posted
I've been searching for papers on this population and have gotten very little information aside from them carrying the highest frequency of West African E1a on the Y-chromosome. Their language appears to be an isolate as well, could they be the relic of people who lived in the Sahara before it dried up?
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Headwaters are the source of a stream or river. The Niger River begins in the Futa Jalon highlands of Guinea where it takes a northerly route into Mali. As the river reaches farther north into the Sahara Desert, it joins with tributaries and fans out into a large network of lakes, streams, and marshes.
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The Dogon people of Mali are believed to have originated in ancient Egypt, though they have stories of traveling from the Mande kingdom. What is known for sure is that they settled along the sandstone cliffs by the Bandiagara Escarpment (in Mali) probably during the 15th or 16th century. It is thought that they ended up here while trying to escape Islamization. With bluffs reaching over 1600 feet high and 90 miles long, and the cliffs littered with hundreds of caves, it would have been the perfect place to hide from enemies.
The evidence linking Dogon to the Niger–Congo family is mainly a few numerals and some common core vocabulary. Various theories have been proposed, placing them with Gur, Mande, or as an independent branch, the last now being the preferred approach. The Dogon languages show very few remnants of the noun class system characteristic of much of Niger–Congo, leading linguists to conclude that they likely diverged from Niger–Congo very early.
Roger Blench comments,[1]
quote: Dogon is both lexically and structurally very different from most other [Niger–Congo] families. It lacks the noun-classes usually regarded as typical of Niger–Congo and has a word order (SOV) that resembles Mande and Ịjọ, but not the other branches. The system of verbal inflections, resembling French is quite unlike any surrounding languages. As a consequence, the ancestor of Dogon is likely to have diverged very early, although the present-day languages probably reflect an origin some 3–4000 years ago. Dogon languages are territorially coherent, suggesting that, despite local migration histories, the Dogon have been in this area of Mali from their origin.
and:[2]
quote: Dogon is certainly a well-founded and coherent group. But it has no characteristic Niger–Congo features (noun-classes, verbal extensions, labial-velars) and very few lexical cognates. It could equally well be an independent language family.
The Bamana and Fula languages have exerted significant influence on Dogon, due to their close cultural and geographical ties.
Blench (2015) speculates that Bangime and Dogon languages may have a substratum from a "missing" branch of Nilo-Saharan that had split off relatively early from Proto-Nilo-Saharan, and tentatively calls that branch "Plateau".
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The Small Bang Abbie Hantgan Langues et Cultures d’Afrique (LLACAN, UMR 8135) CNRS, INALCO, Paris The Small Bang represents a recently begun ERC-funded project dedicated to discovering the origins of the Bangime language and Bangande people. The language and its speakers are of particular interest to West African research as Bangime is one of the only isolates spoken in the region and the ancestors of the Bangande are also unknown. Using the latest computer-assisted technologies, the Bang team is amassing linguistic and genetic data and comparing them with a hitherto unexplored set of languages and peoples in search of a hidden history. Preliminary hypotheses suggest geographic isolation that has led to a bottleneck of at least 9,000 years. The question as to from whom the people and their language originated remains open. Bangime in the Context of the Dogon Languages The purpose of the ongoing ERC-funded project BANG (PI Abbie Hantgan) is to search for the origins of language isolate Bangime and its genetically distinct speakers, the Bangande. The Dogon languages represent the first step in this investigation. The Bangande live among, and claim to be ethnically, Dogon and to speak a Dogon language. Though the lowest mutual intelligibility rate among the Dogon languages is 32% (Heath et al. 2012), those between Bangime and the Dogon languages are estimated to be below 16% (Hantgan and List 2022). Thus, while the Dogon group does represent at least 21 mutually languages, Bangime cannot be considered to be one of them. The root of the very name of the language, [baŋɡ-] means something ‘secret, hidden, or furtive’ among Dogon languages whose speakers today have little to no contact with the Bangande. Widely known within and outside of academy, Dogon themselves and their languages are the source of many myths. Primarily, the term ‘Dogon’ is often misconceptualized as a monolithic language and society. In fact, Dogon represents a group of diverse languages and customs whose speakers and cultural practitioners build their houses into the rough landscape of Bandiagara Escarpment in central eastern Mali. Further, though often depicted for their ritualistic masked dances, it is only the Dogon who live in the environs of Sangha who practice the Kanaga performance. Dogon from the western side of the Escarpment have no such traditions. Linguistically, the Dogon language group has recently been removed from the Niger-Congo phylum for its CALCiP Volume 5, Number 12 2 purported lack of noun class markers, however, this conclusion is based on a lack of upto-date materials. Thus, one of the outputs of the Bang project will be a much-needed Dogon phylogeny using the methods put forth by the also ERC-funded ComputerAssisted Language Comparison (CALC, PI Johann Mattis List, https://digling.org/calc/) project. Methods in Progress In addition to using lexical wordlists of basic vocabulary to compare Bangime to the surrounding Dogon languages and other ethnolinguistic groups, the Bang project will focus on culturally relevant vocabulary to target potential borrowings in the language. Thus far, we have only performed linguistic and genetic comparisons within the immediate area. The next step will be to expand the scope to speakers who today have no contact with the Bangande. If any evidence of previous contact can be found through linguistic comparison, these speakers will be targeted for genetic sampling. With West Africa above the Bantu belt sorely underrepresented across the disciplines, we hope that the Bang study will shed light on migration patterns and historical events that are thus far unknown. Upcoming Blog Posts This post is only the introduction of an upcoming series outlining some of the technical aspects of the workflow being employed by the Bang team. We very much hope that our methods will be of use to other researchers with similar types of questions and thus we aim to be as transparent as possible about our methodology. The first post that is forthcoming will be a discussion of the ways in which we are converting the Dogon lexical worksheets that were gathered along with the Bangime data into CLDF format (Forkel et al. 2018).
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E-M132 is found most often in West Africa, and today it is especially common in the region of Mali. One study has found haplogroup E-M132 Y-chromosomes in as much as 34% (15/44) of a sample of Malian men, including 2/44 E-M44 and 13/44 E-M33/M132(xE-M44).[8] In particular, the Dogon people of Mali have been found to carry haplogroup E-M132 with a frequency as high as 45.5% (25/55). This makes it perhaps the most common Y-DNA haplogroup in this population, though haplogroup E-P1 appears to be almost equally frequent among the Dogon (24/55 = 43.6%)[3]
Ancient DNA E-M132/E1a has been found in the remains of one Guanche (1/30) from the Canary Islands, and one Bimbape (1/16) from El Hierro that has been dated to the 10th century CE.[6]
A man from the Koban culture (1/15) of the North Caucasus, which has been dated between the 9th century BCE and the 7th century BCE, carried paternal haplogroup E1a2a1b1b, as well as maternal haplogroup J1b1 or J1c.
Haplogroup E-M132 also has been found in samples obtained from Moroccan Berbers, Sahrawis, Burkina Faso (including E-M33/M132(xE-M44) in 2/20 = 10% Fulbe and 2/37 = 5.4% Rimaibe[2]), northern Cameroon (including E-M44 in 9/17 = 53% Fulbe and E-M33/M132(xE-M44) in 3/15 = 20% Tali[2]), Senegal (7/139 = 5.0%[9]), Ghana (1/29 = 3% Ga, 1/32 = 3% Fante[3]), Sudan (including 5/32 = 15.6% Hausa and 3/26 = 11.5% Fulani[5]), Egypt (1%[3]-1.4%[10]), Calabria (including both Italian and Albanian inhabitants of the region), Shiite Muslims from Lebanon (3/193 = 1.55%),[11] Syrians (2/202 = 1%),[12] Druze from Lebanon (5/363 = 1.3%),[13] Maronites from Lebanon (2/200 = 1%),[14] an Italian (1/67 = 1.5%) from Trentino in northeastern Italy,[15] and Romanians from Constanţa.[16]
E-M132 has also been observed among private commercial DNA testers from Switzerland, France, Yemen, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Mali, Italy, Ashkenazi Jews and African Americans
references:
[8] Peter A. Underhill, Peidong Shen, Alice A. Lin et al., "Y chromosome sequence variation and the history of human populations," Nature Genetics, Volume 26, November 2000
[3] Wood, Elizabeth T.; et al. (2005). "Contrasting patterns of Y chromosome and mtDNA variation in Africa: evidence for sex-biased demographic processes" (PDF). European Journal of Human Genetics. 13 (7): 867–876. doi:10.1038/sj.ejhg.5201408. PMID 15856073. S2CID 20279122. Retrieved 5 June 2017. ; cf. Appendix A for population frequencies
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: I've been searching for papers on this population
maybe you have looked at the two research articles referenced here in the wiki article. I skimmed one but didn't see Dogon mentioned but you might want to go over them again. Supposedly the data mentioned is in them. They are kind of old, one 2000, the other 2005
So as we can see E1a is now called E-M132 and was also formerly known as E-M33
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posted
Y hg A1a (A-M31) is also found among Dogon men. There's not as much info available on Dogon maternal lineages as there are paternal but this 2006 Gonzales et al. study shows they possess the highest frequencies of L2 clade.
Which is why there is the paradox of the Tishkoff et al. 2009 autosomal findings on the Dogon 'Eurasian blue' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Y hg A1a (A-M31) is also found among Dogon men. There's not as much info available on Dogon maternal lineages as there are paternal but this 2006 Gonzales et al. study shows they possess the highest frequencies of L2 clade.
Which is why there is the paradox of the Tishkoff et al. 2009 autosomal findings on the Dogon 'Eurasian blue' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
I was just about to bring up Tishkoff study, she said that blue cluster was "Saharan African" or a OOA type mixture, thats why it interests me about the Dogon origins.
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Eurasian blue[/URL]' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
Ancestral North African perhaps?
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Y hg A1a (A-M31) is also found among Dogon men. There's not as much info available on Dogon maternal lineages as there are paternal but this 2006 Gonzales et al. study shows they possess the highest frequencies of L2 clade.
Which is why there is the paradox of the Tishkoff et al. 2009 autosomal findings on the Dogon 'Eurasian blue' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
I was just about to bring up Tishkoff study, she said that blue cluster was "Saharan African" or a OOA type mixture, thats why it interests me about the Dogon origins.
That is interesting where did she say that?
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Eurasian blue[/URL]' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
Ancestral North African perhaps?
here is the Dogon commentary from the study Djehuti mentioned
quote:
The genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans Sarah A Tishkoff et al. 2009
African variation in a world-wide context. African and African American populations, with the exception of the Dogon of Mali, show the highest levels of within population genetic diversity (θ = 4Neμ) (figs. S2 and S3). In addition, genetic diversity declines with distance from Africa (fig. S2, A to C), consistent with proposed serial founder effects, resulting from the migration of modern humans out of Africa and across the globe (9, 11–13).
Genetic structure within Africa. Principal components analysis of genetic variation within Africa indicated the presence of 43 significant PCs (P - 0.05 with a Tracy-Widom distribution). PC1 (10.8% of the extracted variation) distinguished eastern and Saharan Africa from western/central/southern Africa (Fig. 2B). The second PC (6.1%) distinguished the Hadza, while the third PC (4.9%) distinguished Pygmy and SAK individuals from other Africans. The fourth PC (3.7%) was associated with the Mozabites, some Dogon and the CMA individuals, who show ancestry from the European/Middle Eastern cluster. The fifth PC (3.1%) was associated with SAK speakers. The tenth PC was of particular interest (2.2%) because it associates with the SAK, Sandawe and some Dogon individuals, suggesting shared ancestry...
Another geographically contiguous cluster extends across Northern Africa (blue) into Mali (the Dogon), Ethiopia and northern Kenya. With the exception of the Dogon, these populations speak an Afroasiatic language. Chadic and Nilo-Saharan speaking populations from Nigeria, Cameroon and central Chad, as well as several Nilo-Saharan speaking populations from southern Sudan comprise another cluster (red). Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic speakers from the Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania, as well as some of the Bantu speakers from Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda (Hutu/Tutsi) constitute another cluster (purple), reflecting linguistic evidence for gene flow amongst these populations over the past ~5,000 years (27, 28). Finally, the Hadza are the sole constituents of a sixth cluster (yellow) consistent with their distinctive genetic structure identified with PCA and STRUCTURE.
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Y hg A1a (A-M31) is also found among Dogon men. There's not as much info available on Dogon maternal lineages as there are paternal but this 2006 Gonzales et al. study shows they possess the highest frequencies of L2 clade.
Which is why there is the paradox of the Tishkoff et al. 2009 autosomal findings on the Dogon 'Eurasian blue' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
Possibly some rare ancestry that the genetics programs have difficulty untangling, as only shows up in some analyses. Similar situation in Hadza whose ancestry is also misunderstood (see very unusual treemix results below).
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Y hg A1a (A-M31) is also found among Dogon men. There's not as much info available on Dogon maternal lineages as there are paternal but this 2006 Gonzales et al. study shows they possess the highest frequencies of L2 clade.
Which is why there is the paradox of the Tishkoff et al. 2009 autosomal findings on the Dogon 'Eurasian blue' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
Possibly some rare ancestry that the genetics programs have difficulty untangling, as only shows up in some analyses. Similar situation in Hadza whose ancestry is also misunderstood (see very unusual treemix results below).
quote:3.7.3 West Eurasian ancestry in the Sandawe and Hadza. We noted that the fit of the Sandawe in the TreeMix graph is imperfect (Supplementary Figure S21D). In particular, the relationship between the Sandawe and the European populations in these data is a poor fit. On inspection, the Hadza also show a similar signal, but to a lesser extent (Supplementary Figure S20D). We thus examined the Sandawe and Hadza for evidence of west Eurasian ancestry. We used f4 statistics of the form [Chimp, X,[French, Han]], where X is either the Sandawe or the Hadza. In both cases, this tree fails. For the Hadza, this tree fails with a Z-score of -4.2 (p = 1.3 × 10−5 ), and for the Sandawe, this tree fails with a Z-score of -7.2 (p = 3 × 10−13). Both of these are consistent with west Eurasian (either European or, more likely, Arabian), gene flow into these populations. To further examine this, we turned to ROLLOFF. We used Dinka and French as representatives of the mixing populations (since date estimates are robust to improperly specified reference populations). The results are shown in Supplementary Figure S22. Both populations show a detectable curve, though the signal is much stronger in the Sandawe than in the Hadza. The implied dates are 89 generations (≈2500 years) ago for the Hadza and 66 generations (≈2000 years) ago for the Sandawe. These are qualitatively similar signals to those seen by Pagani et al. [65] in Ethiopian populations. There are two possible historical scenarios that could lead to these signals: either the Hadza and Sandawe both directly admixed with a western Eurasian population about 2,000 years ago, or 42 they admixed with an east African population that was itself admixed with a western Eurasian population. The latter possibility would be consistent with known east African admixture into the Sandawe [16] . 3.7.4 Modification of TreeMix to include known admixture Since all of the southern African Khoisan populations are admixed with non-Khoisan populations, any attempt to build a tree relating these populations is complicated by admixture. We wanted to examine the historical relationships of these populations before the admixture. To do this, we used the composite likelihood approach of Pickrell and Pritchard [36] , as implemented in the software TreeMix. Briefly, the approach is to build a graph of populations (which allows for both population splits and mixtures) that best fits the sample covariance matrix of allele frequencies [36] . In all analyses, we calculate the standard errors on the entries in the covariance matrix in blocks of 500 SNPs. In the original TreeMix algorithm, one first builds the best-fitting tree of populations. However, this approach is not ideal if there are many admixed populations (as in our application here, where all of the Khoisan populations are admixed). To get around this, we allow for known admixture events to be incorporated into this tree-building step. Imagine that there are several populations that we think a priori might be unadmixed (in our applications, these are the Chimpanzee, Yoruba, Dinka, Europeans, and East Asians). We first build the best tree of these unadmixed populations using the standard TreeMix algorithm. Now assume we have an independent estimate of the admixture level of each Khoisan population, and imagine we know the source population for the mixture. To add a Khoisan population to the tree, for each existing branch in the tree, we put in a branch leading to the new population. We then force the known admixture event into the graph with a fixed weight, update the branch lengths, and store the likelihood of the graph. After testing all possible branches, we keep the maximum likelihood graph. We then try all possible nearest-neighbor interchanges to the topology of the graph (as in the original TreeMix algorithm), keeping the change only if it increases the likelihood. We do this for all populations. Finally, after adding all the populations with fixed admixture weights, we optimize the admixture weights, and attempt changes to the graph structure where the source populations for the admixture events are changed. To initialize the migration weights for each Khoisan population, we used the corrected f4 ratio estimates from Figure 2B in the main text. To initialize the source population for the mixture events, we chose the Yoruba for all populations except the Hadza and Sandawe, which we initialized as mixing with the Dinka. We additionally initialized the Hadza and Sandawe as having 5% and 10% ancestry, respectively, related to the French, for the reasons described in Section 3.7.3 (these proportions were chosen based on rough examination of the ADMIXTURE plot (Supplementary Figure S8), but are only used for intialization; the algorithm then updates these proportions to fit the data. The final estimated proportions are 13% and 17%, respectively. To obtain a measure of confidence in the resulting tree, if there are K blocks of 500 SNPs, we performed a bootstrap analysis where we randomly sample K blocks from the genome (with replacement) and re-estimate the tree. We ran this bootstrap analysis 100 times, then counted the fraction of replicates supporting each split in the tree.
Of course Hadza have Eurasian DNA. We know this because they're used regularly in African genetics papers like Pagani et al 2012 or Pickrell et al 2014.
Hadza Eurasian is only slightly higher than what East African Bantu speakers have. it's a matter of single digits higher, not in the 10s or 20s higher, like Omotic speakers or Masai. Yet we've never seen Kikiyu show those affinities in treemix.
If you, lioness, or someone else disputes this, they can post more conclusive data than these authors. Neanderthal % for instance is fairly conclusive in settling if this is really Eurasian DNA.
The authors in your quote admit themselves that they're treating the French as an unadmixed population. It's been widely publicized all over the media since 2014 that they're not. If African Americans treat themselves as an unadmixed population and fix this in a program, all Europeans will have African-American admixture with the click of a mouse button. Abuse of genetics programs or even outright deception was also discussed in the 3 abstracts thread and many times before that.
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Looking at the Tishkoff map above with the pie charts, at the Hadza, lower right, I don't see any blue (possibly a tiny sliver) and largely their own unique outlier, as yellow
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posted
If you also want the admixture dates (you asked when the admixture happened), see fig 4. Using only CTRL + F, you're not going to find keywords like 'Hadza' in non-OCRed text.
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posted
Let's not get off track, the topic is about the Dogon and their ancestry, I wonder what does that blue from Tishkoff et al study really represent.
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posted
I have my own ideas. But you might want to look up pre-Dogon populations (like Hassi el Abiod and Tellem Pygmy-like populations from Mali) and take it from there.
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: If you also want the admixture dates (you asked when the admixture happened), see fig 4. Using only CTRL + F, you're not going to find keywords like 'Hadza' in non-OCRed text.
ok I see the dates now
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I have my own ideas. But you might want to look up pre-Dogon populations (like Hassi el Abiod and Tellem Pygmy-like populations from Mali) and take it from there.
I wonder if their ancestor related to the SSA that was found in Taforalt
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I have my own ideas. But you might want to look up pre-Dogon populations (like Hassi el Abiod and Tellem Pygmy-like populations from Mali) and take it from there.
I wonder if their ancestor related to the SSA that was found in Taforalt
Taforalt is E1b1b
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I have my own ideas. But you might want to look up pre-Dogon populations (like Hassi el Abiod and Tellem Pygmy-like populations from Mali) and take it from there.
I wonder if their ancestor related to the SSA that was found in Taforalt
Taforalt is E1b1b
I'm talking about autosomal ancestry
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Yes but their E1b1b can easily account for their Natufian component as both Egyptians and Natufians and Taforalt had E1b1b and they all also have Natufian-like in common. We don't know what haplogroup the SSA-like in Taforalt is paired with, just like we don't know what haplogroup the Basal Eurasian in farmers is paired with (farmers are mostly Y-DNA G, which means their Y-DNA profile is a shell of the original Y-DNA diversity they must have had, once). Since hgs can become fixed (like E1b1b in Taforalt and Y-DNA G in farmers), hgs can sometimes give a misleading picture.
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite:
quote:Originally posted by Swenet: I have my own ideas. But you might want to look up pre-Dogon populations (like Hassi el Abiod and Tellem Pygmy-like populations from Mali) and take it from there.
I wonder if their ancestor related to the SSA that was found in Taforalt
That's a very interesting idea I hadn't considered yet, but it makes sense because there is palaeolithic rock art in the Maghreb of shorter steatopygous figures. These could relate to the pre-Dogon Tellem population thought to have had short stature.
I myself was thinking in the direction of Dogon E-M33 being what remains of a larger E-M33 distribution that has since vanished, much like certain Capsian mtDNAs having moved to other places (e.g. from Tunisia and Algeria to the nearby refugia in Fezzan), due to the drying Sahara. This is how I explain Tishkoff's results with the Dogon sample. The Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, and Mali in general, could be to E-M33 what Fezzan refugia are to Capsian descendants. In both cases, the original distributions of the hgs has vanished and only a remnant remains that has relocated to places nearby.
In this scenario, the Dogon, being Niger Congo speakers (who are high in E-M2, but not usually not in E-M33) would be newcomers to this old E-M33 distribution. Hence the relevance of older pre-Dogon populations from Mali, like the Tellem.
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^Yes I noticed that. There are more examples of 'steatopygia' in Palaeolithic rock art in Qurta (Egypt), other than that headless figure you posted. The figures and the very existence of art is consistent with the end of the pleistocene corresponding with occasional appearances of populations in Egypt that were more like predynastics and dynastics, and less like the older MSA groups (who generally did not make art).
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quote:Originally posted by Swenet: ^Yes I noticed that. There are more examples of 'steatopygia' in Palaeolithic rock art in Qurta (Egypt), other than that headless figure you posted. The figures and the very existence of art is consistent with the end of the pleistocene corresponding with occasional appearances of populations in Egypt that were more like predynastics and dynastics, and less like the older MSA groups (who generally did not make art).
quote:Originally posted by Elijah The Tishbite: I wonder if their ancestor related to the SSA that was found in Taforalt
That's a very interesting idea I hadn't considered yet, but it makes sense because there is Palaeolithic rock art in the Maghreb of shorter steatopygous figures. These could relate to the pre-Dogon Tellem population thought to have had short stature.
I don't feel like searching for it, but I have come across 2 sources-- 2 books actually-- stating that not only blood groupings but autosomal affinities between certain Haratin in Morocco and and certain Pygmies (Biaka?). Again, I'd like to point out that 'Haratin' within many Amazigh (Berber) social systems is a class not ethnicity so while some are descendants of slaves from historical times, the ones in rural parts of sub-Atlas Morocco have no tradition of being of slave ancestry but are aboriginal. Pygmy too is a generic term for short statured Africans who inhabit the jungles and only certain tribes show this genetic affiliation to said Haratin. People like L.C. Briggs and Bates suspect them to be aboriginal. And even Carleton Coon due to certain physical attributes (steatopygia among others) considers them to be a remnant of so-called "Capoid North Africans".
What do you make of this Pygmy connection?
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posted
^The way you started your first sentence, I thought you were going to talk about an older paper showing blood group similarities between Haratin and Giza(?) dynastic Egyptians.
I will have to think about what can be said about Pygmies. I do know about links to Khoisan in the literature. (← Notice BTW that the 10-12ky old mtDNA L0a arrow in Rito et al goes to an area close to Mali. This could be one source of shorter stature, not just in the Maghreb, and Tellem, but in Tenereans and Badarians and some Natufians as well). I say this because the anthro literature speaks of short statured and taller Khoisan populations in prehistoric Africa. So, mtDNA L0a populations arriving in equatoral Africa and further north could have included some populations with shorter stature, as well.
Also, since I last posted in this thread, I thought about the Tellem and it occurred to me that the Taza I Iberomaurusian woman from Algeria dating to 16.1ky ago, was unsually small compared to the large Taforalt and Afalou skeletal remains from several millennia later. The Afalou #28 male is also older than the Taforalt and Afalou samples, and also shorter in stature.
The lower level is represented by the skeleton of a single adult male, to whom we shall refer by his catalogue number, #28. Number 28 was a short man, about 161.5 cm. tail, equivalent in stature to Galley Hill, Combe Capelle, and the male negroid from Grimaldi. His skull differs greatly from the others taken from the upper level of the same site. It is ovoid in shape, hyperdolichocephalic, and low vaulted; it possesses a sloping forehead, a large U-shaped palate, and high orbits. It is only moderately massive, and is about equal in this respect to Combe Capelle. This skull is that of a generalized white type, and can be placed without much difficulty into the general class of Galley Hill and Combe Capelle. Like the latter, its nasal aperture is wide, its index chamaerrhine. The Races Of Europe https://archive.org/details/racesofeurope031695mbp
Might be relevant considering what I said about the short statured Tellem possibly being part of a larger West Sahara/West Sahel/Maghreb population that survives today as E-M33 in Mali.
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Here's just one source I found on the blood groupings-- Pleistocene Man in Africa with special reference to West Africa (1974) Although it is not certain whether it is an old population feature or the result of recent mutation, it has also been convincingly shown that the Volta plateau territory directly north of Ghana, is the 'nesť of HbC gene. It seems also certain that both HbC,HbS and HbL abnormal haemoglobins were imported northwards from the Western Sudan. These features are found among the Haratin, and together with their blood group patterning suggest that they were the result of an ancient cross between early Negro immigrants from the South East and another physical type coming from or through Egypt on their way westward (Briggs 1955). Their ABO patterns are very similar to those of the Sudan, in their high percentage of B, but they also have very high 'A' percentage reminiscent of certain Congo Pygmy and Egyptian groups.
I still couldn't find the autosomal data, but I'm just going by what those two books said many years ago. This was the most recent of the two I remember.
The last thread I remember about the Pygmies specifically was here.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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I've always associated Pygmy phenotypes in an African context with the equatorial rainforests, so reading about possibly Pygmy-like people having lived in North Africa has been a surprise for me. I suppose that, whenever the rainforests contracted during glacial periods, some Pygmy populations might have been forced out and migrated further north, but that's of course assuming what we call the Pygmy phenotype even evolved in a rainforest habitat in the first place.
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^ There are different genetic causal factors for diminution of stature in populations, but One major environmental cause is a decrease in protein sources. While Haratin are overall short they are not as quite as diminutive as Pygmies. But the source cited by Swenet on Epipaleolithic remains in North Africa and UP remains in Europe are quite interesting.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Damn. You definitely caught me off guard with that one. I can't relate the pygmy accounts by Atlas locals to anything I've read in the anthro literature.
Unfortunately, sometimes literate societies discover unexpected populations when they're on the brink of extinction or even when they've pretty much gone extinct and can only be recovered from eyewitness accounts.
I once read there were pygmies recorded in Australia and that they've been forgotten by the anthropological establishment who today reject such accounts. There are reports of this nature in Africa as well, and the Americans. Balito Bay is one good example of this as he represents a branch of Khoisan that doesn't exist anymore and must died out 'right before' Portuguese explorers landed in South Africans and recorded their interactions with Khoisan groups.
Do we have something tangible in the Atlas that was left behind, like the Tellem cemeteries, art, etc in Mali?
EDIT: Glad to see the article is still online (I read this many years ago), and I'm also glad to see I remembered it correctly.
Here is the article on pygmies native to Australia:
Here is an example of an ugly side of academia I've become all too familiar with: suppression of reasonable evidence by members of the scientific establishment who are intolerant of certain types of information (in this case, it's the subject of the now-forgotten Australian pygmy populations that's given unfair treatment).
Since there is an active misinformation campaign on this subject, with seemingly dubious science on both sides, I looked around to see if maybe I had been duped by a hoax when I read this years ago. But the subject seems reasonable, if not perfectly legit:
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As a side note to the possible 'Pygmy' influence, recall the 2020 discovery of the Shum Laka Rock Shelter burial in Cameroon as reported by the New York Times. Ancient DNA from West Africa Adds to Picture of Humans’ Rise From a burial site in Cameroon, archaeologists recovered human genetic material dating as far back as 8,000 years...
In the new study, published in Nature, the researchers reported that modern humans diverged into four major populations between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago. One of those populations is new to scientists; few traces of it remain in the DNA of living Africans.
The vanished population may have consisted of bands of hunter-gatherers who lived south of the Sahara from Mali to Sudan until just a few thousand years ago.
To Dr. Prendergast’s surprise, none of the people at Shum Laka were closely related to Bantu speakers at all. In fact, they had a strong kinship to the Aka, a group of hunter-gatherers with a pygmy body type who live today in rain forests 1,000 miles to the east.
To make sense of this paradox, the researchers carried out a large-scale comparison of all the ancient African DNA gathered so far, along with living people from across Africa and beyond. The team found a scenario that best explains how different groups of Africans ended up with their particular combinations of DNA.
Dr. Reich and his colleagues can trace the major lineages of people back to common ancestors who lived in Africa between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago.
“It seems we have four lineages splitting at the same time,” said Mark Lipson, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard and an author of the new study.
One lineage passed down their DNA to living hunter-gatherers in southern Africa. A second group were ancestors of the Aka and other central African hunter-gatherers.
A third group became hunter-gatherers in East Africa, as evidenced by the fact that many living Africans in that region have inherited some of that DNA.
The fourth group, which Dr. Reich and his colleagues call “Ghost Modern,” is far more mysterious.
The ancient Shum Laka people have a substantial amount of Ghost Modern ancestry. So does the ancient Mota man from Ethiopia. But ancient remains from Morocco and South Africa had none. Today some people in Sierra Leone have a tiny trace of Ghost Modern ancestry, the researchers found.
Most people in Africa — and the rest of the planet — can trace much of their ancestry to the East African hunter-gatherers. Less than 100,000 years ago, this group split into new lineages.
One group gave rise to many of today’s East African tribes. Another group included the Mota man. They were closely related to the people who expanded east out of East Africa and into the rest of the world.
A separate group of East Africans moved west, encountering and mixing with Central African hunter-gatherers and eventually becoming the first West Africans. The people of Shum Laka may be the descendants of this group.
Many thousands of years passed before a different group of the West Africans gave rise to the Bantu people. Their population discovered agriculture, grew and took over larger areas of land.
But the Bantu farmers didn’t swiftly drive hunter-gatherers to oblivion. The Shum Laka people survived for at least 1,000 years in the heart of Bantu country.Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Y hg A1a (A-M31) is also found among Dogon men. There's not as much info available on Dogon maternal lineages as there are paternal but this 2006 Gonzales et al. study shows they possess the highest frequencies of L2 clade.
Which is why there is the paradox of the Tishkoff et al. 2009 autosomal findings on the Dogon 'Eurasian blue' which is almost as high as the Mozabite Berbers. This is why I agree with Swenet that the Dogon may very well represent a population that is or had substantial admixture with pre-OOA or OOA before they exited Africa.
Here she calls blue Saharan, although also see quotes about STRUCTURE at bottom "moderate levels of European/Middle Eastern ancestry (blue)". yet they don't have that look like the Fulani do in photos I've seen
Also compared to other populations in Africa closer to Cushitic and Fulani but on relative to other populations in Africa, they are a genetic outlier like Hadza
Although Dogon sample here is somewhat small, 9 individuals __________________________________________
The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans SARAH A. TISHKOFF, 2009
The Dogon from Mali, who speak a Niger-Kordofanian language, cluster near the Saharan populations in the phylogenetic trees (Figs. 1, S7, S8), consistent with the results from STRUCTURE analysis, showing considerable Saharan (blue) ancestry, and consistent with oral history of a northern African origin (although it should be noted that the sample size for this population, 9 individuals, is very small and many markers did not amplify well) (Figs. 5B and 5C; Table S9). The linguistic evidence remains to be studied in this case. [/b] _________________
Detection of relative pairs: Relative pairs and duplicated samples in the dataset were inferred from the pattern of shared genotypes and population allele frequencies with RELPAIR 2.0.1 (S6-8) . Because the inclusion of closely related individuals can impact population genetic inferences (e.g. (S9)), we took the conservative approach of excluding individuals inferred to be third degree or more closely related, including inferred relative pairs between regional ethnic populations (e.g. all Tanzanian populations). An exception was made in the case of the Dogon as it is difficult to reliably infer relative pairs in a small sample and the Dogon are highly distinctive and could not be readily merged with other populations to improve allele frequency estimates. Merging the Dogon with other non-Pygmy West African populations inferred four unrelated individuals in the sample, but this may be overly conservative given the distinctiveness of the Dogon sample from other West Africans. Also, the Dogon are the only representatives from Mali in our study and since the sample size is already small we did not want to further reduce the sample size in the analyses, especially if the relative pair estimates were questionable.
_____________
The ratios of θ inferred from variance and heterozygosity for the current dataset are shown in Fig. S3. The ratio of variance and heterozygosity is the largest in Native 12 American populations, followed by Oceanic and East Asian populations, all with values greater than one, intermediate in most European, Middle Eastern, and Indian populations, with values near one, and with values less than one in most African populations and a few Middle Eastern and European populations. This observation is consistent with previous findings, suggesting a strong bottleneck followed by a recent and rapid expansion in Native Americans and Australo-Melanesians, and expansion but lack of a recent strong bottleneck in Africans (S80, S82). Interestingly, the San and the Hadza hunter-gatherers have the highest ratio of variance relative to heterozygosity among almost all African populations, with a ratio value slightly greater than 1.0 (Fig. S3). The only African population with a larger ratio is the Dogon. The Hadza and San are also apparent outliers in the plot of θ inferred from heterozygosity shown in Fig. S2B. These results are consistent with relatively stable small population sizes in these hunter-gatherer populations, although simulations will be required to obtain detailed demographic parameter values.
STRUCTURE analysis, from K=6 upward (shown in blue, consisting of eastern African Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan speaking populations, the Fulani, and CMA population);
In the global STRUCTURE analysis, the Fulani show low to moderate levels of European/Middle Eastern ancestry (blue), consistent with mtDNA (S101) and Y chromosome (S97) analyses, as well as the presence at low frequency of the -13910T mutation associated with lactose tolerance in Europeans in this population (S102).
Consistent with their proposed history of migration from Arabia across eastern Africa, southern Sudan, and the Sahel, the Baggara show low levels of Middle Eastern/European associated ancestry (blue) and high to moderate levels of Cushitic (purple) and Nilo-Saharan (red) associated ancestry in the global and African STRUCTURE analyses (Fig. 3, 4, S15).
Posts: 42918 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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^ So the "Saharan blue" includes OOA ancestry. I guess that makes sense if OOA originated somewhere in the eastern Sahara.
Compare with the 2020 Reich et al. study on Shum Laka
The Dogon would probably be associated with the node that branched off the same node that the Cushitic Agaw branched off from.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Baalberith
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quote:The Dogon would probably be associated with the node that branched off the same node that the Cushitic Agaw branched off from.
Nope. Tishkoff's Dogon samples was flawed from the start:
quote:Relative pairs and duplicated samples in the dataset were inferred from the pattern of shared genotypes and population allele frequencies with RELPAIR 2.0.1 ( 6-8) . Because the inclusion of closely related individuals can impact population genetic inferences [e.g. (S9)], we took the conservative approach of excluding individuals inferred to be third degree or more closely related, including inferred relative pairs between regional ethnic populations (e.g. all Tanzanian populations). An exception was made in the case of the Dogon as it is difficult to reliably infer relative pairs in a small sample and the Dogon are highly distinctive and could not be readily merged with other populations to improve allele frequency estimates. Merging the Dogon with other non-Pygmy West African populations inferred four unrelated individuals in the sample, but this may be overly conservative given the distinctiveness of the Dogon sample from other West Africans. Also, the Dogon are the only representatives from Mali in our study and since the sample size is already small we did not want to further reduce the sample size in the analyses, especially if the relative pair estimates were questionable. Therefore, RELPAIR inferred relative pairs among the Dogon were not excluded. In total 737 individuals were removed. Networks of relatives, which in some cases were quite complex, were plotted with neato from the GraphViz software package (S10), which was used to select the minimum number of individuals to exclude to break up networks of relative pairs.
From a commentor under Dienekes' blog article about the study:
quote:According to Tishkoff, one of the main conclusions of her study is that the world population samples produced 14 genetic clusters, and that 9 of them were in Africa. She said the clusters represent "genetically divergent ancestral population clusters". "You're seeing more diversity in one continent than across the globe". Clearly, according to Tishkoff, the 14 clusters she identified represent 14 ancestral populations, each with its own individual migratory history, existing separately from the other 13 ancestral populations for a long enough time to develop their own genetic profile, discernable today in Tishkoff's study. [Another important conclusion is that "the new findings will help medical researchers tailor drug treatments for different groups of Africans rather than treating them as homogenous."]
But identifying a genetic cluster doesn't automatically mean it represents an ancient population cluster. In her previous study from 2004, "Implications of biogeography of human populations for ‘race’ and medicine", she analyzed Rosenberg's genetic study of the 52 global populations of the HGDP samples, which resulted in 6 clusters. The clusters consisted of entire continents, except one which was made up exclusively by the Kalash in the mountains of north Pakistan. Tishkoff said that this 6th cluster "probably reflects high levels of inbreeding and genetic drift in that group". That's very likely and I completely agree. So in this case we have an example of a genetic cluster that doesn't represent an ancestral population, and in fact, the exact opposite, an extremely recent population cluster.
In this study, Tishkoff hasn't looked into this, because 3 of the 14 genetic clusters are almost certainly the result of inbreeding. In graph S10 (page 34) of the supplementary file of the study, they are the Dogon (gray), Hadza (yellow), and Mbugu (white). The latter 2 have less then 10,000 people, like the Kalash, and are clear candidates for inbreeding. The Dogon are instead almost a million people, but their samples were treated differently than the rest. "Because the inclusion of closely related individuals can impact population genetic inferences, we took the conservative approach of excluding individuals inferred to be third degree or more closely related. An exception was made in the case of the Dogon as it is difficult to reliably infer relative pairs in a small sample." The Dogon consisted of 9 samples (the average was 20). They were exempted from a test of relatedness, which means inbreeding can't be ruled out. And they form a cluster to which they belong 100% and which isn't found in any other population in any amount. This is identical to the Kalash or the Hadza, and it's to be expected from inbreeding. All the Dogon samples came from the same small city. I would easily consider the Dogon, Hadza, and Mbugu clusters to be the artifact of inbreeding, like the Kalash in Rosenberg's study, and discard them. That leaves 11 global genetic clusters, 6 of which are found in Africa.
African-Americans are 71% Niger-Kordofanian, 19% Eurasian, 2% Cushitic, 2% Sandawe and 1% or less each of Fulani, NiloSaharan, Chadic, Pygmy and SA Khoesan.
The 'blue' section in the African pie chart is the 'Saharan/Dogon' African cluster which is based on bad samples. So take the Dogon slice with a grain of salt because later studies(Xing et al. 2010) show they are much closer genetically to the Mande, Bambaran, YRI and Yoruba West Africans than to Mozabites.
Dogon samples were NOT used in the global population comparison and they were NOT ruled out as relatives which would make their analysis probably invalid. Dogon are 1 of 15 different African genetic clusters or groups discovered!
quote:The remaining African populations appear to follow a north–south gradient, and the Dogon and Bambara from Mali show high similarity to the HapMap YRI from Nigeria (Supp. Fig. S4C).
In fact, more so than the Bambara according to this same study:
quote:When K = 12, a number of sub-continental patterns appear. In Africa, Mbuti Pygmy, !Kung, and Dogon are separated into distinct groups. Despite being sampled from neighboring regions in Mali, Bambaran and Dogon individuals show quite different ancestry. Most Dogon individuals appear to be composed of a single western African component, while Bambaran individuals contain more than 30% of a component prevalent in eastern Africa.
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The "Saharan Blue" component is essentially Eurasian, much like Hodgson's Maghrebi and Arabian components, hence why Tishkoff herself links this same type ancestry to the Baggara Arabs, connected to their ethnogenesis from the Arabian Peninsula. Each of these types of ancestries (Saharan Blue, Maghrebi, & Arabian) just so happen to have a African substratum compared with most Eurasian ancestries (European, East Asian, etc.), each with their own distinct genetic substructure. For instance, the "Maghrebi" component has significant SSA ancestry via the IBMs or a related half SSA, half *Eurasian group. In contrast, the "Arabian" component is for the most part primarily Basal Eurasian. What the genetic substructure of this component exactly looks like is not quite clear, but think of the model for this type of ancestry as Dzudzuana + minor SSA or a half SSA/half *Eurasian type structure. These components contrast to Tishkoff's "Cushitic" or Hodgson's "Ethio-Somali" component, which is an in situ Northeast African component (Half SSA, half *Eurasian) or in your guys' case, the missing "North African" substructure you guys been talking about these days and the difference between them is as clear as day. Don't expect much from the African-ness of Tishkoff's "Saharan Blue" component outside of Basal Eurasian and some minor SSA ancestry, because those are the only type of African ancestries you're going to get from it.
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Baalberith
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This thread was good to entertain and interesting to say the least, but we must be consistent about African genetics, lest we want more people to be confused about it.
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^ Thanks for the clarification. So the Dogon samples in Tishkoff's study was flawed but do you agree that the Dogon represent a very ancient branch of West Africans at least?
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Baalberith
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: ^ Thanks for the clarification. So the Dogon samples in Tishkoff's study was flawed but do you agree that the Dogon represent a very ancient branch of West Africans at least?
I could see the Dogon as an early Branch of West Africans who possibly harbor Ghost ancestry as alluded by Swenet about the Tellem people. But it's hard to verify this with the limited genetic information we have of them.
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