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.
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This shows that the European influence in Tunisia was from nearby Italian Peninsula.
Posts: 26466 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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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 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.
Posts: 26466 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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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.
Posts: 2590 | From: Somewhere | Registered: May 2012
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