, and not be able to find the populations listed in those records anymore, today.
So, of course, this can happen to Egypt. They were lucky to hold on as long as they did. But eventually the DNA of the settlers of the Egyptian Nile (predynastics) had to undergo the same fate that dynastic Egyptians witnessed in the populations around them (e.g. A group came and went, then C group came and went, etc). Not that modern Egyptians are transplants from elsewhere. But their genomes did undergo massive change. It's just that the populations around them have Basal Eurasian in common with Egyptians, that is masking the massive dilution of predynastic ancestry. The Abusir whitewashed uniparentals, the skin lightening, and the substantial loss of lactase persistence, among other things, show that this did happen, and that it's not a myth.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: [qb] I agree with Doug that there is campaign going on to push the DNA and phenotypes of coastal North Africans back further than the evidence allows. This is taken to its most ridiculous extent by Antalas, whose posting history has revolved around this very objective, and we've seen him dance around the fact that the upcoming dynastic Egyptian aDNA with dark skin pigmentation, shows massive population change at the level of skin pigmentation. The pictures of those Berbers in this thread, presumably meant to show 'real Berbers' show a similar confusion. That is not to say those people are not Berbers (that is not for me to say), or that black-skinned Berbers are automatically 'real Berbers' simply because they have dark skin.
This is simply to say, like Doug said, that there is clearly a limit to how far back those light skinned phenotypes can be attached to the ancient Berber identity and language, before we have to come to grips with the phenotypes of the very first Libyans shown on the Egyptian walls in the Old Kingdom (Tjehenu) and the pigmentation in North African rock art (dark brown and medium brown), before that.
That makes no sense. I thought you knew that light skin alleles were introduced to the Maghreb by Early European farmers as early as the mid-6th millennium BC.
You're saying light skin alleles were introduced, as in plural? I only know one allele was introduced, and I know there was a report that it was introduced to the KEB sample (I'm not aware of any report that it was spread rapidly to the rest of the Maghreb). One Libyan you posted comes from Tut's tomb (I think it's part of the chair in his tomb) and the mural is also New Kingdom.
In my last post, I spoke of the first recorded Libyans in the Old Kingdom (not assorted Libyans from the New Kingdom). Specifically, the ones called Tjehenu. Tjehenu were depicted with colors the Egyptians mostly reserved for themselves.
Again your argument doesn't make sense because all ancient samples available so far, whether from the Copper Age or the Iron Age, show a significant percentage of Early European farmer ancestry. Archaeologically, the Bronze Age in Northwest Africa is marked by intense exchanges with Europe and European population movements towards the Maghreb. Additionally, there is currently no evidence that the "Tjehenu" were Berbers or related to Northwest Africans in the same way as the Bronze Age eastern Libyans were. Those early "libyans" seem to have been replaced by groups like the Libu or Meshwesh who came from further west.
How does this contradict Antalas's point that pre-Islamic Berbers, such as the Moors, Libyans, and Numidians, were not drastically different from modern Berbers physically or genetically? Both ancient and modern samples, as well as anthropological studies, show no drastic changes. So how did the changes in pigmentation occur? The only possible explanation seems to be sexual selection, but do you have any evidence to support this possibility? If anything, modern North Africans are logically darker, not lighter. Countless studies emphasize the impact of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, which most likely explains why mountainous Berber groups are generally lighter than the Arabized populations in the plains.
I've been out of the loop due to my increasing boredom with aDNA (just more of the same, nowadays), so I might have to read up on any Maghrebi samples that fill in the gap between KEB and Canary Islander aDNA.
I just hope you're not wasting my time with this, because you're not forthcoming with light skin alleles (plural) being introduced, as you implied. One light skin allele does not result in a pale skinned population. Early farmers also weren't pale skinned (Otzi's recent updated genome being a good example of the what people think early farmer skin pigmentation was). So, Early neolithic Europeans that weren't pale skinned to begin with, cannot make Maghrebis pale, by mixing with them. So, I hope if you're going to bring up samples I'm not aware of, that it's going to benefit the conversation.
You tell me that Tjehenu are not known to be Berbers. Okay. Fair enough on that technicality. Though I wouldn't say that makes Tjehenu inadmissable when it comes to approximating what Berbers would have looked like, without infusion of light skin alleles that post-date the Berber population. They are still an indigenous North African population, and would have been part of the same gradual skin lightening process, that Berbers and Egyptians went through. They were most likely kin of the original Berber population, if they weren't actually Berbers.
Let's look at the options you have as far as arguing that those New Kingdom Egyptian depictions of Berbers, have actual antiquity. The uniparental pool that was unquestionably passed on to ancient Berbers, are found in IAM (E-L19) and Taforalt (U6, M1). Some other lineages were also introduced (e.g. E-M33 found in Guanches). So, you still have to deal with the fact that there is a break between IAM and the samples you seem to be alluding to, that came after IAM, and that break is mostly caused by DNA foreign to Berbers (unless you are suggesting that the Berber identity was transmitted with those European farmers).
You are proving Doug's point that people are upholding DNA foreign to North Africa, as representing North Africans in times before that DNA existed in North Africa.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
I should point out that "Berber" seems to be a linguistic term first and foremost (IIRC, it is how the Greeks described their "barbarian" language). I definitely believe the branch of Proto-Afroasiatic speakers who dispersed into the Maghreb from the eastern Sahara and became the earliest Libyco-Berber speakers were dark-skinned prior to absorbing both Iberomaurusian- and EEF-related populations in the region (the former already being dark as we know). If anyone constitutes the "real Berbers", it's those eastern Saharan migrants.
Slapped this map together myself using Affinity Photo (the Photoshop substitute I've been using lately) to illustrate my argument.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I've been out of the loop due to my increasing boredom with aDNA (just more of the same, nowadays), so I might have to read up on any Maghrebi samples that fill in the gap between KEB and Canary Islander aDNA.
I just hope you're not wasting my time with this, because you're not forthcoming with light skin alleles (plural) being introduced, as you implied. One light skin allele does not result in a pale skinned population. Early farmers also weren't pale skinned (Otzi's recent updated genome being a good example of the what people think early farmer skin pigmentation was). So, Early neolithic Europeans that weren't pale skinned to begin with, cannot make Maghrebis pale, by mixing with them. So, I hope if you're going to bring up samples I'm not aware of, that it's going to benefit the conversation.
You tell me that Tjehenu are not known to be Berbers. Okay. Fair enough on that technicality. Though I wouldn't say that makes Tjehenu inadmissable when it comes to approximating what Berbers would have looked like, without infusion of light skin alleles that post-date the Berber population. They are still an indigenous North African population, and would have been part of the same gradual skin lightening process, that Berbers and Egyptians went through. They were most likely kin of the original Berber population, if they weren't actually Berbers.
Let's look at the options you have as far as arguing that those New Kingdom Egyptian depictions of Berbers, have actual antiquity. The uniparental pool that was unquestionably passed on to ancient Berbers, are found in IAM (E-L19) and Taforalt (U6, M1). Some other lineages were also introduced (e.g. E-M33 found in Guanches). So, you still have to deal with the fact that there is a break between IAM and the samples you seem to be alluding to, that came after IAM, and that break is mostly caused by DNA foreign to Berbers (unless you are suggesting that the Berber identity was transmitted with those European farmers).
You are proving Doug's point that people are upholding DNA foreign to North Africa, as representing North Africans in times before that DNA existed in North Africa. [/QB]
Ok but then who are those light skinned people who lived in the Sahara around 3000 BC ? :
The rest of your argument still doesn't make any sense. Why are you bringing IAM into the discussion when we were initially talking about Iron Age populations? As far as I know, Antalas never said that modern Berbers are similar to IAM, and I don't think I need to remind you that IAM were not Berbers. Now given the numerous Egyptian depictions, you're forced to admit that light-skinned populations were living in North Africa during the Bronze Age. These populations as demonstrated by F. Colin spoke a proto-Berber language related to the Libyco-Berber spoken further west in Numidia, and which is the ancestor of modern Berber languages.
I'll make it clear for you : Based on genetic and anthropological studies, the profile of North Africans during the Iron Age was already very similar to that of present-day Berber populations, with most introgressions occurring before this period. Consequently, during classical antiquity, Berbers were physically distinct enough from dark-skinned populations for "racial" discrimination based on skin color to be possible. This was not merely a class conflict or an imported external practice but genuine forms of discrimination rooted in skin color differences.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: Ok but then who are those light skinned people who lived in the Sahara around 3000 BC ?
Was pale skin common in Europe, 5000 yrs ago? See for yourself:
Looks like significant traction in skin lightening happened in Europe, only ~4ky ago. So, you can see my reservations with ongoing depictions of a pale North Africa before there seems to be widespread distribution of pale skin even in Europe, the supposed source of pale skin in the Maghreb. That's math that just doesn't add up.
Even if that pic is correct and it means what you say it means (let's pretend for a sec that the fraudulent French scholar who 'found' that depiction, had not damaged his reputation by introducing fake rock art, that's still one rock art depiction, among countless others that use brown pigment for the skin of the depicted subjects. See this predynastic painting, for instance.
Also, rock art needs to be properly dated using modern scientific methods. Here is an example of rock art that has been dated professionally, not by some guesswork that has been repeated so often that its taken as scientific fact:
Long doubted, the existence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa is here proven through the dating of petroglyph panels displaying aurochs and other animals at Qurta in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley. The method used was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) applied to deposits of wind-blown sediment covering the images. This gave a minimum age of ∼15 000 calendar years making the rock engravings at Qurta the oldest so far found in North Africa. First evidence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa: Securing the age of the Qurta petroglyphs (Egypt) through OSL dating
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: The rest of your argument still doesn't make any sense. Why are you bringing IAM into the discussion when we were initially talking about Iron Age populations?
The TMRCA of extant Berber linguistic variation is Iron Age. But there is are extinct Berber languages, that betray the existence of an older TMRCA (see Brandon's map). For instance, the names for Inyotef II's dogs (a Middle Kingdom ruler), are Berber words. So, Berbers are not an Iron Age population. I know you can do better than that.
But you're right that IAM are not Berbers. But we do need a baseline of what North Africans were like, before foreign European ancestry, in the same way that you've pointed out that modern North Africans are less 'North African' than Guanches bc they possess common era Sub-Saharan ancestry. So you have to be fair and remove the excess European, also, if you're going to remove the excess SSA. That's why you bring in IAM.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: I'll make it clear for you : Based on genetic and anthropological studies, the profile of North Africans during the Iron Age was already very similar to that of present-day Berber populations, with most introgressions occurring before this period.
I'm sure you're correct about Iron Age North Africans having those affinities. But I'm interested in the original Berbers, not in artificial constructs that you seem to be bringing in (ie the E-M181 bottleneck that happened in the Iron Age, is not the beginning of the Berber population; Berbers were around for some of the E-M81(xM181) history, too).
Posted by Ibis (Member # 23674) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: I'm not quite sure what you're trying to convey here... It is well known that many rulers had black ancestry through black concubines (as most black slaves in North Africa were women). Additionally, in such patriarcal societies, a child's lineage is determined by the father's heritage. However, there are some cases where intense racism even led to opposition against such unions, which is why, for example, the Caliph al-Sa'id was deposed.
I'll admit I had forgotten about patrilineal descent when I had made that post, however, I don't see any solid evidence from you supporting the idea that the Masmuda founders were non-black Africans. I still stand by the opinion that their discrimination was towards non-islamic groups and populations they enslaved after defeating them in war.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: Now ask yourself why you don't find any ruler with a black father or any full black ruler...
Okay, but which dynasty and civilization are we referring to here? Some of your images were describing Moroccan society, which is distinct from the Almohad dynasty. If we're just taking about Magrebian islamic groups in general, then I'll mention Yusuf bin Tashfin.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: As for Almoravids, I don't think I have to remind you that neither Berbers or Arabs are indigenous to Mauritania they all came from the North. Almoravids/Sanhaja actually refused to allow children from "mixed" unions to take their mother's name, thus excluding them from inheritance (matrilineal society).
Okay, but this doesn't act as evidence against the idea of them being black africans. There are Black africans in the north even today.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: There is also for instance the case of the Almoravid governor of Azemmour who refused to listen to the complaints of the saint Abû Shu‘ayb simply because he had dark skin. Almoravids were also the first to use a large number of black slaves in their army because of their non-tribal affiliation, which meant their loyalty could be most trusted.
I would like a source for the Azemmour incident
Also, regarding your point on the black slave soldiers, you already explained their rationale behind using them. It's because they wouldn't have to worry about ethnic divisions, not because they were black. Using them as evidence is the equivalent of me claiming that the Ottomans were racist against white people because the Janissaries were white.
Posted by Ibis (Member # 23674) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I've been out of the loop due to my increasing boredom with aDNA (just more of the same, nowadays), so I might have to read up on any Maghrebi samples that fill in the gap between KEB and Canary Islander aDNA.
I just hope you're not wasting my time with this, because you're not forthcoming with light skin alleles (plural) being introduced, as you implied. One light skin allele does not result in a pale skinned population. Early farmers also weren't pale skinned (Otzi's recent updated genome being a good example of the what people think early farmer skin pigmentation was). So, Early neolithic Europeans that weren't pale skinned to begin with, cannot make Maghrebis pale, by mixing with them. So, I hope if you're going to bring up samples I'm not aware of, that it's going to benefit the conversation.
You tell me that Tjehenu are not known to be Berbers. Okay. Fair enough on that technicality. Though I wouldn't say that makes Tjehenu inadmissable when it comes to approximating what Berbers would have looked like, without infusion of light skin alleles that post-date the Berber population. They are still an indigenous North African population, and would have been part of the same gradual skin lightening process, that Berbers and Egyptians went through. They were most likely kin of the original Berber population, if they weren't actually Berbers.
Let's look at the options you have as far as arguing that those New Kingdom Egyptian depictions of Berbers, have actual antiquity. The uniparental pool that was unquestionably passed on to ancient Berbers, are found in IAM (E-L19) and Taforalt (U6, M1). Some other lineages were also introduced (e.g. E-M33 found in Guanches). So, you still have to deal with the fact that there is a break between IAM and the samples you seem to be alluding to, that came after IAM, and that break is mostly caused by DNA foreign to Berbers (unless you are suggesting that the Berber identity was transmitted with those European farmers).
You are proving Doug's point that people are upholding DNA foreign to North Africa, as representing North Africans in times before that DNA existed in North Africa.
Ok but then who are those light skinned people who lived in the Sahara around 3000 BC ? :
The rest of your argument still doesn't make any sense. Why are you bringing IAM into the discussion when we were initially talking about Iron Age populations? As far as I know, Antalas never said that modern Berbers are similar to IAM, and I don't think I need to remind you that IAM were not Berbers. Now given the numerous Egyptian depictions, you're forced to admit that light-skinned populations were living in North Africa during the Bronze Age. These populations as demonstrated by F. Colin spoke a proto-Berber language related to the Libyco-Berber spoken further west in Numidia, and which is the ancestor of modern Berber languages.
I'll make it clear for you : Based on genetic and anthropological studies, the profile of North Africans during the Iron Age was already very similar to that of present-day Berber populations, with most introgressions occurring before this period. Consequently, during classical antiquity, Berbers were physically distinct enough from dark-skinned populations for "racial" discrimination based on skin color to be possible. This was not merely a class conflict or an imported external practice but genuine forms of discrimination rooted in skin color differences. [/QB]
Not only are L'hote's whites suspected to be fake. This thread already debunked the idea of them being there since 3000 B.C as there's no evidence of any white people being in Libya(currently defined as territory west of Egypt's nation) from what we see of Old Kingdom depictions. The earliest evidence of white people in North Africa is in the middle kingdom period, which is what Brandon P revealed way back in page 2 of this thread.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: Ok but then who are those light skinned people who lived in the Sahara around 3000 BC ?
Was pale skin common in Europe, 5000 yrs ago? See for yourself:
Looks like significant traction in skin lightening happened in Europe, only ~4ky ago. So, you can see my reservations with ongoing depictions of a pale North Africa before there seems to be widespread distribution of pale skin even in Europe, the supposed source of pale skin in the Maghreb. That's math that just doesn't add up.
Even if that pic is correct and it means what you say it means (let's pretend for a sec that the fraudulent French scholar who 'found' that depiction, had not damaged his reputation by introducing fake rock art, that's still one rock art depiction, among countless others that use brown pigment for the skin of the depicted subjects. See this predynastic painting, for instance.
Also, rock art needs to be properly dated using modern scientific methods. Here is an example of rock art that has been dated professionally, not by some guesswork that has been repeated so often that its taken as scientific fact:
I was expecting this...
1) I never stated or implied that all Saharans were light-skinned. In fact, the expansion of Berbers into the Sahara occurred quite late, around the 1st millennium BC, associated with the Equidian and Cameline phases, if I recall correctly.
2) The Uan Debauen painting is genuine. Some time ago, someone asked J.L. Le Quellec, a specialist in Saharan rock art, if it was fake, and he confirmed its authenticity. I can't find the screenshot, but if you don't trust me, feel free to contact him on Twitter; he's quite active: https://x.com/Physiologos
Regarding the dating, we have C14 results according to the Berber Encyclopedia: "The Iheren/Tahilahi style is considered the most recent of the Bovidian period. C14 analysis at Iheren has given an age of 4850 ±110 years, which is 3000 BC." (Source: https://journals.openedition.org/encyclopedieberbere/1556)
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: The TMRCA of extant Berber linguistic variation is Iron Age. But there is are extinct Berber languages, that betray the existence of an older TMRCA (see Brandon's map). For instance, the names for Inyotef II's dogs (a Middle Kingdom ruler), are Berber words. So, Berbers are not an Iron Age population. I know you can do better than that.But you're right that IAM are not Berbers. But we do need a baseline of what North Africans were like, before foreign European ancestry, in the same way that you've pointed out that modern North Africans are less 'North African' than Guanches bc they possess common era Sub-Saharan ancestry. So you have to be fair and remove the excess European, also, if you're going to remove the excess SSA. That's why you bring in IAM.
I'll make it clear for you : Based on genetic and anthropological studies, the profile of North Africans during the Iron Age was already very similar to that of present-day Berber populations, with most introgressions occurring before this period. I'm sure you're correct about Iron Age North Africans having those affinities. But I'm interested in the original Berbers, not in artificial constructs that you seem to be bringing in (ie the E-M181 bottleneck that happened in the Iron Age, is not the beginning of the Berber population; Berbers were around for some of the E-M81(xM181) history, too).
How is any of that relevant to the Berbers of classical antiquity? The focus here isn’t on speculating about the genetics of the earliest pre-proto-Berber speakers from North-East Africa.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ibis
Not only are L'hote's whites suspected to be fake. This thread already debunked the idea of them being there since 3000 B.C as there's no evidence of any white people being in Libya(currently defined as territory west of Egypt's nation) from what we see of Old Kingdom depictions. The earliest evidence of white people in North Africa is in the middle kingdom period, which is what Brandon P revealed way back in page 2 of this thread.
According to Rock art expert Jean-Loïc Le Quellec they are not fake but real
Excerpt from another thread:
quote:Originally posted by L'Atlante
End of an endless debate [Smile] : answer from Jean-Loïc Le Quellec https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Lo%C3%AFc_Le_Quellec , "anthropologist and prehistorian, specialist in the rock art of the Sahara, collecting paintings and rock engravings dated for most of the Neolithic period" ; "graduated from the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Quaternary paleoecology) and doctorated in anthropology, ethnology and prehistory in 1992, with a thesis entitled The Symbolism of Ancient Rock Art in the Central Sahara" ; "Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS" and author of "numerous books on the rock art of the Sahara , particularly in Libya, two of which set out to renew the approach to rock art" ; having "carried out several expert missions in the Sahara on behalf of UNESCO" and "since 2003, chairman of the Association of Friends of Saharan Rock Art (AAARS)" ; also known for having severely criticized Lhote's job for "colonial biase" (so no white chauvinist at all) :
"Hello, These oxen-riding women are fully authentic and painted in the style of Iheren. There is not the slightest doubt about it. If it's not an indiscretion, I'd like a link to the discussion you're talking about. In any case, rest assured that these paintings are not fakes. These do exist, but they are rare and well known. Very cordially, JLLQ"
quote:Originally posted by Ibis: I'll admit I had forgotten about patrilineal descent when I had made that post, however, I don't see any solid evidence from you supporting the idea that the Masmuda founders were non-black Africans. I still stand by the opinion that their discrimination was towards non-islamic groups and populations they enslaved after defeating them in war.
You’ve overlooked almost all the evidence I’ve presented that contradicts your viewpoint. Additionally, you haven’t addressed why modern Masmûda people in the High Atlas region are not black. People like you tend to avoid genetic results for a reason. The tribes that constituted the Sanhaja and Masmuda still exist today, and they do not look black. How do you explain this? Is there any evidence of recent admixture events?
I think I'll post some of these quotes directly since according to you it had nothing to do with skin color :
quote: The Sanhâja, among whom matrilinear structures played a significant role, refused to allow children from a "mixed" union to carry their mother's name, thus excluding them from inheritance. On the other hand, the Almoravid governor of Azemmour reportedly refused to listen to the complaints of the saint Abû Shu‘ayb (late 12th century) because he had dark skin. Meanwhile, the Masmûda believed that a child born to a black woman had no rights. This was, in fact, the argument used by the Almohad sheikhs to revolt against the Almohad caliph al-Sa‘îd (1238-1248), who was the son of a black woman from the imperial harem.
P. Buresi et M. Ghouirgate, Histoire du Maghreb médiéval XIe-XVe siècle, Armand Colin, 2013, pp. 207-208
quote:Despite these positions and negative attitudes, the number of "mixed-race" individuals was considerable in the Berber world, both in the countryside and in the cities. Several terms were used to refer to them: ‘anbar ("amber"), aswad ("black"), agnâw in Berber, gnâwî in Arabic ("Guinean"); by extension, the terms ‘abîd or raqâ’iq in Arabic, isamgan in Berber ("slaves") were synonymous with black. Conversely, "the White," in Berber mallûl, was valued and symbolized purity. As a result, many lineages bore this name, as well as the birthplace of Almohadism, named Tîn Mallâl, meaning "Place of the Whites/Pure."
P. Buresi et M. Ghouirgate, Histoire du Maghreb médiéval XIe-XVe siècle, Armand Colin, 2013, p. 208
quote:Originally posted by Ibis: Okay, but which dynasty and civilization are we referring to here? Some of your images were describing Moroccan society, which is distinct from the Almohad dynasty. If we're just taking about Magrebian islamic groups in general, then I'll mention Yusuf bin Tashfin.
Any source ? evidence of this ?
quote:Originally posted by Ibis: Okay, but this doesn't act as evidence against the idea of them being black africans. There are Black africans in the north even today.
They were part of confederations that discriminated against the same "black Africans" living in the north today. The sources clearly show that they distinguished themselves from "Blacks" or "mixed" individuals.
quote:Originally posted by Ibis: Also, regarding your point on the black slave soldiers, you already explained their rationale behind using them. It's because they wouldn't have to worry about ethnic divisions, not because they were black. Using them as evidence is the equivalent of me claiming that the Ottomans were racist against white people because the Janissaries were white.
You still don't understand that, in the sources we have, they explicitly designated them as "Black." They used skin color or their slave statut to distinguish these groups from other regiments or from the Almoravids themselves.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Ibis
Not only are L'hote's whites suspected to be fake. This thread already debunked the idea of them being there since 3000 B.C as there's no evidence of any white people being in Libya(currently defined as territory west of Egypt's nation) from what we see of Old Kingdom depictions. The earliest evidence of white people in North Africa is in the middle kingdom period, which is what Brandon P revealed way back in page 2 of this thread.
According to Rock art expert Jean-Loïc Le Quellec they are not fake but real
Excerpt from another thread:
quote:Originally posted by L'Atlante
End of an endless debate [Smile] : answer from Jean-Loïc Le Quellec https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Lo%C3%AFc_Le_Quellec , "anthropologist and prehistorian, specialist in the rock art of the Sahara, collecting paintings and rock engravings dated for most of the Neolithic period" ; "graduated from the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Quaternary paleoecology) and doctorated in anthropology, ethnology and prehistory in 1992, with a thesis entitled The Symbolism of Ancient Rock Art in the Central Sahara" ; "Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS" and author of "numerous books on the rock art of the Sahara , particularly in Libya, two of which set out to renew the approach to rock art" ; having "carried out several expert missions in the Sahara on behalf of UNESCO" and "since 2003, chairman of the Association of Friends of Saharan Rock Art (AAARS)" ; also known for having severely criticized Lhote's job for "colonial biase" (so no white chauvinist at all) :
"Hello, These oxen-riding women are fully authentic and painted in the style of Iheren. There is not the slightest doubt about it. If it's not an indiscretion, I'd like a link to the discussion you're talking about. In any case, rest assured that these paintings are not fakes. These do exist, but they are rare and well known. Very cordially, JLLQ"
Perfect ! This was the screenshot I was trying to find. Thank you !
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: I was expecting this...
I never stated or implied that all Saharans were light-skinned.
I said nothing about the Sahara either..??
One can't bring the date of a general art style, to date rock art of uncertain authenticity, and where suspicions of fraud exist. The whole point of dating that scene you posted is to also confirm the art is authentic. To do that you need to find a way to directly date the patina or whatever else that can be dated. You should already know that the dating of an artistic style, doesn't settle this.
Let's just leave it at this because with you insisting on making the conversation about Iron Age Berbers, I feel the conversation has taken a less than genuine turn.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
Let's just leave it at this because with you insisting on making the conversation about Iron Age Berbers, I feel the conversation has taken a less than genuine turn.
I don't know who Sarapis is or what background he has (despite his talking points being uncannily familiar), but honestly, the Bronze to Iron Age populations are what most of these online Amazigh nationalists care about. They're basically trying to convince everyone that the Carthaginians, Numidians, Moors, weren't really "Black" and shouldn't be portrayed as such in popular media.
Of course lighter-skinned people probably did have an established presence in the Maghreb by that time, but I wouldn't conclude that they were the only people there even then. The descriptions that writers in Roman North Africa left behind of the Mauri/Moors being significantly darker than themselves, as well as the Byzantine writer Procopius describing both dark and light-skinned inhabitants in North Africa would attest to some diversity even in the Iron Age.
Posted by Sarapis (Member # 23852) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: [QB]
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: I was expecting this...
I never stated or implied that all Saharans were light-skinned.
I said nothing about the Sahara either..??
One can't bring the date of a general art style, to date rock art of uncertain authenticity, and where suspicions of fraud exist. The whole point of dating that scene you posted is to also confirm the art is authentic. To do that you need to find a way to directly date the patina or whatever else that can be dated. You should already know that the dating of an artistic style, doesn't settle this.
Let's just leave it at this because with you insisting on making the conversation about Iron Age Berbers, I feel the conversation has taken a less than genuine turn.
This is starting to become dishonesty.
You literally have a modern specialist who insists on the authenticity of these paintings, and yet you prefer to remain in denial. Similarly, your opinion on the dating makes no sense because we are not talking about a style as widespread as the Bovidian or Equidian styles but a rare style specific to a region of the Tassili, and the dating has given only one date. It is up to you to prove that this style could have persisted for millennia. Not to mention that there are chronological indications within the style itself (for example, cattle farming is not attested at a later period).
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: According to Rock art expert Jean-Loïc Le Quellec they are not fake but real
As far as I'm aware the only painting proven to be fake is that of the so-called 'bird headed women' as shown below.
I'm hesitant to call the coiffured women riding a cow below as "light skinned" simply because their their drawn silhouettes were not painted dark brown as was usually done in most of the artwork.
As Tukuler has stated, along with scholars who've commented, the women above all sport hairstyles still worn by Fulani women today.
I have yet to see 'light skinned women' especially in the Maghreb to have such hair styles.
But the main thing is even though are we to make the exception of figures not colored dark as non-black or light-skinned and not either people painted light or as representing some abstract or symbolic concept not known.
So are we suppose to assume these figures were either stark white or albinos in life?
The same goes for the animals too.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: I was expecting this...
I never stated or implied that all Saharans were light-skinned.
I said nothing about the Sahara either..??
One can't bring the date of a general art style, to date rock art of uncertain authenticity, and where suspicions of fraud exist. The whole point of dating that scene you posted is to also confirm the art is authentic. To do that you need to find a way to directly date the patina or whatever else that can be dated. You should already know that the dating of an artistic style, doesn't settle this.
Let's just leave it at this because with you insisting on making the conversation about Iron Age Berbers, I feel the conversation has taken a less than genuine turn.
This is starting to become dishonesty.
You literally have a modern specialist who insists on the authenticity of these paintings, and yet you prefer to remain in denial. Similarly, your opinion on the dating makes no sense because we are not talking about a style as widespread as the Bovidian or Equidian styles but a rare style specific to a region of the Tassili, and the dating has given only one date. It is up to you to prove that this style could have persisted for millennia. Not to mention that there are chronological indications within the style itself (for example, cattle farming is not attested at a later period).
Dude, stfu. Stop baiting me to continue this conversation. Quoting a scholar who swears by these images and expecting me to take his word for it, just on his blue eyes, is appeal to authority fallacy. I go by evidence, and evidence, only. Not by 'Iz tellss yous sos' by some phd.
Now, go back to talking to someone else and stop dragging me in the conversation.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
Let's just leave it at this because with you insisting on making the conversation about Iron Age Berbers, I feel the conversation has taken a less than genuine turn.
I don't know who Sarapis is or what background he has (despite his talking points being uncannily familiar), but honestly, the Bronze to Iron Age populations are what most of these online Amazigh nationalists care about. They're basically trying to convince everyone that the Carthaginians, Numidians, Moors, weren't really "Black" and shouldn't be portrayed as such in popular media.
Of course lighter-skinned people probably did have an established presence in the Maghreb by that time, but I wouldn't conclude that they were the only people there even then. The descriptions that writers in Roman North Africa left behind of the Mauri/Moors being significantly darker than themselves, as well as the Byzantine writer Procopius describing both dark and light-skinned inhabitants in North Africa would attest to some diversity even in the Iron Age.
I have to say, Iron Age N Africa never interested me much (I feel the same about late dynastic Egypt). Because of this I never really bothered with the populations of the Iron Age, so I can't really say too much about their affinities other than mention the contents of some papers (like that Punic fordisc paper).
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote: Originally posted by Swenet Quoting a scholar who swears by these images is appeal to authority fallacy. I go by evidence, and evidence, only. Note by Iz tellss yous sos by some phd.
In one way or another we often have to trust the interpretations of those who for example have written a study or report. Often the data is presented in a way that makes it possible to interpret them, but some times it can be hard since we were not present during the obtaining of the data through for example excavations, surveys or similar. There can be details and subtleties which is evident in the field but for some reason are not clear or evident in a report or study. Long field experience can make that one can assess for example an archaeological site in another way than people who only read about it. So it can be hard to dismiss observations done by an experienced researcher who actually seen and examined the objects in real life. But if one wants clarity or more details one can in many cases actually ask the researcher in question.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti As Tukuler has stated, along with scholars who've commented, the women above all sport hairstyles still worn by Fulani women today.
As a side note one can observe some interesting details like the dome shaped objects on top of the heads of at least two of the women. Similar objects can be seen in some Egyptian paintings, but also among now living people. I will remember those kind of objects were discussed in another thread.
quote:But the main thing is even though are we to make the exception of figures not colored dark as non-black or light-skinned and not either people painted light or as representing some abstract or symbolic concept not known.
The color of some figures can be real or symbolic, we can not be 100% sure. To better assess such things one must sometimes see the pictures in their context. Looking at pics on the net is seldom enough. One must look at things like other nearby pictures, how were they painted, which similarities or differences? Are the paintings associated with other types of findings that can give some clues about the identity of the peoples depicted? If one look at these kind of images online, and even in books one many times just get half (or less) of the real picture. Especially rock art must often be seen in the field to be able to do a correct assessment.
I have seen a lot of rock art here in my place and one get another impression of it by seeing it in the field.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I have to say, Iron Age N Africa never interested me much (I feel the same about late dynastic Egypt). Because of this I never really bothered with the populations of the Iron Age, so I can't really say too much about their affinities other than mention the contents of some papers (like that Punic fordisc paper).
That's fair enough. As far as I can tell, Iron Age North African cultures attract the level of interest they do as a result of their interactions with (and possible influence on) classical European civilizations like Greece and Rome. The topic of whether or not any of those North Africans would qualify as "Black" is bound to come up whenever a Black person appears in period media involving ancient Greece or Rome, especially if that Black person is not reduced to the status of slave. See any discourse on whether certain Roman emperors of North African descent would have looked "Black".
I suppose these discussions of media portrayals don't interest you, but they're pretty hard to ignore if you have any interest in media set in those time periods.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I have to say, Iron Age N Africa never interested me much (I feel the same about late dynastic Egypt). Because of this I never really bothered with the populations of the Iron Age, so I can't really say too much about their affinities other than mention the contents of some papers (like that Punic fordisc paper).
That's fair enough. As far as I can tell, Iron Age North African cultures attract the level of interest they do as a result of their interactions with (and possible influence on) classical European civilizations like Greece and Rome. The topic of whether or not any of those North Africans would qualify as "Black" is bound to come up whenever a Black person appears in period media involving ancient Greece or Rome, especially if that Black person is not reduced to the status of slave. See any discourse on whether certain Roman emperors of North African descent would have looked "Black".
I suppose these discussions of media portrayals don't interest you, but they're pretty hard to ignore if you have any interest in media set in those time periods.
A reason why later time periods get more attention is also that the amount of written records increase so we can get eye witness accounts but also mentions in other kinds of narratives, like mythological or epic poems.
The matter of peoples colors are many times not discussed in archaeological reports or studies. But I can understand if it can be more discussed in works of physical anthropology as a part of studies of ancient phenotypes.
Then we of course have historians especially interested in questions about race and racial relations during different time epochs.
Also in todays racialized world such questions often stir a public interest.
That means that media representations of for example Black people in ancient Europe often can be hotly debated.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: ..Quoting a scholar who swears by these images and expecting me to take his word for it, just on his blue eyes, is appeal to authority fallacy. I go by evidence, and evidence, only. Not by 'Iz tellss yous sos' by some phd.
Now, go back to talking to someone else and stop dragging me in the conversation.
That there were light/fair skinned people in coastal North Africa is undisputed. What is being questioned is whether these people stretched all the way into the Central Sahara region. As yet I have seen no actual evidence of this. Again, this is not to rule out the possibility but like Swenet I go by evidence, and just because a few figures here and there in the Saharan rock art are unpainted silhouettes or painted all white does not make them such people we are discussing. As I've shown, the same unpainted silhouettes or stark white coloring is also given to some animals in the artwork.
As to evidence of the physical populations living in that region, we have their skeletal remains including mummified bodies such as from rock shelter burials that I have covered here. Ironically most of these remains were described as "negroid" while a few exhibit "Mediterranean" as in "Hamitic" types similar to dark skinned Saharan Berbers or Egyptians. From what I understand DNA sequencing of these remains is in the works but one female mummy has yielded upstream mtDNA N. That said, I doubt any of these remains will show they are light or fair-skinned.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
There is an article about the ladies riding on bovids, but it does not discuss skin color. It is instead an attempt of interpreting the social and cultural setting. Who are these women and what are they doing? Rather interesting.
The article is written by Augustin F. C Holl:
quote: The Tassil-n-Ajjer mountain range is well known for its phenomenal richness in rock-shelters and cave paintings. Generations of researchers have surveyed, mapped, drafted and discussed different facets of these Tassili paintings. The diversity and versatility of the paintings traditions of the Tassili make difficult any attempt at straightforward generalization, whether stylistic or thematic. Each painting’s station appears to be unique and conveys its own suggestions that have to be studied extensively and systematically. In the approach outlined in this paper -the iconographic approach-, paintings are viewed as complex sets of ‘artifacts’ arranged by the creative minds of the actual artists. How did these artists practice their crafts? What iconic elements did they choose to represent and why? How and why are these selected elements arranged and combined? These are some of the questions addressed in this paper. The new readings of the Uan Derbuaen paintings allow to suggest a staging and grand representation of matrimonial arrangements, the final travel of the brides.
‘Here come the brides’: Reading the neolithic paintings from Uan Derbuaen (Tasili-n-Ajjer, Algeria)`
One interesting aspect is the different colors of the women´s hair. Realistic or symbolic? Is it hair, or some kind of headgear? Or colored wigs?
Posted by Ibis (Member # 23674) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: You’ve overlooked almost all the evidence I’ve presented that contradicts your viewpoint. Additionally, you haven’t addressed why modern Masmûda people in the High Atlas region are not black.
I'll retreat from my Almohad position due to my lack of knowledge on their history.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: People like you tend to avoid genetic results for a reason. The tribes that constituted the Sanhaja and Masmuda still exist today, and they do not look black. How do you explain this? Is there any evidence of recent admixture events?
Counter argument:
"ZENAGA (SANHAJA, SENAJER), a Berber tribe of southern Morocco who gave their name to Senegal, once their tribal home. They formed one of the tribes which, uniting under the leadership of Yusef bin Tashfin, crossed the Sahara and gave a dynasty to Morocco and Spain, namely, that of the Almoravides (q.v.). The Zeirid dynasty which supplanted the Fatimites in the Maghrib and founded the city of Algiers was also of Zenaga origin. The Zenaga dialect of Berber is spoken in southern Morocco and on the banks of the lower Senegal, largely by the negro population. --Originally appearing in Volume V28, Page 967 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: I think I'll post some of these quotes directly since according to you it had nothing to do with skin color :
quote: The Sanhâja, among whom matrilinear structures played a significant role, refused to allow children from a "mixed" union to carry their mother's name, thus excluding them from inheritance. On the other hand, the Almoravid governor of Azemmour reportedly refused to listen to the complaints of the saint Abû Shu‘ayb (late 12th century) because he had dark skin. Meanwhile, the Masmûda believed that a child born to a black woman had no rights. This was, in fact, the argument used by the Almohad sheikhs to revolt against the Almohad caliph al-Sa‘îd (1238-1248), who was the son of a black woman from the imperial harem.
P. Buresi et M. Ghouirgate, Histoire du Maghreb médiéval XIe-XVe siècle, Armand Colin, 2013, pp. 207-208.
I find the Almohad caliph al-Sa‘îd incident to be suspicious for two reasons. First, we both know that Yakub Al-mansur had a black mother, and the Almohads accepted his rule, why on earth would their position randomly change? Second, I've been trying to find more info on Almohad caliph al-Sa‘îd and have been unsuccessful? Is his full name Abu al-Hasan as-Said al-Mutadid? Because if it is then the information you have is incorrect as al-Hasan died in war. I'll address the Azemmour incident later in my post.
quote:Originally posted by Sarapis: Any source ? evidence of this ?
Sure.
"Yusuf ibn Tashfinn was described by Ali ibn Abd allah in Roudh el-Kartas as “Brown [in] color, middle height, thin, little beard, soft voice, black eyes, straight nose, lock of Muhammad falling on top of his ear, eye brow joined, wooly hair” And since Tashfin's parents were both Lamtuna berbers, and also since the Lamtuna berbers believed in matrilineal descent we can be confident that he was completely black. Also keep in mind that his straight nose falls within black African variance, as we see with Paul Kagame's nose. Also, Tashfin acts as evidence against the Azemmour incident. Why would they have sent that man out soley on skin colour when the Tashfin and the other founding fathers of the empire were also black skinned? In my opinion this point covers the remaining ones you made, so I'll stop here.
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
A geographical historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought vp in Barbarie.
Leo, Africanus, ca. 1492-ca. 1550.
PAGE 2
The 〈◊〉 of Africa. OVR authors affirme, that Africa is 〈◊〉 into fower partes, that is to say, Barbaria, Numidia, Libya, and the lande of Negros. Barbaria taketh beginning from the hill called Meies, which is the extreme part of all the moun∣taines of Atlas, being distant from Alexandria almost three hundred miles. It is bounded on the North side with the Mediter∣ran sea, stretching thence to mount-Meies aforesaid, and from mount∣Meies extending itselfe to the streites of Gibraltar. Westward it is limi∣ted with the said streites, from whence winding it selfe out of the Medi∣terran sea into the maine Ocean, it is inclosed with the most westerly point of Atlas: namely, at that Westerne cape which is next vnto the towne called Messa. And southward it is bounded with that side of Atlas which lieth towards the Mediterran sea. This is the most noble and wor∣thie region of all Africa, the inhabitants whereof are of a browne or taw∣nie colour, being a ciuill people, and prescribe wholsome lawes and con∣stitutions vnto themselues.
The second part of Africa is called of the Latines Numidia, but of the Arabians Biledulgerid: this region bringeth foorth dates in great abun∣dance. It beginneth eastward at the citie of Eloacat, which is an hundred miles distant from Egypt, & extendeth west as far as the towne of* 1.3 Nun, standing vpon the Ocean sea. Northward it is inclosed with the south side of Atlas. And the south part thereof bordereth vpon the sandie de∣serts of Libya. All the Arabians doe usually call it The land of dates: be∣cause this onely region of Africa beareth dates.
The third part called of the Latines Libya, and of the Arabians Sarra (which word signifieth a desert) beginneth eastward at that part of Nilus which is next vnto the citie of Eloacat, and from thence runneth west∣ward as far as the Ocean sea. Northwarde it is bounded with Numidia, southward it abutteth vpon the land of Negros, eastward it taketh begin∣ning at the kingdome of Gaoga, and stretcheth westwarde euen to the land of Gualata, which bordereth vpon the Ocean sea.
The fourth part of Africa which is called the land of Negros, begin∣neth eastward at the kingdome of Gaoga, from whence it extendeth west as far as Gualata. The north part thereof is inclosed with the desert of Libya, and the south part, which is vnknowen vnto vs, with the Ocean sea: howbeit the merchants which daily come from thence to the king∣dome of Tombuto, haue sufficiently described the situation of that coun∣trie vnto vs. This lande of Negros hath a mightie riuer, which taking his* 1.4 name of the region, is called Niger: this riuer taketh his originall from the east out of a certaine desert called by the foresaide Negros Seu. Others will haue this riuer to spring out of a certaine lake, and so to runs
Page 5
Of the habitations of Africa, and of the signification of this word Barbar. OVr Cosmographers and historiographers affirme, that in times past Africa was altogether disinhabited, except that part which is now called the land of Negros: and most certaine it is, that Barbarie and Numidia were for many ages destitute of inhabitants. The tawnie people of the said region were called by the name of Barbar, being deriued of the verbe Barbara, which in their toong signifieth to murmur: because the African
Page 6
The originall of the people of Africa. ABout the originall of the Africans, our historiographers doe much disagree. For some will haue them to be deri∣ued from the inhabitants of Palaestina; because (as they say) being expelled out of their owne countrie by the Assyrians, they came at length into Africa, & seeing the fruitfulnes of the soile, chose it to be their place of habitation. Others are of opinion, that they tooke their originall from the Sabeans a people of Arabia foelix, and that, before such time as they were put to flight by the Assyrians or Aethiopians, as hath beene aforesaid. Some others report, that the Africans descended from certaine people of* 1.12 Asia, who being chased thence by reason of warres which were waged against them, fled into Greece, which at the same time had no inhabitants at all. Howbeit the enimie still pursuing them, they were forced to crosse the sea of Mo∣rea, and being arriued in Africa, to settle themselues there: but their eni∣mies aboad still in Greece. All which opinions and reportes are to bee understood onely of the originall of the tawnie people, that is to say, of the Numidians and Barbarians. For all the Negros or blacke Moores take their descent from Chus, the sonne of Cham, who was the sonne of Noë. But whatsoeuer difference there be betweene the Negros and the tawnie Moores, certaine it is that they had all one beginning. For the Negros are descended of the Philistims, and the Philistims of Mesraim the* 1.13 sonne of Chus: but the tawnie Moores fetch their petigree from the Sabeans, and it is euident that Saba was begotten of* 1.14 Rama, which was the eldest sonne of Chus. Diuers other opinions there be as touching this matter: which because they seeme not so necessarie, wee haue pur∣posely omitted.
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The Negros haue diuers languages among themselues, among which they call one Sungai, and the same is current in many regions; as namely, in Gualata, Tom∣buto, Ghinea, Melli, and Gago. Another language there is among the Negros, which they cal Guber; & this is rife among the people of Guber, of Cano, of Casena, of Perzegreg, & of Guangra. Likewise the kingdom of Borno hath a peculiar kinde of speech, altogether like vnto that, which is vsed in Gaoga. And the kingdome of Nube hath a language of great affinitie with the Chaldean, Arabian, & Egyptian toongs. But all the sea∣towns of Africa frō the Mediterran sea to the mountains of Atlas, speake broken Arabian. Except the kingdome and towne of Maroco, & the in∣land Numidians bordering vpon Maroco, Fez, & Tremizen; all which, vse the Barbarian toong. Howbeit they which dwel ouer against Tunis & Tripoli, speake indeede the Arabian language; albeit most corruptly.
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A diuision of the tawnie Moores into sundrie tribes or nations.
A diuision of the tawnie Moores into sundrie tribes or nations. THE tawnie Moores are diuided into fiue seuerall people or tribes: to wit, the tribes called Zanhagi, Musmudi, Zeneti, Hacari, and Gumeri. The tribe of Musmudi inhabite the westerne part of mount Atlas, from the prouince of Hea to the riuer of * 1.15 Seruan. Likewise they dwell vpon the south part of the said mountaine, and vpon all the inward plaines of that region. These Musmudae haue fower prouinces vnder them: namely, Hea, Sus, Guzula, and the territorie of Marocco. The tribe of Gumeri possesse certaine mountaines of Barbarie, dwelling on the sides of those mountaines which lie ouer against the Mediterran sea: as like∣wise they are Lords of all the riuer called in their language Rif. This riuer* 1.16 hath his fountaine neere vnto the streites of Gibraltar, and thence run∣neth eastwards to the kingdome of Tremizen, called by the Latines Cae∣saria.
These two tribes or people haue seuerall habitations by themselues: the other three are dispersed confusiuely ouer all Africa: howbeit they are, like strangers, discerned one from another by certaine properties or tokens, maintaining continuall warre among themselues, especially they of Numidia. These (I say) are those very people (as some report) who had no other places then tents and wide fields to repose themselues in: and it is reported, that in times past they had great conflicts together, and that the vanquished were sent to inhabit townes and cities, but the con∣querors held the champions and fieldes vnto themselues, and there setled their aboad. Neither is it altogether vnlikely; because the inhabitants of cities haue all one and the same language with the countrie people. For the Zeneti, whether they dwell in the citie or in the countrie, speake all one kinde of language: which is likewise to be vnderstood of the rest. The tribes of Zeneti, Haoari, and Sanhagi; inhabit the countrie of Temesne: sometimes they liue peaceably, and sometimes againe, calling to minde their ancient quarrels, they breake foorth into cruell warres and man∣slaughters. Some of these people beare rule ouer all Africa, as namely the Zeneti, who in times past vanquished the familie called Idris; from which some affirme the true and naturall Dukes of Fez, and the founders of the same citie to deriue their petigree: their progenie likewise was called Mecnasa. There came afterward out of Numidia, another familie of the Zeneti called Magraoa: this Magraoa chased the familie of Mec∣nasa with all their Dukes and chieftaines out of their dominions. Not long after, the said tribe of Magraoa was expelled in like sort by certaine others of the race of the Sanhagij, called by the name of Lumtuna, which came also out of the desert of Numidia.
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THose fiue kindes of people before rehearsed, to wit, the people* 1.36 of Zenega, of Gansiga, of Terga, of Leuta, and of Bardeoa, are called of the Latins Numidae: and they liue all after one man∣ner, that is to say, without all lawe and ciuilitie. Their gar∣ment is a narrow and base peece of cloth, wherewith scarce halfe their bodie is couered. Some of them wrap their heads in a kinde of blacke cloth, as it were with a scarfe, such as the Turks vse, which is commonly called a Tur∣bant. Such as will be discerned from the common sort, for geutlemen, weare a iacket made of blew cotton with wide sleeues. And cotton-cloth is brought vnto them by certaine merchants from the land of Negros.
Page 40
Also, the Moores and Arabians inhabiting Libya are somewhat ciuill of behauiour, being plaine dealers, voide of dissimulation, fauourable to strangers, and louers of simplicitie. Those which we before named white, or tawney Moores, are most stedfast in friendship: as likewise Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ I wish Tukuler were here because I forgot which pope it was but one of the popes in the 18th century made a declaration that 'negro' is demeaning and therefore that word should be used for black objects like 'moro' should be used for black people. This is why in Romance speaking countries in Europe, the term moro is used for black person while in Latin America people in some countries still stick to 'negro' for black person.
recall the thread More proof of "black" Moors, with examples such as the Moorish helper of Sinter Klaas (Santa Claus), Schwartze (Black) Peter.
By the way, the three scholars I know of who are knowledgeable on Moors are Stanley Lane-Poole, Ivan Van Sertima, and Dana Marniche. All of these people cite extensive 1st hand accounts with footnotes.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: One interesting aspect is the different colors of the women´s hair. Realistic or symbolic? Is it hair, or some kind of headgear? Or colored wigs?
It's likely just their hairstyle dyed with ochre or better yet held together with clay.
I remember years ago seeing photos of Fulani with their hair caked in ochre giving them brownish, reddish, or lighter color patterns. Unfortunately such traditional hairstyles have become exceptionally rare nowadays and I can't find any on the internet, but as an example here is a himba woman below with braids coated in ochre clay.
Here is an old black-and-white photo of an Igbo woman from Nigeria whose hair style is closer to that of the Fulani but you can make out patches of ochre in her hair.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote: Originally posted by Swenet Quoting a scholar who swears by these images is appeal to authority fallacy. I go by evidence, and evidence, only. Note by Iz tellss yous sos by some phd.
In one way or another we often have to trust the interpretations of those who for example have written a study or report. Often the data is presented in a way that makes it possible to interpret them, but some times it can be hard since we were not present during the obtaining of the data through for example excavations, surveys or similar. There can be details and subtleties which is evident in the field but for some reason are not clear or evident in a report or study. Long field experience can make that one can assess for example an archaeological site in another way than people who only read about it. So it can be hard to dismiss observations done by an experienced researcher who actually seen and examined the objects in real life. But if one wants clarity or more details one can in many cases actually ask the researcher in question.
I agree. But the way it was implied that I should just get over it and take a scholar at his word, that almost never happens in any formal academic context.
To clarify, I'm not even saying the scene is not authentic. I'm just saying, it's not admissible as far as I'm concerned, without some evidence vouching for it. Evidence I'd accept would be dating of organic materials in the paint, or sth like that.
If you read my posts in the AMH thread that's active right now, you can see I hold myself to the same standard. I would have liked to use that Mtoto sample (been looking for sth like that, for a long time), but the sample consists of many fragments that had to be pieced together. I don't know what effect that has on the reconstructed end result, so I don't feel comfortable using it for what I intended.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: ..Quoting a scholar who swears by these images and expecting me to take his word for it, just on his blue eyes, is appeal to authority fallacy. I go by evidence, and evidence, only. Not by 'Iz tellss yous sos' by some phd.
Now, go back to talking to someone else and stop dragging me in the conversation. [/qb]
That there were light/fair skinned people in coastal North Africa is undisputed. What is being questioned is whether these people stretched all the way into the Central Sahara region. As yet I have seen no actual evidence of this. Again, this is not to rule out the possibility but like Swenet I go by evidence, and just because a few figures here and there in the Saharan rock art are unpainted silhouettes or painted all white does not make them such people we are discussing. As I've shown, the same unpainted silhouettes or stark white coloring is also given to some animals in the artwork.
As to evidence of the physical populations living in that region, we have their skeletal remains including mummified bodies such as from rock shelter burials that I have covered here. Ironically most of these remains were described as "negroid" while a few exhibit "Mediterranean" as in "Hamitic" types similar to dark skinned Saharan Berbers or Egyptians. From what I understand DNA sequencing of these remains is in the works but one female mummy has yielded upstream mtDNA N. That said, I doubt any of these remains will show they are light or fair-skinned.
I mostly avoided the Sahara, because I even took it a step further: I questioned his notion that KEB's SLC24A5 (one allele) constitutes "light skin alleles" (plural), and I questioned that they penetrated very far across the breadth of north Africa, above the northern tropic. Even if that scene is authentic, the notion that pale skin was common in North Africa, in the Old Kingdom, does not have much going for it, especially since the speed of depigmentation in the Maghreb, is constrained by the arrival of light skin alleles from Europe. So, if pale skin hadnt yet gained significant traction in Europe until ~4000 ky ago, I'm not going to go along with the sleight of hand that farmer ancestry in KEB, must mean KEB had pale skin. That's that sleight of hand that you see over and over again--the non-sequitur that Eurasian ancestry has a skin color, and that this skin color is white, and that, for instance, North Africa must have been white based on 30ky old mtDNA U6.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet To clarify, I'm not even saying the scene is not authentic. I'm just saying, it's not admissible as far as I'm concerned, without some evidence vouching for it. Evidence I'd accept would be dating of organic materials in the paint, or sth like that.
Rock art can sometimes be hard to date since there is not always any way to date it directly. If one is lucky paintings can contain organic material which one can date, while carvings can totally lack such material. So many times one must date the art on stylistic grounds. One can also take a look at objects depicted in a picture and compare with objects found in archaeological excavations and compare. Sometimes the art can depict objects which are very specific for a certain time. Also pictures of certain animals can be used for assessment of age. Other ways is to see if the art is associated with other findings such as a hearth (with datable carbon) under a rock outcrop that contains paintings or carvings. Up here in Scandinavia some art is dated by its position in relation to the sea's shorelines, which has changed over time. One can sometimes also analyze weathering, patina, and in some cases formation of stalactites and stalagmites on the art (in calcareous caves). And one also looks at an artwork's relation to other artwork in a certain area.
Some art have also been associated with astronomical phenomena that would have occurred during a certain time, but that kind of association is often contested and debated.
When it concerns if a painting is real or not one can sometimes chemically test the paint to see if it contains pigments that did not exist in prehistoric times. Dating organic ingredients in the color is possible in some cases. Weathering and patina can also be used. Other factors are: Is a motif consistent with other motifs from a certain time and place? Is the arts position in the terrain plausible? Sometimes a trained eye can immediately spot a fake painting.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:originally posted by Djehuti It's likely just their hairstyle dyed with ochre or better yet held together with clay.
A couple of the women also wear a kind of dome shaped objects on their head. Parallels can be seen in Egyptian art but have also been observed among late African cultures. I want to remember that they have been discussed in some previous thread here on ES.
When it comes to the paintings at Uan Derbuaen they are interesting among others because of the choice of colors on the ladies. The color scheme is well thought out and executed. The skin is very pale while the hair (or hair gear) is colorful. Also their clothes are colorful. The skin is very pale even compared to most people who live along the Mediterranean far to the north. Many times it can be hard to know exactly what the choice of certain colors mean. Realistic or symbolic?
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
According to DNA studies a woman living in Gibraltar 7500 years ago had light skin, dark eyes and dark, straight hair. She was also lactose intolerant.
A facial reconstruction has been done of the woman who is nicknamed Calpeia. Gibraltar is approximately 14 km from North Africa.
^Generally speaking, we're better off using common sense than to rely too much on media announcements that leave out research specifics. Both WHG and early farmers, had darker skin. Look at the time she was born: farming had just arrived in Iberia, so it must only have been a matter of generations for her WHG and farmer ancestors to come together. Common sense says, she should not deviate that much from other products of WHG-farmer admixture.
See where her time of birth puts her on the depigmentation timeline of Europe.
So, I'm thinking this was either fumbled by a team who doesn't understand the wider context of skin pigmentation (she's not the first early farmer reconstructed with light skin; you can even see they have given Otzi light skin in the past, even though we know that this is not what the learned opinion is), OR, we're dealing with a unique situation where she and her people were genetic outliers (I understand that in Scandinavia, for instance, some hunter gatherers had derived alleles for several skin pigmentation genes).
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet To clarify, I'm not even saying the scene is not authentic. I'm just saying, it's not admissible as far as I'm concerned, without some evidence vouching for it. Evidence I'd accept would be dating of organic materials in the paint, or sth like that.
Rock art can sometimes be hard to date since there is not always any way to date it directly. If one is lucky paintings can contain organic material which one can date, while carvings can totally lack such material. So many times one must date the art on stylistic grounds. One can also take a look at objects depicted in a picture and compare with objects found in archaeological excavations and compare. Sometimes the art can depict objects which are very specific for a certain time. Also pictures of certain animals can be used for assessment of age. Other ways is to see if the art is associated with other findings such as a hearth (with datable carbon) under a rock outcrop that contains paintings or carvings. Up here in Scandinavia some art is dated by its position in relation to the sea's shorelines, which has changed over time. One can sometimes also analyze weathering, patina, and in some cases formation of stalactites and stalagmites on the art (in calcareous caves). And one also looks at an artwork's relation to other artwork in a certain area.
Some art have also been associated with astronomical phenomena that would have occurred during a certain time, but that kind of association is often contested and debated.
When it concerns if a painting is real or not one can sometimes chemically test the paint to see if it contains pigments that did not exist in prehistoric times. Dating organic ingredients in the color is possible in some cases. Weathering and patina can also be used. Other factors are: Is a motif consistent with other motifs from a certain time and place? Is the arts position in the terrain plausible? Sometimes a trained eye can immediately spot a fake painting.
I agree. Did you catch my earlier post? They dated a Silsilian engraving recently, where they dated the build up of deposits. Impressive.
Long doubted, the existence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa is here proven through the dating of petroglyph panels displaying aurochs and other animals at Qurta in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley. The method used was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) applied to deposits of wind-blown sediment covering the images. This gave a minimum age of ∼15 000 calendar years making the rock engravings at Qurta the oldest so far found in North Africa. First evidence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa: Securing the age of the Qurta petroglyphs (Egypt) through OSL dating
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: ^Generally speaking, we're better off using common sense than to rely too much on media announcements that leave out research specifics. Both WHG and early farmers, had darker skin. Look at the time she was born: farming had just arrived in Iberia, so it must only have been a matter of generations for her WHG and farmer ancestors to come together. Common sense says, she should not deviate that much from other products of WHG-farmer admixture.
See where her time of birth puts her on the depigmentation timeline of Europe.
So, I'm thinking this was either fumbled by a team who doesn't understand the wider context of skin pigmentation (she's not the first early farmer reconstructed with light skin; you can even see they have given Otzi light skin in the past, even though we know that this is not what the learned opinion is), OR, we're dealing with a unique situation where she and her people were genetic outliers (I understand that in Scandinavia, for instance, some hunter gatherers had derived alleles for several skin pigmentation genes).
Yes, some of the Scandinavian Hunter Gatherers (SGH) seem to have had derived alleles for lighter skin and also for lighter hair. Some would also have light eyes. SHG had traits both from WHG and EHG, and there seems to have been a rather strong selection for lighter skin in Scandinavia.
quote:We find a surprise in six Scandinavian hunter-gatherers (SHG) from the Motala site in southern Sweden. In three out of six samples, we observe the haplotype carrying the derived allele of rs3827760 in the EDAR gene (Extended Data Fig. 5), which affects tooth morphology and hair thickness and has been the subject of a selective sweep in East Asia, and today is at high frequency in East Asians and Native Americans. The EDAR derived allele is largely absent in present-day Europe except in Scandinavia, plausibly due to Siberian movements into the region millennia after the date of the Motala samples. The SHG have no evidence of East Asian ancestry, suggesting that the EDAR derived allele may not have originated not in East Asians as previously suggested. A second surprise is that, unlike closely related western hunter-gatherers, the Motala samples have predominantly derived pigmentation alleles at SLC45A2 and SLC24A5.
The c 8000 years old Motala individuals belonged to SHG and also the c 10 000 years old so called Bredgård man from Western Sweden.
See this thread about the Bredgård man. The thread also includes an artistic interpretation and speculations about Lola, a c 5700 years old WHG girl whose DNA was found in a "chewing gum" made from birch tar, and facial reconstructions of two of the c 8000 years old Motala SHG individuals. Topic: The oldest reconstructed face in Sweden
About the woman from Gibraltar it seems she is included in a study from 2019:
quote:Ancient DNA studies have begun to help us understand the genetic history and movements of people across the globe. Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, Olalde et al. report genome-wide data from 271 ancient individuals from Iberia (see the Perspective by Vander Linden). The findings provide a comprehensive genetic time transect of the region. Linguistics analysis and genetic analysis of archaeological human remains dating from about 7000 years ago to the present elucidate the genetic impact of prehistoric and historic migrations from Europe and North Africa.
quote:Researchers were most excited about what DNA revealed about Calpeia’s ancestry. Only 10 percent of Calpeia’s genome comes from the population found in the Iberian Peninsula, while the remaining 90 percent has its origin in Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. Farmers from Anatolia during the Neolithic period had a high percentage of alleles for dark eyes and light skin. By contrast, hunter-gatherers from central and western Europe show genetic markers for dark skin and light eyes.
But time goes and also genetics have developed 2019. Future research will probably refine the methods of inferring phenotype from aDNA.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I agree. Did you catch my earlier post? They dated a Silsilian engraving recently, where they dated the build up of deposits. Impressive.
Long doubted, the existence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa is here proven through the dating of petroglyph panels displaying aurochs and other animals at Qurta in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley. The method used was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) applied to deposits of wind-blown sediment covering the images. This gave a minimum age of ∼15 000 calendar years making the rock engravings at Qurta the oldest so far found in North Africa.
First evidence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa: Securing the age of the Qurta petroglyphs (Egypt) through OSL dating
Indeed impressive, the different luminescence techniques are really interesting.
The earlier mentioned Jean-Loïc Le Quellec also discusses the chronology of Saharan rock art in an old article from 2013:
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: A couple of the women also wear a kind of dome shaped objects on their head. Parallels can be seen in Egyptian art but have also been observed among late African cultures. I want to remember that they have been discussed in some previous thread here on ES.
We don't even know what those objects are let alone if they have any relation to the perfume cones Egyptians and other Africans wore. Those objects could be small pots or containers.
quote:When it comes to the paintings at Uan Derbuaen they are interesting among others because of the choice of colors on the ladies. The color scheme is well thought out and executed. The skin is very pale while the hair (or hair gear) is colorful. Also their clothes are colorful. The skin is very pale even compared to most people who live along the Mediterranean far to the north. Many times it can be hard to know exactly what the choice of certain colors mean. Realistic or symbolic?
I've already shown other examples of unpainted silhouettes in the Sahara including those of animals. That does not mean the figures were that of literal pale skinned individuals. At least in Egypt, the first evidence we see of pale skinned Libyans was the Middle Kingdom and none of the women sport Fulani or other West African type hairstyles.
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: Generally speaking, we're better off using common sense than to rely too much on media announcements that leave out research specifics. Both WHG and early farmers, had darker skin. Look at the time she was born: farming had just arrived in Iberia, so it must only have been a matter of generations for her WHG and farmer ancestors to come together. Common sense says, she should not deviate that much from other products of WHG-farmer admixture.
See where her time of birth puts her on the depigmentation timeline of Europe.
So, I'm thinking this was either fumbled by a team who doesn't understand the wider context of skin pigmentation (she's not the first early farmer reconstructed with light skin; you can even see they have given Otzi light skin in the past, even though we know that this is not what the learned opinion is), OR, we're dealing with a unique situation where she and her people were genetic outliers (I understand that in Scandinavia, for instance, some hunter gatherers had derived alleles for several skin pigmentation genes).
This is another issue. When they say that these early Eurasians had dark skin, the question is exactly how dark, because I still question the Cheddar Man reconstruction showing him to have the same complexion as equatorial Africans. How can a population living that far north be that dark??
The Peștera cu Oase reconstruction below makes more sense in regards to complexion...
..yet Oase Man lived further south than Cheddar Man.
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
quote:This is another issue. When they say that these early Eurasians had dark skin, the question is exactly how dark, because I still question the Cheddar Man reconstruction showing him to have the same complexion as equatorial Africans. How can a population living that far north be that dark??
I understand why you might question those results, but the techniques they used to predict Cheddar Man and other WHGs' skin tone are the same (or similar) to the ones predicting dark skin for ancient North African samples. If you don't mind me asking, why do you accept those techniques when they assess North African samples but not when they assess Mesolithic southern and western Europeans?
Also, I think Swenet has proposed that Cheddar Man might have North African ancestry. If there was indeed substantial gene flow from North Africa into south and then western Europe before the European Mesolithic, maybe that explains their dark skin tones?
Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
What difference does it make exactly how light or dark some ancient population was? Why should we care?
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti I've already shown other examples of unpainted silhouettes in the Sahara including those of animals. That does not mean the figures were that of literal pale skinned individuals. At least in Egypt, the first evidence we see of pale skinned Libyans was the Middle Kingdom and none of the women sport Fulani or other West African type hairstyles.
White figures can mean different things in different contexts. Are they from the same time and place? What is the relationship between skin color, clothes and hair? Why did the painters of the Uan Derbuaen choose to paint hair and clothes in vivid colors, but not the skin? It is not that the figures are unpainted, it is mostly the skin parties which are white. We do not have the exact keys to their imagery.
Both in Egypt and among Minoans and others there have been later traditions of painting very light skinned women, while the men are depicted darker. Maybe it is a similar symbolism here? It could be quite local in a somewhat limited area. Or there can be a totally other symbolism.
Their exact skin color we do not know but we can guess they were not as white as in the paintings. Not even Mediterraneans are so white.
Otherwise the occasion maybe explain the choice of color. Augustin Holl for example in the article I referred to above interpret them as the participants in a wedding party.
The colors of their hair can be different forms of ochre (yellow, red, brown), but can also be symbolic, or something else.
As for the objects on their heads, they can be anything from clay pots (which we have seen in other parts of Africa) to ostrich eggs. As long as we have not found the objects themselves we cannot be sure.
Sometimes to be able to more advanced interpretations one must see the paintings in real life and in their right context. How are their real colors? How degraded are they? What is their relation to other, nearby paintings? Even then there is room for speculations.
Also we sometimes impose todays views of race and similar on ancient times and populations. Some like to see white figures in Sahara, others like to see black figures in Northern Europe.
One more painting in the Iheren style. Seems that it was common to depict people in light colors but with colorful clothes
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by the lioness,: What difference does it make exactly how light or dark some ancient population was? Why should we care?
You are right, in many cases it does not matter. The reason we still discuss it have often more to do with todays racial issues then what it has to do with the world of the ancient peoples.
Of course if one does research about how skin color affects our biology, and how skin color is affected by external factors, and how it has changed over the millennia, then it is relevant. But many skin color discussions in various fora online are often more political than scientific.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
It is interesting that when artist Tom Björklund painted his interpretation of "Lola", a WHG-girl from Lolland in Denmark, known only by DNA preserved in a chewing gum made from birch tar, he got reactions from some people who thought he had made her way too dark. But he also got reactions from other people who thought he had painted her too light.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP:
quote:This is another issue. When they say that these early Eurasians had dark skin, the question is exactly how dark, because I still question the Cheddar Man reconstruction showing him to have the same complexion as equatorial Africans. How can a population living that far north be that dark??
I understand why you might question those results, but the techniques they used to predict Cheddar Man and other WHGs' skin tone are the same (or similar) to the ones predicting dark skin for ancient North African samples. If you don't mind me asking, why do you accept those techniques when they assess North African samples but not when they assess Mesolithic southern and western Europeans?
Also, I think Swenet has proposed that Cheddar Man might have North African ancestry. If there was indeed substantial gene flow from North Africa into south and then western Europe before the European Mesolithic, maybe that explains their dark skin tones?
Yes, I did, but I was still waiting for more evidence. In my response to SlimJim I mentioned Kom Ombo Man. In the past I've speculated that his unusually wide and prominent frontal bone could be the source of the same feature showing up in parts of West Eurasia, after his people (Sebilians?) disappeared from Upper Egypt, as part of a larger evacuation of the Egyptian Nile:
There came an end to the visibility of human presence after 13 ka calBP and for a long period of several millennia no sites have been documented in Upper Egypt, except some rare Epipalaeolithic sites around 9.0 ka calBP (Vermeersch, 1978). Only with the end of the Holocene pluvial at about 5.5 ka calBP when Predynastic culture is developing, is a high number of sites observed in the area (Kuper and Kr€ opelin, 2006). Nile behaviour and Late Palaeolithic humans in Upper Egypt during the Late Pleistocene https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379115001328
Angel on wide frontal bones showing up in different roughly contemporary sites (Angel doesn't list him, but Cheddar Man also has this feature, and he also belongs to this general post-glacial time period):
This Egyptian ancestry, if it's even responsible for spreading this phenotype, could have hitch-hiked to Europe as part of this postglacial migration from Middle East (which Cheddar Man's genome, also shows some admixture with):
During the major warming period after ~14,000 years ago, a genetic component related to present-day Near Easterners became widespread in Europe. These results document how population turnover and migration have been recurring themes of European prehistory. The genetic history of Ice Age Europe https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17993
^Just some context, so I don't look crazy being paraphrased saying Cheddar Man may have African ancestry (Its def possible to go overboard w/ seeing African ancestry everywhere, as some others do).
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
British stone age is quite interesting since several different waves of humans have inhabited the land. Wiki gives a brief summary:
quote:Several species of humans have intermittently occupied Great Britain for almost a million years. The earliest evidence of human occupation around 900,000 years ago is at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast, with stone tools and footprints probably made by Homo antecessor. The oldest human fossils, around 500,000 years old, are of Homo heidelbergensis at Boxgrove in Sussex. Until this time Britain had been permanently connected to the Continent by a chalk ridge between South East England and northern France called the Weald-Artois Anticline, but during the Anglian Glaciation around 425,000 years ago a megaflood broke through the ridge, and Britain became an island when sea levels rose during the following Hoxnian interglacial.
Fossils of very early Neanderthals dating to around 400,000 years ago have been found at Swanscombe in Kent, and of classic Neanderthals about 225,000 years old at Pontnewydd in Wales. Britain was unoccupied by humans between 180,000 and 60,000 years ago, when Neanderthals returned. By 40,000 years ago they had become extinct and modern humans had reached Britain. But even their occupations were brief and intermittent due to a climate which swung between low temperatures with a tundra habitat and severe ice ages which made Britain uninhabitable for long periods. The last of these, the Younger Dryas, ended around 11,700 years ago, and since then Britain has been continuously occupied.
One famous fossil of Homo sapiens is the 33000 years old Red "Lady" of Paviland. But his (it was actually a man) people disappeared when the climate deteroriated again.
So Cheddar man is rather late on the stage. But he seems to be related with many other WHG:s in Europe.
After the reconstruction where they depicted him as rather dark there were some discussions about the reliability of the methods to determine his skin color.
Here is a newsflash from 2018
quote:Was Cheddar man white after all? There's no way to know that the first Briton had ‘dark to black skin’ says scientist who helped reconstruct his 10,000-year-old face
T-he bones are the oldest near-complete human skeleton ever found in Britain
-Experts tested DNA taken from bone powder by drilling a hole through the skull
-It showed there was a 76 per cent chance that Cheddar Man was ‘dark to black’
-Scientist behind the test used says it is impossible to be certain of this fact
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: ^Just some context, so I don't look crazy being paraphrased saying Cheddar Man may have African ancestry (Its def possible to go overboard w/ seeing African ancestry everywhere, as some others do).
One can just hope his relatives had the time to stop for a cup of tea on the way from Africa to England Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: ^Just some context, so I don't look crazy being paraphrased saying Cheddar Man may have African ancestry (Its def possible to go overboard w/ seeing African ancestry everywhere, as some others do).
One can just hope his relatives had the time to stop for a cup of tea on the way from Africa to England
What is the saying? Necessity is the mother of all inventions? Unlike some others, when postulating migration, I follow the necessity (climatic pressures, and other forces that drive ancient history), not personal whims. W/ necessity everything else follows, including finding the time for that cup of tea. Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: Generally speaking, we're better off using common sense than to rely too much on media announcements that leave out research specifics. Both WHG and early farmers, had darker skin. Look at the time she was born: farming had just arrived in Iberia, so it must only have been a matter of generations for her WHG and farmer ancestors to come together. Common sense says, she should not deviate that much from other products of WHG-farmer admixture.
See where her time of birth puts her on the depigmentation timeline of Europe.
So, I'm thinking this was either fumbled by a team who doesn't understand the wider context of skin pigmentation (she's not the first early farmer reconstructed with light skin; you can even see they have given Otzi light skin in the past, even though we know that this is not what the learned opinion is), OR, we're dealing with a unique situation where she and her people were genetic outliers (I understand that in Scandinavia, for instance, some hunter gatherers had derived alleles for several skin pigmentation genes).
This is another issue. When they say that these early Eurasians had dark skin, the question is exactly how dark, because I still question the Cheddar Man reconstruction showing him to have the same complexion as equatorial Africans. How can a population living that far north be that dark??
The Peștera cu Oase reconstruction below makes more sense in regards to complexion...
..yet Oase Man lived further south than Cheddar Man. [/QB]
I try to stay ahead of such difficult questions, by speaking in relative terms. Generally I avoid 'black', and when I speak on WHG and farmers I use dark and darker.
~44% of skin pigmentation is controlled by the genome (ie many SNPs distributed throughout the genome prolly contribute to depigmentation), while the major alleles (SLC24A5, etc) control ~35%. The percentage breakdown differs depending on the study.
Figure 7. Genetic architecture of skin color variation.
(a) Effect sizes of the loci associated with skin color. Effect values represent the beta values obtained from a regression model containing the four associated loci plus ancestry. (b) The pie chart represents the proportion of phenotypic variation accounted for by the different components, including non-heritable factors (∼20%), the four major loci (∼35%, color-coded as in [a]), and average genomic ancestry (44%). The heritable contributions were estimated by regression and variance decomposition as described in Material and Methods, and are also represented below the pie chart separately as grey (genomic ancestry) or open (four major loci) areas. However, because of admixture stratification, the heritable contributions overlap as described in the text. Genetic Architecture of Skin and Eye Color in an African-European Admixed Population https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003372
This should give an idea of what can be known, and what can't be known w/ current science. This works for me most of the time. I don't feel like I always have to know the exact level of pigmentation. Sometimes ancient art (eg cave art) will fill in the blanks, sometimes there is nothing to go along and its fine for me to leave it at dark skin.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Talking about skin color in North Africa. Here is the cover of a French comic book about a girl in Tassili during neolithic time,
Front cover of the comic book « Tassili, une femme libre au Néolithique » (Tassili, a Free Woman in the Neolithic Age) from 2022 Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
The map from this paper might be useful in imagining how the alleles for lighter skin in West Eurasian (and later North African) humans would have been distributed between the Paleolithic to Neolithic:
You can see that those West Eurasian alleles for lighter skin did in fact exist during the UP after 28-22 kya, but they would have been concentrated in the northern and eastern parts of Europe before the Neolithic. WHG having ancestry from further south as Swenet mentioned could further account for their darker complexions.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
^ Yes one reason the Scandinavians relatively early got people with light skin is that two early migration waves met here, WHG from the south and EHG from the east. It seems that there was a strong selection for light skin so those alleles became more common.
Britain on the other hand never received any EHG migrants only WHG, so they would have looked different. The distribution of different groups, and their pigments are represented in the map above.
Later came the Neolithic migrations and after them the Steppe peoples which would change big parts of western Europe.
Interestingly there were people with alleles for light skin, light eyes and light hair in Israel during chalcolithic time, around 6000 years ago. They probably got those alleles from immigrations from North East, from todays Iran.
quote: Originally posted by Swenet Quoting a scholar who swears by these images is appeal to authority fallacy. I go by evidence, and evidence, only. Note by Iz tellss yous sos by some phd.
In one way or another we often have to trust the interpretations of those who for example have written a study or report. Often the data is presented in a way that makes it possible to interpret them, but some times it can be hard since we were not present during the obtaining of the data through for example excavations, surveys or similar. There can be details and subtleties which is evident in the field but for some reason are not clear or evident in a report or study. Long field experience can make that one can assess for example an archaeological site in another way than people who only read about it. So it can be hard to dismiss observations done by an experienced researcher who actually seen and examined the objects in real life. But if one wants clarity or more details one can in many cases actually ask the researcher in question.
The problem is that there are tens of thousands of rock art images around Tassili N'Ajjer and many of them date from the last wet phase, when many more Africans from the interior were present. SO the question becomes how "representative" are those images of those females vs any other forms of rock art. As far as I am aware, those images were considered frauds because of how unique they are compared to the majority of the rest of the artwork. And the problem is we don't have the full context on where they were found, what other art was in the area and whether those images still exist in their original context or not.
quote: Tassili n'Ajjer is a vast plateau in south-east Algeria at the borders of Libya, Niger and Mali, covering an area of 72,000 sq. km. The exceptional density of paintings and engravings, and the presence of many prehistoric vestiges, are remarkable testimonies to Prehistory. From 10,000 BC to the first centuries of our era, successive peoples left many archaeological remains, habitations, burial mounds and enclosures which have yielded abundant lithic and ceramic material. However, it is the rock art (engravings and paintings) that have made Tassili world famous as from 1933, the date of its discovery. 15,000 engravings have been identified to date.
The property is also of great geological and aesthetic interest: the panorama of geological formations with "rock forests" of eroded sandstone resembles a strange lunar landscape.
Criterion (i): The impressive array of paintings and rock engravings of various periods gives world recognition to the property. The representations of the Round Heads Period evoke possible magic-religious practices some 10,000 years old, whereas the representations of the Cattle Period depicting daily and social life, and which are amongst the most famous prehistoric parietal art, have an aesthetic naturalistic realism. The last images represent the taming of horses and camels.
Criterion (iii): The rock art images cover a period of about 10,000 years. With the archaeological remains, they testify in a particularly lively manner to climate changes, changes in fauna and flora, and particularly to possibilities provided for farming and pastoral life linked to impregnable defensive sites during certain prehistoric periods.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Talking about skin color in North Africa. Here is the cover of a French comic book about a girl in Tassili during neolithic time,
Front cover of the comic book « Tassili, une femme libre au Néolithique » (Tassili, a Free Woman in the Neolithic Age) from 2022
LOL Is someone going to make a comic about black people of Mesolithic Britain?
I take it this comic was based on those relatively few unpainted silhouettes amidst the masses of painted ones. I'm surprised the artist did not give the girl in the cover the Fulani hairstyle.
Then again this is unsurprising since if the white washing of North Africa was never limited to Egypt or northeast Africa.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
quote:Originally posted by BrandonP: The map from this paper might be useful in imagining how the alleles for lighter skin in West Eurasian (and later North African) humans would have been distributed between the Paleolithic to Neolithic:
https://i.imgur.com/nvCKRvbh.jpeg You can see that those West Eurasian alleles for lighter skin did in fact exist during the UP after 28-22 kya, but they would have been concentrated in the northern and eastern parts of Europe before the Neolithic. WHG having ancestry from further south as Swenet mentioned could further account for their darker complexions.
Every once in a while, Ish Gebor posted a depiction of a brown skinned man in leopard garment, I believe it was, from a Neolithic(?) Anatolian site (Çatalhöyük?). If your map is correct about farmers having light to intermediate skin, it could be that pic is not representative, for whatever reason.
On the other hand, Sumeria was near Anatolia. If it can be confirmed they had these two alleles, we'll know (given the brown pigment used for skin in their early dynastic art, according to that study you posted) that these alelles alone, do not produce light, or even intermediate skin.
Prolly, this science is too young and too hindered by conflicting interests, for media reports and even scientific publications to be trusted to handle this balance and consistency. Somalis, for instance, have unusually high levels of SLC24A5. The Chl samples from the Levant have only SLC24A5 confirmed, yet the authors are cautiously leaning to a phenotype of light skin. Considering what I've just said about Somalis possessing derived SLC24A5 at levels much higher than expected, KEB, Levant Chl, farmers, with only one allele (or with two alleles, but one of the two at low freq), cannot be said to have light skin.
Global distribution of the A111T mutation in SLC24A5 The geographical distribution of the A111T allele of SLC24A5 (Norton et al. 2007), updated with the use of additional population samples (Figure 1), shows that A111T is nearly fixed in all of Europe and most of the Middle East, extending east to some populations in present-day Pakistan and north India. A111T shows a latitudinal decline toward the Equator, with high frequencies in Northern Africa (.0.80), in- termediate (0.4 - 0.6) in Ethiopia and Somalia, and lower (,0.35) in sub-Saharan Africa. Molecular Phylogeography of a Human Autosomal Skin Color Locus Under Natural Selection https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24048645/
^Somalis have derived SLC24A5 at 60%, which is apparently more than Ethiopians (who are generally lighter in skin tone). So much for KEB and other ancients having pale skin on the basis of one allele.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Doug The problem is that there are tens of thousands of rock art images around Tassili N'Ajjer and many of them date from the last wet phase, when many more Africans from the interior were present. SO the question becomes how "representative" are those images of those females vs any other forms of rock art. As far as I am aware, those images were considered frauds because of how unique they are compared to the majority of the rest of the artwork. And the problem is we don't have the full context on where they were found, what other art was in the area and whether those images still exist in their original context or not.
It seems those ladies belong to a certain style where the artist sometimes contrast the light skin of human figures with bright colored clothes. The Iheren paintings are of course just a part of all paintings which exist in Sahara and in Tassili. Most painted figures are dark.
A good example is this painting from the so called round head period which precedes the pastoralist period (whereof the Iheren style is a part).
About the Iheren style, here is a map of it´s distribution on the Tassili plateau (yellow dots).
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Is someone going to make a comic about black people of Mesolithic Britain?
I take it this comic was based on those relatively few unpainted silhouettes amidst the masses of painted ones. I'm surprised the artist did not give the girl in the cover the Fulani hairstyle.
Then again this is unsurprising since if the white washing of North Africa was never limited to Egypt or northeast Africa. [/QB]
We already see childrens carton about Black Romans in Britain and in Swedish TV people of African descent play Western Hunter Gatherers
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Swenet:
Prolly, this science is too young and too hindered by conflicting interests, for media reports and even scientific publications to be trusted to handle this balance and consistency. Somalis, for instance, have unusually high levels of SLC24A5. The Chl samples from the Levant have only SLC24A5 confirmed, yet the authors are cautiously leaning to a phenotype of light skin. Considering what I've just said about Somalis possessing derived SLC24A5 at levels much higher than expected, KEB, Levant Chl, farmers, with only one allele (or with two alleles, but one of the two at low freq), cannot be said to have light skin.
Global distribution of the A111T mutation in SLC24A5 The geographical distribution of the A111T allele of SLC24A5 (Norton et al. 2007), updated with the use of additional population samples (Figure 1), shows that A111T is nearly fixed in all of Europe and most of the Middle East, extending east to some populations in present-day Pakistan and north India. A111T shows a latitudinal decline toward the Equator, with high frequencies in Northern Africa (.0.80), in- termediate (0.4 - 0.6) in Ethiopia and Somalia, and lower (,0.35) in sub-Saharan Africa. Molecular Phylogeography of a Human Autosomal Skin Color Locus Under Natural Selection https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24048645/
^Somalis have derived SLC24A5 at 60%, which is apparently more than Ethiopians (who are generally lighter in skin tone). So much for KEB and other ancients having pale skin on the basis of one allele. [/QB]
Maybe one must also take a look at factors like levels of UV light and peoples exposure for it to assess ancient peoples color. Where is it a selective pressure for lighter or intermediate skin respective dark skin? How long time must a people live in a certain area for it to be noticeable? So maybe external factors also affects how certain genes are expressed.
Here is a modern map of the distribution of skin colors. Maybe we one day can be able to make similar maps but for different periods in human history.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
When comes to ancient pictures depicting skin colors one must also be careful. Artistic conventions and traditions, ideals and cultural norms must be accounted for. One can not always take ancient depictions literally, they are not photos. If one should take those pictures literally we would have brown Egyptian men and yellow (or even white) women, we would have lily white people in Sahara, and we would have both dark brown and light skinned and even blonde Maya.
Bonampak murals, Mexico
Maya servant girl, Mexico
Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
That silly Tassili comic shows one problem I have with how people handle the conventional North/sub-Saharan African binary. The original idea was that the Sahara Desert separated populations along the Mediterranean coast from those in the Sahel and further south, but it's clear that a lot of people take away from this division that the Sahara itself, being part of "North Africa", is necessarily "Mediterranean Caucasoid/West Eurasian" territory too.
The fact that the comic is from France reminds me of how a lot of the Amazigh melanophobes I've encountered online (including Antalas himself) are actually based in France. Makes me wonder what the hell is up with the political climate in that country that is making North African immigrants embrace that kind of racialism.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
French film companies have many times sponsored films from Sub-Saharan Africa. Also they made comics and cartoons where Egyptians are depicted as dark skinned. A French director also once made the cartoon films about Kirikou, a small African boy who experiences adventures in some sort of fairy tale, traditional West African environment.
That the French are making comics about Green Sahara and about many other African topics, with African protagonists, is something that has not been so common in other European countries or even in USA.
Maybe the choice of skin color in the Tassili comic is an adaption to the taste of the many North Africans who live in France.
Maybe it is time for you to make a comic or a novel about the Green Sahara with dark skinned protagonists. Green Sahara is indeed a fascinating subject.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx:
quote:Originally posted by Doug The problem is that there are tens of thousands of rock art images around Tassili N'Ajjer and many of them date from the last wet phase, when many more Africans from the interior were present. SO the question becomes how "representative" are those images of those females vs any other forms of rock art. As far as I am aware, those images were considered frauds because of how unique they are compared to the majority of the rest of the artwork. And the problem is we don't have the full context on where they were found, what other art was in the area and whether those images still exist in their original context or not.
It seems those ladies belong to a certain style where the artist sometimes contrast the light skin of human figures with bright colored clothes. The Iheren paintings are of course just a part of all paintings which exist in Sahara and in Tassili. Most painted figures are dark.
A good example is this painting from the so called round head period which precedes the pastoralist period (whereof the Iheren style is a part).
About the Iheren style, here is a map of it´s distribution on the Tassili plateau (yellow dots).
If there are caves with hundreds or thousands of pieces of rock art in that style, then why do we always see the same one or two images over and over? Why isn't there a comprehensive collection of photographs of these caves in their entire context so you can see all the examples of these styles? Because when I look, I see other rock art from the same area and they look different. Which again goes back to my point of why these images are suspect....
For example, you can go to the following website where they document expeditions to Tassili N'ajjer and the rock art and out of all the images of rock art only a handful look like that.
The Iheren style is just a part of all rock art in the Tassili. It is from a limited time period. Exactly how many of its figures which are "white" ladies (or other light figures) I do not know. Maybe one could ask Jean-Loic Le Quellec or Augustin F. C. Holl, or anyone else who is doing research on Saharan rock art.
Or one could go through some database and try to count them.
Probably they are often highlighted because they are different, and probably also because they are "white". In our race-conscious world, even rock art can get a political meaning.
Here is a quote which describe a couple of styles during the Bovidian period, one white faced style and one black phased style
quote:We are faced with a restricted number of published reproductions that can be used, and while we must recognize that these constitute only a minute fraction of the paintings which exist in the Sahara, we can accept nonetheless that these are ones which are the most spectacular. The sample chosen here is that of the naturalistic rock paintings of Lhote's "bovidien” period from the Central Sahara (Tassili n'Ajjer, Acacus). A survey of the published rock art of this 'bovidian period' shows that there are at least two major painting styles, each with different content, although the viewer is left in no doubt that we are seeing pastoral societies, for the common subject is domestic cattle. Style 1 can be called the "white-face" style. Here the people are drawn with pale skins, long hair, beards on the men and long dresses on the women: K: 234, 418-21, 424 - 31 (Fig. 1). Face paint can be seen on some of the individuals, and some of the men are either tatooed or have body paint. These paintings are also the scenes with the circular huts shown from the outside. It is also in this style that small stock play a prominent role. All the animals are somewhat stylized, and coat markings, while varied, are generalized (K: 420 - 1, 424 - 5). Some of the cattle have a curious wavy-line coat colour. This pattem is repeated in a scene in which some important ceremony or event is recorded (K: 426 - 7 - Fig. 2) the symbolism of which is obscure, but may represent fire-workshippers' (Mones 1988: 229). The ceramics being used appear to be double pots, i.e. large ones with saw-tooth and impressed decoration whose rim is enclosed by a smaller, un- decorated pot upside down and acting as a lid. Leather bags are shown (K: 418 - 20) with looped decoration. Even the humans of this "white-face" style can be subdivided, possibly, into three separate but similar social groups on the basis of hair style and clothing. Also the artistic form shows the artists to be aesthetically concemed with a degree of symmetry which can be seen in the repeated motif of cattle homs (K:417) and animals lined up together (K: 418 - 19, 425 - 5). Even wild animals in one panel show an intermingling of giraffe necks which underline the grace- ful movement of these animals (K: 418 - 9). Another aspect of this genre is the tendency to allow the animals to focus an human activities (K: 424 - 5, 430 - 1), thus ordering the spatial layout of the scenes. The recognizable activities in this style are: a lion hunt (K: 430 - 1), move- ment of camps (K: 418 - 9, 428) and re-erection of huts (K: 418 - 9, 431), possible tribute to leaders or holy men (K: 424 - 5, 430) and ritual ceremonies (K: 430), as well as a broad range of pastoral activities, e.g. tying up the animals (K: 428 - 29) and watering of stock (K: 418).
The second style can be called "black-face" style which is somewhat different in form and content from the previous one. Here the cattle are still the dominant element, but the humans all have dark skin (K: 422 - 3, 427; La: 116 - 132). A range of hair style can be identified (K: 232), and white body paint is oc- casionally found. The scenes with huts, as noted above, are of plan form and a distinct type is repeated in a number of cases: an oval shape with a door which closes on the inside (La: 120 - 1, 123, 130 - 1; K: 299) and occasionally pots and other domestic accoutrements can be seen (K: 229; La: 123). In this style the cattle are often portrayed very realistically, with great attention paid to coat colours (La: 107, 119-21; K: 228). The detail of human faces, always in profile, show strong black African facial characteristics (La: 116, 126, 147-8, 170), but even here there are variations, not only in facial structure (e.g. La: 119) but in hair design or head covering (K: 232, La: 119, 125 - 7, 140, 142, 144 - 5, 149 - 50, etc.). In this "black-face" style we see even greater variability in the cultural details, suggesting many more social groups than in the "white-face" style. Social activities which can be recognized are: riding scenes (La: 160-1), domestic camp scenes (La: 120-1, 130-1; K: 427), scenes of general pastoral activity (La: 119; K: 229, 422 - 3; Hampate Ba and Dieterlen 1966: Plate VIII: D). Other activities are more obscure and are probably of a ritualistic nature, to be discussed below (e.g. K: 422-3; Hampate Ba and Dieterlen 1961: Plates A and B; Lhote 1966: Plates I and IV). The geographical overlap between these two major styles of 'bovidian' art indicate a broad usage of the Central Sahara by various herding groups during the period between 6,500 and 4,000 B.P. (Smith 1980).
Smith, Andrew B. 1993: "New approaches to Saharan rock art of the Bovidian Period" In: ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND HUMAN CULTURE IN THE NILE BASIN AND NORTHERN AFRICA UNTIL THE SECOND MILLENNIUM B.C. Poznari 1993
It is hard to link to the article since when i try to open the url it downloads a PDF so i give a screenshot of the url: Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
The author of the article speculates also about who the white-faced people could have been. One must remember though that the article is rather old and that new anthropological and archaeological knowledge has been obtained since then.
quote:If the 'black-face' people can be equated with black African herdsmen, like the Fulani, who were the 'white-face' people in the rock paintings? The skeletal data above suggest these may have been 'proto-mediterraneans' and one must look to the history and ethnography of North Africa to find analogues. Some of these paintings indicate that not only was the skin fair, but also, apparently, the hair (e.g. Kuper 1978: 440 - 2). In his study of the people of the Rif, Coon (1931: 22) refers to stories of the Mashausha as a tribe of westemers and 'blonds' (see also Bates 1914: 39 - 40). References to "long-haired-people" come from Flerodotus (Book IV). These "Libyan" people varied culturally, although all had domestic stock; some groups migrated seasonally from the coastal strip to the hinterland with their animals. They could be distinguished from each other, among other things, by the way they cut or fixed their hair. Libyan men wore a cloak of leather, often highly decorated. Tatooing of the skin was also practised by men (Bates 1914: frontispiece and Plate III), as seen in the Saharan paintings (K: 426, 430). There is a suggestion that this was only to be found among the noble castes or people with power. Not all the humans in the Saharan paintings have body markings and those which do seem to be playing a central role in the activities depicted (e.g. K: 426, 430). The dress of the Libyan women would be similar to that seen in the Tassili paintings from Iheren (K: 418-9, 424 - 5, 429, 430 - 1), Uan Derbaouen (K: 427) and Uan Amil in the Acacus (K: 234 - 5) described by Herodotus (IV: 189) as being of leather with leather thongs: "The Libyan women wear over their dress goat-skins stript of hair, fringed at their edges, and coloured with vermilion". Today the leather work of the Tuareg would not be out of place in such a description (Nicolaisen 1963).
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: We already see children's cartoon about Black Romans in Britain and in Swedish TV people of African descent play Western Hunter Gatherers
LOL I had totally buried my memory of that. That is why I stopped watching BBC produced material. That cartoon by the way is what compelled Metatron to make video responses on the black-painting of European history. In my opinion two wrongs don't make a right or rather you can't fight disinformation with more disinformation. Black-painting is just as bad as white-washing.
Anyway, the topic of the populations of the Central Sahara has been discussed numerous times before in these older threads:
^^ The eventual association between the Iheren, Mesak and Caballin styles of rock art with certain types of tombs is discussed in this article about the chronology of the art:
One can notice that that in modern archaeological literature there are few discussions about the eventual skin color of the people who made the Rock art. It seems to have been more common in older literature.
Detail from a panel decorated with paintings in the style of Iheren. Oued Imha in Akukas Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: I had totally buried my memory of that. That is why I stopped watching BBC produced material. That cartoon by the way is what compelled Metatron to make video responses on the black-painting of European history. In my opinion two wrongs don't make a right or rather you can't fight disinformation with more disinformation. Black-painting is just as bad as white-washing.
Indeed. Often it has more to do with the politics and conflicts of today than it has to do with the past. For example the comic book about Tassili will probably appeal to many North Africans who live in France, and maybe find it easier to identify with a lighter skinned protagonist than a dark skinned person who looks more Subsaharan.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: The Iheren style is just a part of all rock art in the Tassili. It is from a limited time period. Exactly how many of its figures which are "white" ladies (or other light figures) I do not know. Maybe one could ask Jean-Loic Le Quellec or Augustin F. C. Holl, or anyone else who is doing research on Saharan rock art.
Or one could go through some database and try to count them.
Probably they are often highlighted because they are different, and probably also because they are "white". In our race-conscious world, even rock art can get a political meaning.
Here is a quote which describe a couple of styles during the Bovidian period, one white faced style and one black phased style
quote:We are faced with a restricted number of published reproductions that can be used, and while we must recognize that these constitute only a minute fraction of the paintings which exist in the Sahara, we can accept nonetheless that these are ones which are the most spectacular. The sample chosen here is that of the naturalistic rock paintings of Lhote's "bovidien” period from the Central Sahara (Tassili n'Ajjer, Acacus). A survey of the published rock art of this 'bovidian period' shows that there are at least two major painting styles, each with different content, although the viewer is left in no doubt that we are seeing pastoral societies, for the common subject is domestic cattle. Style 1 can be called the "white-face" style. Here the people are drawn with pale skins, long hair, beards on the men and long dresses on the women: K: 234, 418-21, 424 - 31 (Fig. 1). Face paint can be seen on some of the individuals, and some of the men are either tatooed or have body paint. These paintings are also the scenes with the circular huts shown from the outside. It is also in this style that small stock play a prominent role. All the animals are somewhat stylized, and coat markings, while varied, are generalized (K: 420 - 1, 424 - 5). Some of the cattle have a curious wavy-line coat colour. This pattem is repeated in a scene in which some important ceremony or event is recorded (K: 426 - 7 - Fig. 2) the symbolism of which is obscure, but may represent fire-workshippers' (Mones 1988: 229). The ceramics being used appear to be double pots, i.e. large ones with saw-tooth and impressed decoration whose rim is enclosed by a smaller, un- decorated pot upside down and acting as a lid. Leather bags are shown (K: 418 - 20) with looped decoration. Even the humans of this "white-face" style can be subdivided, possibly, into three separate but similar social groups on the basis of hair style and clothing. Also the artistic form shows the artists to be aesthetically concemed with a degree of symmetry which can be seen in the repeated motif of cattle homs (K:417) and animals lined up together (K: 418 - 19, 425 - 5). Even wild animals in one panel show an intermingling of giraffe necks which underline the grace- ful movement of these animals (K: 418 - 9). Another aspect of this genre is the tendency to allow the animals to focus an human activities (K: 424 - 5, 430 - 1), thus ordering the spatial layout of the scenes. The recognizable activities in this style are: a lion hunt (K: 430 - 1), move- ment of camps (K: 418 - 9, 428) and re-erection of huts (K: 418 - 9, 431), possible tribute to leaders or holy men (K: 424 - 5, 430) and ritual ceremonies (K: 430), as well as a broad range of pastoral activities, e.g. tying up the animals (K: 428 - 29) and watering of stock (K: 418).
The second style can be called "black-face" style which is somewhat different in form and content from the previous one. Here the cattle are still the dominant element, but the humans all have dark skin (K: 422 - 3, 427; La: 116 - 132). A range of hair style can be identified (K: 232), and white body paint is oc- casionally found. The scenes with huts, as noted above, are of plan form and a distinct type is repeated in a number of cases: an oval shape with a door which closes on the inside (La: 120 - 1, 123, 130 - 1; K: 299) and occasionally pots and other domestic accoutrements can be seen (K: 229; La: 123). In this style the cattle are often portrayed very realistically, with great attention paid to coat colours (La: 107, 119-21; K: 228). The detail of human faces, always in profile, show strong black African facial characteristics (La: 116, 126, 147-8, 170), but even here there are variations, not only in facial structure (e.g. La: 119) but in hair design or head covering (K: 232, La: 119, 125 - 7, 140, 142, 144 - 5, 149 - 50, etc.). In this "black-face" style we see even greater variability in the cultural details, suggesting many more social groups than in the "white-face" style. Social activities which can be recognized are: riding scenes (La: 160-1), domestic camp scenes (La: 120-1, 130-1; K: 427), scenes of general pastoral activity (La: 119; K: 229, 422 - 3; Hampate Ba and Dieterlen 1966: Plate VIII: D). Other activities are more obscure and are probably of a ritualistic nature, to be discussed below (e.g. K: 422-3; Hampate Ba and Dieterlen 1961: Plates A and B; Lhote 1966: Plates I and IV). The geographical overlap between these two major styles of 'bovidian' art indicate a broad usage of the Central Sahara by various herding groups during the period between 6,500 and 4,000 B.P. (Smith 1980).
Smith, Andrew B. 1993: "New approaches to Saharan rock art of the Bovidian Period" In: ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND HUMAN CULTURE IN THE NILE BASIN AND NORTHERN AFRICA UNTIL THE SECOND MILLENNIUM B.C. Poznari 1993
It is hard to link to the article since when i try to open the url it downloads a PDF so i give a screenshot of the url:
Again the point was if a scholar is going make a hypothesis based on this particular style, then they should be the ones supporting it with those facts and hence why it is suspect. It shouldn't be on me or anyone else to take this basic step. And beyond that, the larger point is it is funny how given so many Europeans have been to these areas that a comprehensive photo journal hasn't been created. This is in the context of the larger discussion of why people would not believe in the authenticity of these particular images.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Seems that more than one scholar have written articles about them, and we have pictures of them, so it seems they actually exist. If they would have had a dark skin tone no one would suspect that they were fake, it is obviously the fact that some figures are depicted with lighter skin tone which trigger some people, who themselves have not seen these paintings, to claim they are fake. But as I mention, there can be several reasons why they are painted like that, maybe the painters were a bit lighter in the skin, or the color is just symbolic, or it is an artistic convention among certain people. To suspect that they are fake just because some of them are painted lighter is just like suspecting that some darker figures in ancient European art are fake just because they are painted dark. It would be weird if a part of a whole art style whereof scholars write papers and articles would be totally invented.
But of course I would also like to see a comprehensive photo journal or photo data base over them. Maybe there is, one just have to look for it or ask someone who knows.
There is actually a lot of archaeological material, all over the world that is not covered by any comprehensive photo journal, at least not one that is available online. Still researchers write articles about such materials all the time.
From Max Dashus Twitter:
quote:Ancient SE Algerian woman putting small child into a carrying sling, Ouan Azzawa rock shelter, near Libya. In these Iheren style paintings, women ride cattle, load them up with goods and baby slings, as they move from camp to camp on their migrations. Circa 3000-2000 bce
^Given the allegations of fraud w/ some of these paintings, I don't think it's entirely fair, to reduce reservations ppl are having, to being triggered.
I think it deserves repeating that the vast majority of paintings, have brown skin (so, it's really people who try to argue otherwise, who feel threatened by NA art, that they feel the need to make Iheren style out to be more than local, and more than a late phase).
There have been attempts before to nitpick individual artworks (e.g. Rahotep and Nofret) or skin pigmentation studies (late dynastic Abusir skin color predictions) to make ignorant arguments about North Africans, so we're well aware of the games ppl are playing by posting out of context to misrepresent ancient Berbers and Egyptians.
And so, I assure you, that no one here who has a basic grasp of the information, is triggered.
I'm trying to think of a way to reconcile ALL the facts, including the Iheren style art. The people who come here to post that art, on the other hand, are literally never interested in reconciling all the evidence. We've seen that, when that other guy tried to confine Berber identity to the Iron Age, even after I told him Berber words have been recorded in Middle Kingdom Egyptian records.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Well, sometimes artworks can be used as some kind of ammunition in an ongoing debate about skin color, race, ethnicity and so on. And there is a tendency to declare works of art with deviating color as forgeries. Sometimes it seems a bit conspiratorial.
Who says it can not occur forgeries among depictions of figures with darker skin? But they would probably be harder to spot.
And about triggered, sometimes some people also here on ES get very triggered by certain posts about ancient artworks or literary quotes, maybe not you but I have seen other examples in other threads.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
Just a matter of time before this site starts malfunctioning again. But, I'm paying attention from the sidelines to new info regarding this art. I would like to know what archaeological culture this art is associated with. This will give a clue about the size of this population, and if they left a genetic impact. Could very well be, they didn't leave much influence, much like Phoenicians in the Maghreb, or that Levant Chl sample in the Levant w/ lighter eyes. Just one more reason to feel like the onus is on the people posting this art, to make their case presentable. What they like to do is play psychological games, where they put a suggestion in your mind, and you start filling in the blanks in THEIR case, and start assuming this style necessarily has to be more than other transitory art styles and populations that came and went.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
There at least seem to have been some attempts to connect the Iheren style to certain types of tombs in the same area.
The eventual association between the Iheren, Mesak and Caballin styles of rock art with certain types of tombs is discussed in this article about the chronology of the art:
quote:Ancient SE Algerian woman putting small child into a carrying sling, Ouan Azzawa rock shelter, near Libya. In these Iheren style paintings, women ride cattle, load them up with goods and baby slings, as they move from camp to camp on their migrations. Circa 3000-2000 bce
Again, note the Fulani/West African hairstyles. This differs from the long wavy hair or long braids of typical 'Hamitic' Berbers let alone the lank hair of white and light-skinned Libyans as portrayed by both Egyptians and Romans. Although the child looks odd not just with the supposedly blonde hair but the orange body and markings. Again, we don't know that these features represent.
Interesting that the same hairstyles may have lived on for about 5000 years
Some paintings also show some different male hairstyles
Iheren
Uan Derbuaen
Iheren
Seems some authors especially in older articles have tried to connect these people with Berbers and Libyans (partly due to clothes and tatoos). Here is one example from 2001 where the author want to connect them to "Paleoberbers":
quote:Like most rock art from the final Bovidian period, Iheren's paintings provide valuable documentation of the material culture of these pastoralists. These are exclusively of Mediterranean type and correspond to the penetration of the Paleoberbers into the central Sahara. The facial features are fine and the white skin lends itself to the multiplication of body paints. These mainly affect the limbs and, in men, the face. The most common pattern is a vertical, black stripe that occupies the forehead and continues down the bridge of the nose. In certain subjects, the entire body is streaked with stripes which are identical on certain oxen. The bodies are slender and not very muscular, but the weapons are more numerous and more effective than in previous cultures. The bow is abandoned in favor of the javelin.
The clothes are numerous and represented with precision. The women are dressed in dresses made from fabrics decorated with chevrons, they wear harem pants underneath. Goatskin farcloths are worn by both sexes.
Men and adolescents respond to a very clearly expressed concern: wearing a beard is general. It is a short triangular beard which will remain identical among the Berbers until today. The women wear fur hats with feathers stitched into them.
Aside from a lion hunt, the numerous scenes depicted in Iheren give a peaceful image of the life of these populations.
Yes I have noticed that they often debate the same topics on Quora as here on ES.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
Aside from interpretations of certain crude artwork we also have direct historical evidence.
As Keita pointed out in his 1990 paper 'Studies of Ancient Crania from Northern Africa'.. The later movement of foreign peoples into northern Africa is well known and may explain most of the current variability. However, the work of classical European writers suggest a longstanding variability in Maghreban populations. Bates (1914) presents the ethnology of the ancient Maghreb as seen by classical European writers. The detail is such that there is little cause to doubt that these writers were familiar with the region. Snowden (1970) and Desanges (1981) reference various writers’ physical descriptions of the ancient Maghreb’s inhabitants. In addition to the presence of fair-skinned blonds, various “Ethiopian” or “part-Ethiopian” groups are described, near the coast and on the southern slopes of the Atlas mountains. “Ethiopians,” meaning dark-skinned peoples usually having “ulotrichous” (wooly) hair, are noted in various Greek accounts and European coinage (Snowden, 1970). Hiernaux (1975) interprets the finding of “Sub-Saharan” population affinities in living Maghrebans as being solely the result of the Medieval trans-Saharan slave trade; it is clear that this is not the case. Furthermore, the blacks of the ancient Maghreb were apparently not foreign or a caste.
And I already explained here that 'wooly' hair as described by the Greeks does not mean 'kinky' but rather very curly.
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
Yes, art can be hard to interpret if one does not have any real keys to its symbolism, artistic conventions or cultural codes.
Human remains, preferably with well preserved DNA is to prefer.
Some times those who look at artwork try to connect certain objects (like pottery or weapons) seen in paintings with archaeological findings. One can also look at those objects which are found in the same places as the paintings, or as some have done, try to connect certain styles of tombs to different art styles.
Would be nice if one could find eDNA in association with the paintings, but the circumstances for preservation are not optimal (not like chilly caves in temperate climates).
Posted by Archeopteryx (Member # 23193) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Ironically most of these remains were described as "negroid" while a few exhibit "Mediterranean" as in "Hamitic" types similar to dark skinned Saharan Berbers or Egyptians. From what I understand DNA sequencing of these remains is in the works but one female mummy has yielded upstream mtDNA N. That said, I doubt any of these remains will show they are light or fair-skinned
Is it the remains from Takarkori Rockshelter in Libya?
quote:Two individuals from this period had preserved tissue through mummification, which allowed archaeologists to analyze the first ancient DNA from the Sahara. Work on Saharan ancient DNA had been previously unsuccessful due to the lack of preservation. The results from the ancient DNA samples show that the two women have identical haplotypes from basal haplogroup N. This haplogroup was previously unseen in Saharan Africa. Researchers postulate that this genetic lineage could have come from the Near East, possibly along with pastoral herders and herding practices tens of thousands of years ago. The individuals at Takarkori were also analyzed using an isotopic analysis. Data obtained supports the idea that the people buried within the rockshelter are from the same geographic area
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: Is it the remains from Takarkori Rockshelter in Libya?
Correct.
I made a thread about a paper describing it and two other rock shelters here.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Site 2 is Amekni in the southwest of the Ahaggar mountain-range in southern Algeria. The site dates to the end of the Early Holocene, from the 7th to the 6th millennium BC by foragers whose pottery similar to wavy-line ware of Early Khartoum. The burial known as that of the 'grandmother and her shrouded grand children' consisting of a woman was 40- 50 years old and the children, 2-3 years old for the younger and 5-6 years old for the older. The children appear to have been wrapped in animal skins and buried in a crouched position. The 40–50-yearold woman is an unlikely mother for both children; more probably, she could have been a grandmother, real or classificatory.
The 3rd site of Tin Hanakaten is located in southeastern Algeria in the Tassili N' Ajjer area near the Libyan border.
The burial site is that of the 'shrouded child' of unspecified age whose burial dates to 6,000 B.P. and is devoid of any grave goods. the body of the deceased was tightly crouched, wrapped in animal skin, laid in a circular pit filled with grass and straw, and closed with a stone slab smeared with red ochre. The mode and style of burial matches that of the contemporaneous Uan Muhuggiag mummified child in the Acacus area right across the border in Libya. The Shrouded Child of Tin Hanakaten had cranial deformations due to disease or artificial cranial deformation that bears a resemblance with ones performed among Neolithic-era Nigerians. Like Uan Muhuggiag the Tin Hanakaten child is also labeled as 'black' or 'negroid' due to craniofacial features of his skull.
While no DNA has yet been extracted from Tin Hanakaten or Uan Muhuggiag, recall that in 2019, DNA from two individuals (7,000 BP) of the Takarkori rock shelter in the Acacus area of Libya was tested and showed they shared a basal form of mitochondrial hg N. So perhaps there is a relation there with Uan Muhuggiag and Tin Hanakaten.
quote:
quote:Two individuals from this period had preserved tissue through mummification, which allowed archaeologists to analyze the first ancient DNA from the Sahara. Work on Saharan ancient DNA had been previously unsuccessful due to the lack of preservation. The results from the ancient DNA samples show that the two women have identical haplotypes from basal haplogroup N. This haplogroup was previously unseen in Saharan Africa. Researchers postulate that this genetic lineage could have come from the Near East, possibly along with pastoral herders and herding practices tens of thousands of years ago. The individuals at Takarkori were also analyzed using an isotopic analysis. Data obtained supports the idea that the people buried within the rockshelter are from the same geographic area
The genetic findings of Takarkori was discussed here. The form of haplogroup N found in the remains is an upstream or basal form that was first discovered there. That type has yet to be found in the Near East which is why there is still debate as to its origins but here are two big scenarios below.
fig 4. Published: 05 March 2019 Ancestral mitochondrial N lineage from the Neolithic ‘green’ Sahara Stefania Vai Map of Africa with the alternative models discussed. Haplogroups are indicated in black circles in their probable area of origin. Continuous arrows indicate spread by migration, while dashed arrows indicate molecular differentiation from one haplogroup to another. Dates of origin of haplogroups are indicated in squares. Dates along arrows indicate possible migration time. (a) Haplogroup N differentiates from L3 in the African continent, with a subsequent spread out of Africa. (b) Haplogroups M and N diverged from L3 outside Africa or during the expansion of AMH out of the continent; later migrations during Early Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic diffusion led some lineages back to North Africa.
^^ Very nice maps. Now it would be nice to have a GIS map also with human remains which have not yielded any DNA. As in the DNA GIS map above (the one with Takarkori) one could be able to click on a dot and get information and reference to the original study.
See this thread about the DNA GIS map:
Handy DNA map Posted by BrandonP (Member # 3735) on :
To circle back to the topic of WHG pigmentation, here is some rock art from Spain dating to Mesolithic times.
The color palette is probably too limited to be very informative, but it does use black and brown tones for the people.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Yes, I've seen those prehistoric Spanish rock paintings before. Note that the dark coloring is uniform for their bodies, hair, and clothing. This is why I am hesitant to assume those colors represent their actual skin color anymore than the unpainted silhouettes in the Sahara represent light or fair skin.
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: ^^ Very nice maps. Now it would be nice to have a GIS map also with human remains which have not yielded any DNA. As in the DNA GIS map above (the one with Takarkori) one could be able to click on a dot and get information and reference to the original study.
Yes, I recently came upon those maps on google search from a recent paper. It seems like I've forever been looking for a map showing all the sites at once since they all are within the same vicinity. In fact, I didn't even realize that the Garamante capital of Germa was that close to the Central Saharan sites.
Posted by Swenet (Member # 17303) on :
Compare the dates of R-V88 reaching the Sahel (see quote below) w/ the alleged date of the Iheren style paintings. If this link I'm making between the two dates is correct, these lighter skinned people are not farmers (farmers are mainly Y-DNA G) , but related to Indo-Europeans (Y-DNA R), explaining possibly their pale skin, which I think that level of depigmentation would be too early for >5ky farmers.
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: "The genotyping of R-V88 internal markers disclosed the phylogenetic relationships of two rare European sub-clades (R-M18 and R-V35) with respect to African-specific clades (Additional file 2: Figure S6). The presence of two nested R-V88 basal European clades can be related to the high frequencies of R-V88 internal lineages in the central Sahel assuming a movement from Europe toward the central Sahel across northern Africa. In turn, considering the trans-Saharan distribution and the “star-like” topology of the sub-clade R-V1589 (branch 233), it is likely that this lineage rapidly expanded in the lake Chad area between 5.73 and 5.25 kya and moved backward to northeastern Africa across the Saharan region (Fig. (Fig.3b;3b; Additional file 2: Figure S6). The large majority of R-V1589 internal lineages harbours both northern and central Sahelian subjects, with the exception of R-V4759 and R-V5781, which are mainly restricted to northern Africa and central Sahel, respectively (Additional file 1: Table S5). The presence of a precisely dated and geographically restricted clade (R-V4759 in northern Africa; Additional file 1: Table S5 and Additional file 2: Figure S6) allowed us to define its [b]coalescence age (4.69 kya) as the lower limit for the backward R-V88 trans-Saharan movement."
Given the attempts in some quarters to relate these lighter skinned people to Berbers, it's kind of ironic that the solution appears to be coming from this R-V88 migration, with Chadic speakers being the Africans who apparently assimilated them (not Berbers). Always thought a Berber identity for the painted figures was suspect, because the depigmentation process of Egypt and Europe was a gradual process. So why would it be any different for the Berber speakers?