posted
I think there were already studies pointing out Sudan as the domestication center for donkeys. But this new study relies on aDNA and stretches the domestication way south into East Africa:
"From pulling Mesopotamian war chariots to grinding grain in the Middle Ages, donkeys have carried civilization on their backs for centuries. DNA has now revealed just how ancient humans’ relationship with donkeys really is.
The genetic instruction books of over 200 donkeys from countries around the world show that these beasts of burden were domesticated about 7,000 years ago in East Africa, researchers report in the Sept. 9 Science."
"Donkeys transformed human history as essential beasts of burden for long-distance movement, especially across semi-arid and upland environments. They remain insufficiently studied despite globally expanding and providing key support to low- to middle-income communities. To elucidate their domestication history, we constructed a comprehensive genome panel of 207 modern and 31 ancient donkeys, as well as 15 wild equids. We found a strong phylogeographic structure in modern donkeys that supports a single domestication in Africa ~5000 BCE, followed by further expansions in this continent and Eurasia and ultimately returning to Africa. We uncover a previously unknown genetic lineage in the Levant ~200 BCE, which contributed increasing ancestry toward Asia. Donkey management involved inbreeding and the production of giant bloodlines at a time when mules were essential to the Roman economy and military."
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^ Since Ehret and other linguists hypothesize an Afrasian urheimat in the Egypto-Sudanese area, it wouldn't surprise me if those pastoralists who domesticated the donkey were themselves proto-Afrasian speakers.
There seems to be strong evidence that the original root word for donkey was the biradical h-r as variations of that word is used in virtually all Afrasian languages to mean ass or donkey.
This is in contradistinction to words for cattle which seem to have a prevalent Nilo-Saharan root.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Since Ehret and other linguists hypothesize an Afrasian urheimat in the Egypto-Sudanese area, it wouldn't surprise me if those pastoralists who domesticated the donkey were themselves proto-Afrasian speakers.
There seems to be strong evidence that the original root word for donkey was the biradical h-r as variations of that word is used in virtually all Afrasian languages to mean ass or donkey.
This is in contradistinction to words for cattle which seem to have a prevalent Nilo-Saharan root.
“There’s one especially important animal, the donkey, came to the rest of the world from Africa. The donkey was the first multiple use beast of burden in world history, for carrying loads, for riding, and in the Middle East, very early it’s put to use pulling wheeled vehicles…Where did the domestication of donkeys take place? The genetic evidence places the origins of the donkey among the region of the Red Sea hills and the joining regions at the north of the Horn of Africa, the edges of country of modern Somaliland, up in the Red Sea hills where you find the Beja people. You can reconstruct in the ancient Cushitic language the word for the domestic donkey and it projects back to about 5000 years ago.” — Christopher Ehret
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