Sci Rep. 2024; 14: 9979. Published online 2024 May 1. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-60568-8 PMCID: PMC11063056 PMID: 38693301
Understanding the genomic heterogeneity of North African Imazighen: from broad to microgeographical perspectives
Abstract The strategic location of North Africa has led to cultural and demographic shifts, shaping its genetic structure. Historical migrations brought different genetic components that are evident in present-day North African genomes, along with autochthonous components. The Imazighen (plural of Amazigh) are believed to be the descendants of autochthonous North Africans and speak various Amazigh languages, which belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family. However, the arrival of different human groups, especially during the Arab conquest, caused cultural and linguistic changes in local populations, increasing their heterogeneity. We aim to characterize the genetic structure of the region, using the largest Amazigh dataset to date and other reference samples. Our findings indicate microgeographical genetic heterogeneity among Amazigh populations, modeled by various admixture waves and different effective population sizes. A first admixture wave is detected group-wide around the twelfth century, whereas a second wave appears in some Amazigh groups around the nineteenth century. These events involved populations with higher genetic ancestry from south of the Sahara compared to the current North Africans. A plausible explanation would be the historical trans-Saharan slave trade, which lasted from the Roman times to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, our investigation shows that assortative mating in North Africa has been rare.
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Previous genetic studies using from classical markers to genome-wide data1–4,6–8,21–26 demonstrated that North Africa diverges from the rest of the African continent, and more closely resembles out-of-Africa (OOA) populations. Most inhabitants of North Africa carry a mix of four genetic ancestral components, including autochthonous components such as the Maghrebi component1. Initial studies suggested that the Maghrebi component could have been introduced in a back-to-Africa movement, more than 12,000 years ago, although an in situ origin cannot be discarded1,27–30. The comparison of contemporary genomes and ancient modern human samples from the region supported the presence of the local ancestral component, present in the Epipalaeolithic samples from Taforalt7. However, the impact of the Neolithic in North Africa reduced the proportion of this autochthonous component, although it did not erase it2,8. Genetic studies have also demonstrated the genetic impact of the Arabic expansion and the trans-Saharan slave trade in current North Africans2,3,31, as well as the genetic heterogeneity of North Africa, with different degrees of correlation between cultural background, geographic location, and genetics3,5,
the lower number of genetic studies performed in North Africa compared to other continental territories plus the bias on the sampling in this vast geographic area might have prevented a clear genetic inference of its population history. The limited number of samples analyzed, in addition to the geographically and culturally distant populations under study might have biased some of the conclusions on its past demography. Most of these studies1–3,6 have included a single sample population as a representative of a large geographical area (i.e. current political countries) or cultural characteristic (i.e. language spoken), which might have influenced the geographical, cultural, and genetic heterogeneity described in North African populations. In this sense, there are very few examples in North Africa where genetic diversity has been approached with a microgeographical perspective, including different samples from a reduced geographical area and with a variety of cultures and lifestyles9,32–34. In order to overcome some of these limitations and to assess the genetic heterogeneity in the region and especially within the Imazighen, we have analyzed genome-wide data from three Amazigh Chaouïa (also spelled Shawiya)-speaking groups from the Aurès region in northeastern Algeria located in a reduced geographic area (~ 2500 km2) and present this microgeographical approach in the broad context of genetic diversity in North Africa.Posts: 43371 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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posted
Interestingly as Swenet and others have explained before, the majority of modern Imazighen genetic diversity dates back only as far as the Iron Age with only some dating back earlier-- the Neolithic and a tiny fraction to the Paleolithic. Ironically even the Berber languages themselves are said to date back only to the Iron Age. So what we have in the Maghreb is the result of a recent bottleneck of what was likely greater genetic diversity in the region.
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posted
I may have posted it before, but I have a hypothesis that a lot of the olive-skinned Maghrebis you see today descend from the inhabitants of the Roman Empire’s North African holdings. As DJ pointed out, a lot of their ancestry does trace back to a bottleneck associated with Rome’s genocidal destruction of Carthage. North Africa becoming a Roman imperial breadbasket would have ballooned the previously decimated population, and the introduction of the camel and the Trans-Saharan trade could have spread some of these people further south after the Western Roman Empire fell.
We know Romans described the Mauri peoples outside their borders as darker-skinned, and the Byzantine historian Procopius mentioned both darker- and lighter-skinned people inhabiting North Africa during his time. A lot of that diversity has probably gotten smeared over in the last two millennia.
By the New Kingdom there were white Libyans with blonde and red hair which was confirmed by Greek colonizers. But again, I do find it interesting that modern day Berber is dated to only the Iron Age and that it was believed to have derived from an older hypothetical 'Libyco-Berber' subfamily. So there was something going on in the Maghreb.
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By the New Kingdom there were white Libyans with blonde and red hair which was confirmed by Greek colonizers. But again, I do find it interesting that modern day Berber is dated to only the Iron Age and that it was believed to have derived from an older hypothetical 'Libyco-Berber' subfamily. So there was something going on in the Maghreb.
To clarify, my argument is not that lighter-skinned people first appeared in North Africa during Roman times. It's more that a lot of North Africans living today descend from people living in the Roman-controlled areas after Carthage's destruction (i.e. the bottleneck). If modern Berber languages have a common origin around the same time, it would further support the hypothesis linking modern Amazigh to the people who survived the Punic Wars and become Roman subjects.
posted
the OP article says nothing about skin color. we dont need to go there, it's a superficial trait, this is a genetic analysis instantly interpreting everything by skin color is old school race paradigm, it's unnecessary in many cases
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posted
^ My point wasn't about skin color but the fact that there were already heterogeneous populations in the region before Roman times as well as during, but Brandon brings a good point about Carthage during Roman times. It's not improbable for the Carthaginians to become Berberized.
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posted
From Byrsa, located at Carthage came the Byrsa boy from the 500s BC, who showed some European relatedness
quote:Abstract While Phoenician culture and trade networks had a significant impact on Western civilizations, we know little about the Phoenicians themselves. In 1994, a Punic burial crypt was discovered on Byrsa Hill, near the entry to the National Museum of Carthage in Tunisia. Inside this crypt were the remains of a young man along with a range of burial goods, all dating to the late 6th century BCE. Here we describe the complete mitochondrial genome recovered from the Young Man of Byrsa and identify that he carried a rare European haplogroup, likely linking his maternal ancestry to Phoenician influenced locations somewhere on the North Mediterranean coast, the islands of the Mediterranean or the Iberian Peninsula. This result not only provides the first direct ancient DNA evidence of a Phoenician individual but the earliest evidence of a European mitochondrial haplogroup, U5b2c1, in North Africa.
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^ Yes, that should come as no surprise since European influence in that region both genetic and cultural has been going on since at least the Neolithic if not earlier.
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)Posts: 26834 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
This paper is all over the place and repeating the same half truths and misinformation as the other papers it is criticizing.
For example:
quote: Over the course of history, North Africa has experienced a series of influential cultural and demographic events due to its strategic position located at the crossroads of three continental regions (Europe, Middle East, and the rest of the African continent), resulting in a complex and varied genetic structure in current populations. These migrations introduced genetic components from the neighboring regions, which are now detected in the genomes of present-day North Africans
North Africa has been populated by humans since before humans existed anywhere else on the planet. Yet somehow like all other papers on "Berbers" they try and make a connection between a set of languages and cultures that are only about 5 - 8 thousand years old and hundreds of thousands of years of history before that, which makes no sense. Like most papers on "Berber DNA" they always do this arm waving of trying to make Berber language and culture some ancient fixed entity when it isn't. Because to actually distinguish the origin of "Berber" language and culture they would have to use a multidisciplinary approach and not simply focus on DNA because you cannot identify a language and culture solely based on DNA. Yet with Berber language and culture they always play this game of pretending it is some fixed ancient marker of "North African" identify, when in fact they never even defined what "North Africa" is and how that applies over tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of history.
quote: Ancient artifacts provide evidence of early hominin presence in North Africa dating back to ~ 2.4 Mya10, while the earliest human bones to be directly dated appeared 300 Kya11. Although numerous fossils have been discovered in North Africa, Taforalt in Morocco (15,100–13,900 cal bp) is the oldest site for which genetic data is available, with human remains from the Iberomaurusian period in the Epipalaeolithic7. Additional Early, Middle and Late Neolithic genomes have also been retrieved from different sites in Morocco6,8
And as expected, they jump to Taforalt as if Berber languages and culture originated there or was some center point of Berber language and culture. The point being that in ancient times, the evidence is clear that the languages we now call Berber originated among a widely diverse and scattered population ranging far and wide across Northern Africa from Southern Egypt and Lower Sudan to the Senegal River and Central and Southern Sahara. Yet they continue to try and imply that regions close to the coast are somehow the basis of all ancient Berber culture and language when it absolutely is not. And on top of that use modern populations as the DNA pool without any attempt to include any ancient DNA from any other parts of the region outside the coastal areas..... Even though we know many sites relevant to the history of Berber languages and culture are in the South of Algeria, Libya and elsewhere which the always leave out on purpose.
quote: Since modern Berber languages are relatively homogeneous, the date of the Proto-Berber language from which the modern group is derived was probably comparatively recent, comparable to the age of the Germanic or Romance subfamilies of the Indo-European family. In contrast, the split of the group from the other Afroasiatic sub-phyla is much earlier, and is therefore sometimes associated with the local Mesolithic Capsian culture.[46] A number of extinct populations are believed to have spoken Afroasiatic languages of the Berber branch. According to Peter Behrens and Marianne Bechaus-Gerst, linguistic evidence suggests that the peoples of the C-Group culture in present-day southern Egypt and northern Sudan spoke Berber languages.[47][48] The Nilo-Saharan Nobiin language today contains a number of key loanwords related to pastoralism that are of Berber origin, including the terms for sheep and water/Nile. This in turn suggests that the C-Group population—which, along with the Kerma culture, inhabited the Nile valley immediately before the arrival of the first Nubian speakers—spoke Afroasiatic languages.
quote: The process of Neolithization in North Africa was introduced by more than one migration wave. In the Early Neolithic, a first migration of European Neolithic farmers introduced farming and cultural knowledge6,8,12–14. Genetic analyses, however, revealed that gene flow was unidirectional from autochthonous populations to newcomers8. Unlike this first migration, during the Middle Neolithic people migrated from the Levant8,15,16 admixed with local populations from North Africa, and introduced a new ancestry, resulting in a heterogeneous landscape by the Late Neolithic. Nevertheless, low levels of genetic diversity and small effective population sizes, likely induced by periods of isolation, may have led to the Maghrebi genetic component that is present today8.
And here again they are making a deceptive statement about the Neolithic because the Neolithic in Africa has far earlier origins not associated simply with migrations from Europe or the Levant. And many of the early sites of neolithic are associated with the central and Southern Sahara, which are again conveniently excluded to again paint this false narrative of coastal regions being the exclusive homeland and ancient center points of Berber history, all of which is false.
quote: The Imazighen (singular Amazigh, also known by the misnomer of Berbers17,18), are likely to be the descendants of the autochthonous inhabitants of North Africa, who inhabited the region prior to the demographic movements beginning in the Iron Age ~ 3000 years ago18,19. At that time, languages of Afro-Asiatic language family may have already been spoken in the region, with little influence from non-African immigrants19. However, significant changes occurred as diverse human groups gradually arrived in the region. The series of historical arrivals began with the influx of Mediterranean-based populations, such as the Phoenicians (~ 900 BCE), Ionians (~ 700 BCE) and Romans (146 BCE)19. However, the Arab conquest, beginning in the seventh century, had a profound and lasting cultural impact by introducing the Arabic language and Islam, which plays an important role in the cultural landscape of the region19. Despite the fact that Arabization implied a cultural and linguistic assimilation of many autochthonous populations19, a wide variety of Amazigh languages that characterize the different groups are still preserved in the region20. Besides Arabization, later population contacts such as the Ottoman and European colonial powers also had an influence in the region
And here we see the crux of the issue, where they admit that the origin of Berber languages lay in the evolution and spread of Afroasiatic languages from other parts of Africa, yet they only mention that in passing and otherwise make no effort to describe any historical model of how this language and culture spread into Algeria and coastal North Africa and from where. If they were serious about an actual history of Berber language and culture and all the various DNA lineages that were involved over time, they would do that, but they don't. Instead, they then jump to later times when other groups from Eurasia enter the picture almost as if Eurasian immigrants into North Africa as if they are more interested in when Eurasian mixture took place among Berber populations than when or where did Berber languages and culture originate and how the DNA lineages evolved over time...... Because if Berber language and culture predates those Eurasian immmigrations and wasn't isolated in areas along the coast, then obviously other lineages were involved than simply "Eurasian" ones.
Either way, the pattern here is the continued effort to graft Berber language and culture from only 8 - 10 thousand years ago into some ancient identifying marker for all of North African history which it cannot be because it is too young. Not to mention coincides with the rise of all kinds of migrations into parts of North Africa which again came long after the exit of modern humans from Africa and long after early human settlements in North Africa. All of which is to say use this concept of the population bottleneck in part of North Africa to try and isolate Berber culture and isolate it from the rest of Africa, when in fact it originates in Africa.
quote: Berbers are divided into several diverse ethnic groups and Berber languages, such as Kabyles, Chaouis and Rifians. Historically, Berbers across the region did not see themselves as a single cultural or linguistic unit, nor was there a greater "Berber community", due to their differing cultures.[42] They also did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to their own groups and communities.[43] They started being referred to collectively as Berbers after the Arab conquests of the 7th century and this distinction was revived by French colonial administrators in the 19th century. Today, the term "Berber" is viewed as pejorative by many who prefer the term "Amazigh".[44] Since the late 20th century, a trans-national movement – known as Berberism or the Berber Culture Movement – has emerged among various parts of the Berber populations of North Africa to promote a collective Amazigh ethnic identity and to militate for greater linguistic rights and cultural recognition.
That said, I do agree that generally populations North of the Sahara and nearer the coasts of North Africa were part of a population bottleneck likely due to environmental and other factors. And this bottleneck is identifiable from various lines of genetic analysis. However that bottleneck only applies to some historic or ancient populations associated with Berber language and culture. But as it stands many of the modern living Berber speakers happen to also be associated with that bottleneck. And it makes sense given the history of those regions in North Africa. I am just saying that the history of Berber languages goes way beyond that one region of North Africa and those bottlenecks.
Found this interesting passage in the unesco series on the history of Africa:
quote: The humid period of the Neolithic age came to an end towards the middle of the third millennium, as attested by the dating of guano from the Taessa (Atakor in the Hoggar).15 Arkell's work on the fossil fauna and flora on Mesolithic and Neolithic sites in the Khartoum region gives some support to this finding as regards the valley of the upper Nile. From this time on North Africa, almost totally cut off from the whole continent by desert, found itself virtually an island, only able to communicate easily with the rest of Africa through the narrow corridor of Tripolitania. This drastic reduction of the former unity of Africa was, however, compensated for by new relationships established precisely at that time on the two wings of the Maghreb, on the one hand with the south of the Iberian peninsula, and on the other with Sicily, Sardinia, Malta and southern Italy.
As early as the close of the third millennium before our era the painted potsherds of Gar Cahal, in the Ceuta area, bear a resemblance to the Chalcolithic ceramics of Los Millares. We must therefore assume sea-route contacts17 which may perhaps take us back to the fourth millennium. From 2000, ivory and ostrich eggs were imported into Spain, while bell-shaped vessels of Iberian origin make their appearance in the Ceuta and Tetuan areas. Towards 1500, copper and bronze arrow-heads are to be found in the west of Africa Minor, no doubt first imported by Iberian hunters; but they do not appear to have spread westward beyond the region of Algiers. Because of the lack of tin, the use of bronze is hardly noticeable in North Africa. At the other end of Africa Minor, from Korba to Bizerta, the presence of flakes of obsidian originating from the Lipari islands and worked in Sicily and Pantellaria provides evidence of the beginnings of navigation in the Messina Straits. G. Camps18 has drawn attention to the numerous borrowings made from then onwards by eastern Africa Minor from European neighbours: rectangular tombs with short access passages and right-angled bays, cut into the cliffs and known as 'Haounet', existed in Sicily as early as 1300; the Algerian and Tunisian dolmens are of a type similar to those widely found in Sardinia and Italy; the Castellucio ceramics which were common throughout Sicily towards 1500, with geometrical designs painted in brown or black on a paler background, are the forerunners of Kabyle pottery; and so forth. More distant influences, from Cyprus or Asia Minor, came through Malta, Pantellaria and Sicily as soon as Aegean, and then Phoenician, sailors began to reach those islands. By such means did this land of North Africa, long before the foundation of Carthage, assume its place in the Mediterranean complex as a gigantic peninsula, receiving nevertheless through the Tripolitanian corridor other cultural contributions such as those funerary monuments with recesses and chapels which were common on the southern slopes of the Atlas range in remote antiquity and in which the incubation ritual may have been practised. The tomb of Tin Hinan is a variant of this type of monument.
posted
It seems likely to me that the earliest Libyco-Berber speakers were people of Northeast African origin (like their Proto-Afroasiatic ancestors) who arrived in the region north of the Atlas Mountains from the Sahara. We could identify them with the Neolithic Capsian culture, or people who left behind rock art like this in Tunisia during that period:
As to what language(s) the migrants from Europe intially spoke, I don't think we know yet. Maybe something related to ancient Iberian, Tartessian, or Basque (all non-Indo-European languages native to the Iberian peninsula). I wonder if modern Berber languages preserve any kind of non-Afroasiatic substratum of European origin?
posted
^ Interestingly, white Berbers do carry a high frequency of Rh negative type O blood similar to Basques across the Mediterranean and this was later confirmed by genetic markers like mtDNA H and U.
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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 they have been inhabiting for dozens or even hundreds of generations.
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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 they have been inhabiting for dozens or even hundreds of generations.
The problem here is that Berber language is of African origin only and therefore not a result of migration or mixture. In fact the origin lay in the North East Africa along the Upper Nile between Egypt and Sudan. It is amazing how much people keep trying to turn "berber" into a "race" when t is an African language and culture and not a race. And where is this dude getting his DNA data from? There were no "bebers" 10,000 years ago and certainly the wet Sahara was not a melting pot of races either. This is the problem with trying to use the term "berber" as a proxy for evidence of Eurasian mixture in North Africa. It ignores the fact that the history of "Berber" is a history of a language and culture and not a DNA history, except when that ancient DNA can be associated with the origin and spread of the language. But typically they just imply that 'berber' language is simply associated with Eurasian DNA in North Africa and then try and extend the history of "berber' long before when it first came into being and exclude the fact of its African origins completely from the discussion.
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quote: A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for Y-Chromosomal DNA Variation in North Africa Barbara Arredi 2004
just two haplogroups predominate within North Africa, together making up almost two-thirds of the male lineages: E3b2 and J* (42% and 20%, respectively)
posted
^ Correct. It's annoying when scientists keep changing the nomenclature.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: The problem here is that Berber language is of African origin only and therefore not a result of migration or mixture. In fact the origin lay in the North East Africa along the Upper Nile between Egypt and Sudan. It is amazing how much people keep trying to turn "berber" into a "race" when t is an African language and culture and not a race. And where is this dude getting his DNA data from? There were no "bebers" 10,000 years ago and certainly the wet Sahara was not a melting pot of races either. This is the problem with trying to use the term "berber" as a proxy for evidence of Eurasian mixture in North Africa. It ignores the fact that the history of "Berber" is a history of a language and culture and not a DNA history, except when that ancient DNA can be associated with the origin and spread of the language. But typically they just imply that 'berber' language is simply associated with Eurasian DNA in North Africa and then try and extend the history of "berber' long before when it first came into being and exclude the fact of its African origins completely from the discussion.
Doug, you should know by now that language and/or culture is different from population. We are all writing and speaking English that does not mean we have English ethnic ancestry. Similarly, as Coelho pointe out 'Berbers' are themselves a diverse group. The ones that display the most Eurasian admixture are those in living in the coasts especially north of the Atlas. At the same time across the Straits in Spain and Portugal are European (white) people who speak Ibero-Romance languages-- Spanish and Portuguese yet they also carry African ancestry.
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Correct. It's annoying when scientists keep changing the nomenclature.
quote:Originally posted by Doug M: The problem here is that Berber language is of African origin only and therefore not a result of migration or mixture. In fact the origin lay in the North East Africa along the Upper Nile between Egypt and Sudan. It is amazing how much people keep trying to turn "berber" into a "race" when t is an African language and culture and not a race. And where is this dude getting his DNA data from? There were no "bebers" 10,000 years ago and certainly the wet Sahara was not a melting pot of races either. This is the problem with trying to use the term "berber" as a proxy for evidence of Eurasian mixture in North Africa. It ignores the fact that the history of "Berber" is a history of a language and culture and not a DNA history, except when that ancient DNA can be associated with the origin and spread of the language. But typically they just imply that 'berber' language is simply associated with Eurasian DNA in North Africa and then try and extend the history of "berber' long before when it first came into being and exclude the fact of its African origins completely from the discussion.
Doug, you should know by now that language and/or culture is different from population. We are all writing and speaking English that does not mean we have English ethnic ancestry. Similarly, as Coelho pointe out 'Berbers' are themselves a diverse group. The ones that display the most Eurasian admixture are those in living in the coasts especially north of the Atlas. At the same time across the Straits in Spain and Portugal are European (white) people who speak Ibero-Romance languages-- Spanish and Portuguese yet they also carry African ancestry.
Of course I know that and why are you acting like you don't know that I do know that? Are you acting like you are the only one that knows anything again? The point is even though we speak ENglish, nobody is calling us "the English". The the point being that "Berber" is a language, not a DNA lineage but they are still trying to associated Berber language and culture with a genetic lineage and then using that to claim "Berber" is Eurasian. "Berber" is not Eurasian and most ancient North Africans > 5KYA did not originate in Eurasia. So it is obvious that they are doing everything they can to associate the history of Berber language and culture exclusively with populations close to the coast so they can claim it comes from Eurasia. And if Berber languages originate in Africa, then the genetic lineages associated with its origin and spread did not come from Eurasia. Most papers on this don't make any distinction and simply lump everything together as "Berber". And nobody is calling the French Africans.
Recall:
quote: DNA in hand, Van de Loosdrecht and Choongwon Jeong, also of SHH, were able to analyze genetic material from the cell's nucleus in five people and the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA from seven people. But they found no genetic tie to ancient Europeans. Instead, the ancient Iberomaurusians appear to be related to Middle Easterners and other Africans: They shared about two-thirds of their genetic ancestry with Natufians, hunter-gatherers who lived in the Middle East 14,500 to 11,000 years ago, and one-third with sub-Saharan Africans who were most closely related to today's West Africans and the Hadza of Tanzania.
The Iberomaurusians lived before the Natufians, but they were not their direct ancestors: The Natufians lack DNA from Africa, Krause says. This suggests that both groups inherited their shared DNA from a larger population that lived in North Africa or the Middle East more than 15,000 years ago, the team reports today in Science.
And this ancient population wasn't Berber because the language and culture didn't exist yet. What happens when they do DNA on ancient populations of the Eastern Sahara nearer the Nile where the language actually originated?
Posts: 8940 | Registered: May 2005
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Sci Rep. 2024; 14: 9979. Published online 2024 May 1. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-60568-8 PMCID: PMC11063056 PMID: 38693301
Understanding the genomic heterogeneity of North African Imazighen: from broad to microgeographical perspectives
there are very few examples in North Africa where genetic diversity has been approached with a microgeographical perspective, including different samples from a reduced geographical area and with a variety of cultures and lifestyles9,32–34. In order to overcome some of these limitations and to assess the genetic heterogeneity in the region and especially within the Imazighen, we have analyzed genome-wide data from three Amazigh Chaouïa (also spelled Shawiya)-speaking groups from the Aurès region in northeastern Algeria located in a reduced geographic area (~ 2500 km2) and present this microgeographical approach in the broad context of genetic diversity in North Africa.
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The Chaoui were reportedly also known as the Zenata, and according to 14th century historian, Ibn Khaldum.
This has been disputed by some modern historians, who consider the Chaouis as part of the Gaetuli from the desert region south of the Atlas, or with the Maesulians of eastern Numidia.
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