posted                         

quote:

---

Originally posted by Doug M:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Elmaestro:
@Doug
In a perfect world where you got your way as far as how we do research, what results would you expect to see? This isn't an essay question btw, can you keep it short.

EDIT oh fuck, look at what you started ....all because you're afraid to actually read a fucking paper.

---

The point is you are seeing "false positives" based on selective DNA sampling and comparisons.

And it isn't a "perfect world" which is why I don't pretend these papers are really pushing anything more than propaganda.... ie. Eurasians overran North Africa and thus limiting "true African" DNA lineages to the "Sub Saharan" bantustan lineages...

The TL;DR Bottom line African genetic history should not be modeled on or based on "Eurasian" anything. The roots of and origins of farming included.

quote:

---

Africa harbors more genetic diversity than any other part of the world (Cann et al., 1987, Tishkoff et al., 2009). This is reflected both in a higher average number of differences among sub-Saharan African genomes than among non-African genomes (Cann et al., 1987, Ramachandran et al., 2005) and in the fact that the ancestry found outside of Africa is largely a subset of that within it (Tishkoff et al., 2009). Today, some of the earliest-branching African lineages are present only in populations with relatively small census sizes, including the southern African Khoe-San (see STAR Methods for terminology), central African rainforest hunter-gatherers, and Hadza of Tanzania (Gronau et al., 2011, Schlebusch et al., 2012, Veeramah et al., 2012). However, the population structure of Africa prior to the expansion of food producers (pastoralists and agriculturalists) remains unknown (Busby et al., 2016, Gurdasani et al., 2015, Patin et al., 2017). Bantu-speaking agriculturalists originating in western Africa are thought to have brought farming to eastern Africa by ∼2,000 years BP (years before present, defined by convention as years before 1950 CE) and to southern Africa by ∼1,500 BP, thereby spreading the largest single ancestry component to African genomes today (Russell et al., 2014, Tishkoff et al., 2009). Earlier migration(s), which brought ancestry related to the ancient Near East (Lazaridis et al., 2016, Pagani et al., 2012, Pickrell et al., 2014), brought herding to eastern Africa by ∼4,000 BP (Marshall et al., 1984) and to southern Africa by ∼2,000 BP (Sadr, 2015).

---

This is nothing more than a rehashing of the old Bantustan model of African DNA. It doesn't go back more than 10 thousand years and doesn't discuss the antiquity of African DNA prior to that.




Not to mention the fact that Africans have been practicing all sorts of subsistence strategies, including collecting wild grains and herding wild cattle and livestock since LONG BEFORE any Eurasian back migration during the Neolithic. In fact I would argue that the movement of Saharan populations after the drying of the Sahara 10,000 years ago is a key spark for the arrival of the Neolithic in the "Near East".

quote:

---

There are essentially three archaeologically-based models for the domestication of cattle in North Africa. Wendorf et al. (2001) argue for domestication in the 9th millennium BC, pointing to their reconstruction of the ecology of the Nabta Play – Bir Kiseiba region and to diminishing skeletal size; there is minimal if any input from Near Eastern cattle later on. Andrew Smith’s (2005) model states that the inhabitants of the NP region were hunter-gatherers prior to the late 6th millennium BC and that all the cattle and ovicaprids came from the Near East via the Red Sea coast. My (2007) model hypothesises that anatomical domestication occurred ca 6300 BC, around the time that ovicaprids were introduced into the Eastern Sahara and this may well have included cattle too, and that they were incorporated into and transformed the economy & social structures of the inhabitants of the Nabta Playa-Bir Kiseiba area who had previously been managing some small numbers of wild cattle. It is this managing of wild cattle which could have been a source for the Y2 introgression and the mixed mtDNA results seen to date.

Maria Gatto (2011), however, notes that the early Nabta Playa-Bir Kiseiba pottery is part of the same tradition as the early Kerma region pottery, augmenting Donatella Usai’s (2005) analysis of the stone tools from Nabta Playa in reaching a similar conclusion. There are also currently no known earlier instances of Bos primigenious in the Kerma region, which argues in favour of Honegger’s cattle having been under human control. This is taken by Honegger and Gatto as being supportive of the early domestication model of Wendorf & Schild, i.e. that the cattle were brought to the Kerma region from Nabta Playa-Bir Kiseiba through pastoralist contact with more settled hunter-forager communities living along the Nile.

However, the issue is not so cut and dried. If the criticisms of the reconstruction of the Nabta Playa-Bir Kiseiba ecology are valid and a limited degree of herd management was occurring, possibly similar to the less dangerous Barbary sheep in the Acacus Mountains around this time (di Lernia, 2001), there is no valid reason why some of these cattle would not have been exchanged and ended up in the more favourable environment in the Nile Valley.

What we may be witnessing in fact are two or more centres of morphological domestication occurring, a phenomenon which frankly should not be surprising. Perhaps as part of re-evaluating our epistemological and theoretical approaches to early cattle domestication in North-East Africa, we should also consider discontinuing the antiquated use of imported terms such as Neolithic (Gatto, 2011; Wengrow 2006) and instead continue developing appropriate regionalised archaeolological traditions (cf. Garcea, 2004). This is a wake-up call for North-East Africanists more broadly to better critically engage with the trends, methods and theories being developed elsewhere both on the African continent and elsewhere, as many who are fauna and faunal specialists already do.

---

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783853/

quote:

---

Researchers at the Organic Geochemistry Unit in the University of Bristol's School of Chemistry, working with colleagues at Sapienza, University of Rome and the Universities of Modena and Milan, studied unglazed pottery dating from more than 10,000 years ago, from two sites in the Libyan Sahara.

The invention of cooking has long been recognised as a critical step in human development.

Ancient cooking would have initially involved the use of fires or pits and the invention of ceramic cooking vessels led to an expansion of food preparation techniques.

....
Detailed investigations of the molecular and stable isotope compositions showed a broad range of plants were processed, including grains, the leafy parts of terrestrial plants, and most unusually, aquatic plants.

The interpretations of the chemical signatures obtained from the pottery are supported by abundant plant remains preserved in remarkable condition due to the arid desert environment at the sites.

The plant chemical signatures from the pottery show that the processing of plants was practiced for over 4,000 years, indicating the importance of plants to the ancient people of the prehistoric Sahara.

Dr Julie Dunne, a post-doctoral research associate Bristol's School of Chemistry and lead author of the paper, said: "Until now, the importance of plants in prehistoric diets has been under-recognised but this work clearly demonstrates the importance of plants as a reliable dietary resource.

"These findings also emphasise the sophistication of these early hunter-gatherers in their utilisation of a broad range of plant types, and the ability to boil them for long periods of time in newly invented ceramic vessels would have significantly increased the range of plants prehistoric people could eat."

---

https://phys.org/news/2016-12-earliest-evidence-cooked-ancient-pottery.html

And of course we cannot pretend that the arrival of the Neolithic is the basis of ancient African DNA going back 300,000 years which is absurd. But that is precisely what they are doing with this paper....

---

Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006  |  IP: Logged |