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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0056775




excerpt

Introducing the Algerian Mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome Profiles into the North African Landscape
2013

Asmahan Bekada,
Rosa Fregel,
Vicente M. Cabrera,
José M. Larruga,
José Pestano,
Soraya Benhamamouch,
Ana M. González


Abstract

North Africa is considered a distinct geographic and ethnic entity within Africa. Although modern humans originated in this Continent, studies of mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA) and Y-chromosome genealogical markers provide evidence that the North African gene pool has been shaped by the back-migration of several Eurasian lineages in Paleolithic and Neolithic times. More recent influences from sub-Saharan Africa and Mediterranean Europe are also evident. The presence of East-West and North-South haplogroup frequency gradients strongly reinforces the genetic complexity of this region. However, this genetic scenario is beset with a notable gap, which is the lack of consistent information for Algeria, the largest country in the Maghreb. To fill this gap, we analyzed a sample of 240 unrelated subjects from a northwest Algeria cosmopolitan population using mtDNA sequences and Y-chromosome biallelic polymorphisms, focusing on the fine dissection of haplogroups E and R, which are the most prevalent in North Africa and Europe respectively. The Eurasian component in Algeria reached 80% for mtDNA and 90% for Y-chromosome. [/b]However, within them, the North African genetic component for mtDNA [U6 and M1; 20%) is significantly smaller than the paternal [E-M81 and E-V65; 70%). The unexpected presence of the European-derived Y-chromosome lineages R-M412, R-S116, R-U152 and R-M529 in Algeria and the rest of the Maghreb could be the counterparts of the mtDNA H1, H3 and V subgroups, pointing to direct maritime contacts between the European and North African sides of the western Mediterranean. Female influx of sub-Saharan Africans into Algeria [20%) is also significantly greater than the male [10%). In spite of these sexual asymmetries, the Algerian uniparental profiles faithfully correlate between each other and with the geography.


Introduction

On geographic, archaeological and historical grounds, Northwest Africa is considered a distinct spatial-temporal entity [1]. The core of this region comprises Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, but sometimes also includes Libya and Mauritania. The region was known as Africa Minor by the ancients and as the Maghreb by the Arabs, the far western region of their Empire. From the Middle Paleolithic on, while the Neanderthals occupied Europe and Western Asia, anatomically modern humans with their Aterian industry already flourished in the Maghreb. After a prolonged hiatus but still in Paleolithic times, a new backed bladelet industry, named Iberomaurusian, replaced the Aterian in this area [2]. A wet period beginning around 9,000 years ago brought Saharan and Mediterranean Neolithic influences to the autochthonous Capsian Epipaleolithic. It seems that since that time Berber Afroasiatic dialects gave some cultural homogeneity to the anthropologically diverse populations of the Maghreb [3]. In historical times, North Africa was affected by the expansion of several Mediterranean civilizations, particularly the Phoenicians and Romans, who left their cultural influences with only minor demic impact on the Berber population [3]. However, the Berber language was not seriously threatened until the Islamic Arabs expanded their religion and culture to the Maghreb, since the end of the 7th century onwards [4]. Widely superseded by Arabic, Berber dialects are today confined to the more mountainous and desert rural areas of the region.

Population genetic studies, mainly those using the non-recombining Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA) uniparental polymorphisms, have provided insight into not only the structure and relationships among North African and neighboring populations but also the most probable origin and date of past immigrations and expansions of several informative lineages in the area. From the beginning, a prominent mtDNA Euroasiatic genetic component was observed in the Northern areas occupied by Morocco [5] and Egypt [6], with gradual sub-Saharan African influences moving southwards to the Western Sahara and Mauritania, or to Nubia and the Sudan respectively. Populations from the Sahel belt and the Chad basin almost certainly played an important role in this sub-Saharan-North African connection [7]–[9]. Comparisons between North African and Mediterranean Europe maternal and paternal gene pools [10]–[13] reveal sharp discontinuities and limited gene flow between both areas.Furthermore, Berbers constitute a very heterogeneous group showing significant differences even between geographically close communities [14]–[20]. However, an unexpected lack of differentiation between Berber and Arab speaking communities was found [15], [21]–[23].[

These results suggest that the Arabization phenomenon was mainly an acculturation process of the indigenous Berber population. However, the significantly higher presence of the prominently Arab Y-chromosome J-M267 haplogroup in cosmopolitan compared to rural samples pointed to a substantial male-biased Arab influence in North Africa and the Levant [11], [15], [16], although it is probable that the diffusion of Islam only reinforced previous human displacements [24], [25]. Interestingly, wide geographical longitudinal gradients are detectable overlying local microstructure in North Africa for several uniparental markers [15], [17], [26], [27]. Some of these lineages, such as the mtDNA haplogroups U6 [28]–[30], M1 [29], [31], [32] and X1 [33] had their ancestral roots in the Middle East but expanded in North Africa since Paleolithic times with instances of secondary dispersion in this area. Others, like sub-haplogroup U5b1b [34], sub-haplogroups H1 and H3 [20], [35], [36] and haplogroup V [37] seem to have reached North Africa from Iberia in a post-last glacial maximum expansion. In concordance, an ancient DNA study from Ibero-Maurusian bone remains from Taforalt in Morocco detected the presence of haplogroups U6, V, T and probably H, pointing to a Paleolithic genetic continuity in Northwest Africa [38]. Additionally, male lineages also provide support to a Paleolithic Asia to Africa back migration [39] with Holocene trans-Saharan spreads as testified by the haplogroup R-V88 distribution [40]. Other lineages, E-M81 [26] and E- M78 [41], seem to be of North African origin with Paleolithic and Neolithic expansions that reached surrounding areas. The presence of these clades in southwestern Europe has been attributed to trans-Mediterranean contacts without involving the Levant [41], [42].

The impressive genetic information gathered from North Africa is beset with a notable gap, the lack of consistent information for the Algerian populations. Algeria is the largest country of the Maghreb and, in fact, the largest country of the whole continent. Although at mtDNA sequencing level the first North African sample studied was from an Algerian Berber-speaking Mozabite population [43], it resulted to be a very isolated group not representative of the whole Algerian population. After that, only a small sample of miscellaneous Algerians has been analyzed [13]. Similarly, only small samples of Algerian Arabs and Berbers have been studied with Y-chromosome binary polymorphisms [26]. To fill in this gap we analyzed a representative cosmopolitan sample from the Oran area of northwestern Algeria. We chose an urban area because urban populations give more representative information than rural, often isolated, localities [15]. In addition, Oran is considered the second largest city in Algeria and lies near Siga, one of the main cities of the largest Algerian Berber kingdoms in classical times [3]. In this study we characterized 240 maternally unrelated Algerians from this area by mtDNA HVS-1 region sequencing and haplogroup diagnostic coding positions by RFLP and SNaPshot multiplexing in order to obtain their maternal profiles. The male sub-set of this sample [102 paternally unrelated males) was previously analyzed for Y-chromosomal binary markers and short tandem repeat haplotypes [44]. However, in the present study, this male sample was further genotyped for the recently described informative Y-chromosome polymorphisms within haplogroups E [41] and R [45] whose subdivision has increased the phylogeographic differentiation between Europe and North Africa. Furthermore, in order to obtain more accurate comparisons, we extended these Y-chromosome fine resolution analyses of haplogroups E1b [M78) and R1b [M343) to published samples of Iberians and Moroccans [46], Saharawi and Mauritanians [47] and Tunisians [15]. This uniparental genetic information has been used to integrate Algeria into the overall North African genetic landscape.


Results

Algerian mtDNA profile

Pairwise comparisons between our Algerian sample and two ones published previously [13], [43] show that the three are heterogeneous in their haplogroup frequencies [Table 1). Mozabites are the most differentiated with a p<0.001 value in both comparisons, whereas the Oran-miscellaneous Algerian pair is only significantly different at p<0.05 level. A detailed inspection of their haplogroup profiles compared to those of surrounding populations [Supplementary Table S2) shows that Mozabites present a high excess of U3 and U6a1′2′3 haplotypes whereas the miscellaneous sample lacks HV0 representatives and has an outstanding excess of J/J1c/J2, L3e5 and L2a1 lineages. In contrast, Oran frequencies fall within the range expected by its geographic position, presenting only a slight deficit of K* lineages [p = 0.04) and a notable excess of M1 lineages [p = 0.002), which could be characteristic of Algeria since it is also shared by the miscellaneous sample [Supplementary Table S2). For these reasons we considered the Oran sample as the best representative of the general Algerian pool. However, in spite of their apparent differences, the three Algerian samples are joined as a tight cluster in a PCA analysis based on haplogroup frequencies [data not shown), and for this reason they have been pooled together for large-area comparisons. In addition, Andalusians from Tunisia show closer affinities with Moroccans and Algerians than with Tunisians [Figure 2A). In comparison with other Mediterranean and west Asian samples, the H haplogroup subdivision in the Algerian sample shows a typical Maghreb population structure[Supplementary Table S4). Congruently, the most common western subgroups, H1 [47.8%) and H3 [10.1%), represent 60% of H lineages. Furthermore, the H1 frequency in Algeria is intermediate between that found in Morocco [51.6%) and Tunisia [29.4%), fitting the eastward-decreasing gradient previously observed for this subgroup [36]. Thus, for the H haplogroup, Algerian affinities with the East seem to be weaker than with the West. Subgroups H2a1, H4 and H13a1 account for 42% of H lineages in Egypt but only 6% in Algeria [Supplementary Table S4). In addition, lioness productions found such a characteristic subgroup of the Arabian Peninsula as H6b [13%) was not found in our Algerian sample.


Of all North African populations, Eurasian lineages are the most frequent in Algeria [80%) while sub-Saharan Africa origin accounts for the remaining 20%. At least two Eurasian lineages, M1 and U6, had Paleolithic implantation and subsequent expansions in North Africa, reaching the Sahel and Sudan belts. It seems that the main focus of distribution of U6 was in the Northwest and M1 in the Northeast areas of the Continent [28]–[31]. Indeed, the U6 haplogroup frequency is significantly higher in Algeria [11.83%) and W. Sahara and Mauritania [11.04%) compared to the eastern: Tunisia [5.24%, p<0.0001), Libya [4.08%, p = 0.006) and Egypt [0.77%, p<0.0001). However, the M1 frequency in Algeria [7.1%) raises an anomalous peak in its decreasing gradient from Northeast to Northwest [Supplementary Table S2). The rest of the Eurasian lineages in North Africa had a Levantine or Middle Eastern origin and, most probably, had reached Europe and Africa in parallel episodes in which sea-travel across the Mediterranean, occurring since Epipaleolithic times, played an important role [13], [62]–[66]. However, for some lineages present in North Africa but showing higher frequencies in Western Europe [for example, H1, H3, HV0 and U5b1b), a direct source in the Iberian Peninsula has been put forward, as a result of post glacial re-expansion [34], [35], [37], [53], [67]–[70]. The observed frequencies for H1 [47.8%), H3 [10.1%) and HV0 [7.5%) in our Algerian sample lie well within the Northwestern- to Northeastern- African decreasing gradients observed for these lineages, reaching statistical significance in the cases of H1 [r = −0.93; p = 0.008) and HV0 [r = −0.83; p = 0.043). Nevertheless, U5b1b haplotypes have not been found in Algeria yet, although this is a rare lineage in North Africa with its highest peak [6.2%) in the W. Saharan-Mauritanian region [Supplementary Table S2). Neither have we detected any representative of haplogroup U5b3, which expanded in Italy in Epipaleolithic times reaching nearby Mediterranean coasts [71]. However, a peculiar U5 haplotype [192 224 261 270) belonging to the U5b2b3 cluster [72] was observed. Until now, it has only exact matches with Hungarians [73], [74] and Romani from Bulgaria [75]. Regarding the sub-Saharan African component, Algeria [20%) is at the same level as Morocco [20.4%) and Egypt [22.9%) but significantly lower [p = 0.003) than Tunisia [30.1%) and marginally lower [p = 0.059) than Libya [27.1%). Aside from the widespread haplogroup L2a, the majority [14%) of Algerian L lineages [L1b, L2a1, L2b, L2c, L3b, L3d) are of West Africa origin. Those from Central Africa [L1c, L3e, L3f) account for an additional 5%, leaving around 1% for those of East African ancestry [L0, L3*, L4). It has been suggested that these lineages reached North Africa since Holocene times, when climatic amelioration permeated the Saharan desert. However the historical trans-Saharan slave trade promoted by the Arabs may have been mainly responsible for their present day incidence [9], [76].

The geographic origins and gradients of some of these haplogroups are graphically reflected in the PCA plot [Figure 2A). The first component clearly separates European Mediterranean populations from North African. Haplogroups N2, U2, T2 and I further separate the West Asian samples from European. On the other side, the sub-Saharan African haplogroups L3d, L1b, L2a1b′f, L2a1c1′2, L3b and U6a pull the North African countries to the left, leaving W. Saharan-Mauritanian as the most displaced. The second component aligns Mediterranean countries according to their geographic longitudinal transect, which continues through West Asia, leaving the Levant in an intermediate position. Haplogroups H, HV0, T2b, and to a lesser degree J2b1 and several U5 subgroups push the populations down whereas East African haplogroups such as L3i, L3x and L2a2 and eastern West-Eurasian haplogroups like N1, R0a and U9 pull them up.

Pairwise based FST distances between populations were calculated [Supplementary Table S8). Significant mean FST values were found between our Algerian sample and North African [0.023±0.002), European [0.036±0.003) and Middle East [0.021±0.003) populations. Within North Africa, the Algerian lowest genetic distance is observed for Tunisia [FST = 0.016) and the greatest for Egypt [0.026). Italy [FST = 0.032) and the Balkans [FST = 0.032) are the closest areas within the European peninsulas while France is the most distant European region [FST = 0.042). Finally, for the Middle East, the Levant [FST = 0.014) seems to be the most similar and the Arabian Peninsula [FST = 0.033) the most different. In fact, removing the pairwise comparison between Algeria and Arabia, the mean FST value for the Middle East drops considerably [FST = 0.018+0.001) rising the mean distance of Algeria from Europe significantly compared to that from the Middle East [p<0.01).

Algerian Y-chromosome profile

Results for the sub-typing of haplogroups E-M78 and R-M343 in the Iberian Peninsula and Northwest African countries including Algeria are presented in Figure 1. In general, data for E-M78 agree with the previous analysis [41]. Therefore, the Eurasian E-V13 is the most common sub-group in Iberia, although one North African E-V65 type has also been detected. On the African side, the lack of E-M78 representatives in a total sample of 189 males from the W. Saharan-Mauritanian area is notable. For the Maghreb countries, the fact that the number of males belonging to para-group E-M78* is the same as those included in the autochthonous E-V65 group also stands out.

For the R-M343 subdivision, the Iberian Peninsula reflects a genuine European profile [45] except for the presence of one Sahel R-V88 type. In contrast, all R-M343 detected in W. Saharan-Mauritanian belong to sub-group R-V88, reaching a frequency of 7%, similar to those observed in other Sahel samples [40]. In the Maghreb countries, the frequency of R-V88 drops to around 1%. On the other hand, the presence in this area of representatives of the European sub-groups R-M412, R-S116, R-U152 and R-M529 points to North-South maritime contacts across the Mediterranean.

Supplementary Table S6 presents frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroups, as spread out as possible, for the same countries-areas as performed for the mtDNA analysis. Clearly, markers E-V65, E-M81 and J1-M267 confirm the geographic and ethnic identity of Algeria but, while E-M81 represents an autochthonous group that sharply decreases in Egypt, J1-M267 points to a Levantine influence. Haplogroups G-M201, L-M20, R2-M124, T-M70, J2-M172 and the majority of derived J2 sub-groups all reflect West Asian influences on Europe with only weak inputs on North Africa. On their part, several European I sub-groups also extend to West Asia with minor gene flow to the African countries. Exceptions to this general pattern are the subgroups J2-M67 and R-M412 that have similar frequencies in Algeria as in Europe, and R2-M124 whose frequency in Egypt is not significantly different from the mean value of European and West Asian areas. These geographic influences are graphically reflected in the PCA analysis [Figure 2B). All the European countries are aligned in a diagonal transect running from the Iberian Peninsula to Turkey and the Caucasus, according to their respective geographic positions, and well separated from the North African countries. Within North Africa, the Maghreb region appears well differentiated from Egypt, which, reflecting its geographical position, is near to the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. The most influential haplogroups in the first component separation are: E-M81, E-V65 and R-V88 that pull the North African countries together, and J-M172, R-M173, R-M17, R-M124 and R-L23 that pull West Asian countries in the opposite direction. In the second component, haplogroups R-L11, R-M529, R-U198, I-M223 and I-M26 are responsible for the spread of the European Mediterranean countries away from Egypt and Arabia, which in turn are pulled by J-M267, B-M60, E-V22 and E-M123.

Discussion

Strong microdifferentiation has been detected for both uniparental markers in Tunisia [15]. It seems to be also the case for the Algerian mtDNA pattern as the three samples compared here showed significant differences among them. However, in spite of these differences, samples from the same country usually cluster together. A notable exception, for mtDNA, is the case of Andalusian from Tunisia that clustered with Moroccan samples. The presence in Algeria of a rare U5b2b3 haplotype, of Eastern Europe adscription, could be explained as result of the Ottoman influence. Although Algeria and W. Sahara-Mauritania show the highest frequencies for mtDNA haplogroup U6 in the Maghreb, division into subgroups reveals that whereas the majority of U6 haplotypes in W. Sahara-Mauritania [7.6%) are included in the ancestral cluster U6a, the bulk in Algeria [9.4%) belongs to derived subgroups U6a1′2′3 [Supplementary Table S2). Similarly, although Algeria [7.3%) and Egypt [8.5%) present the highest frequencies of the North African haplogroup M1, subdivision of this cluster shows clear phylogeographic differences; whereas 6.4% of the Egyptian lineages belong to the East African cluster M1a1, none M1a1 was found in the Algerian sample [Figure 3). These patterns are congruent with lioness productions findings that the existence of different origin of geographic spread for both haplogroups in the Maghreb and East Africa [28], [31]. Contrastingly, for the Y-chromosome North African autochthonous lineages E-V65 and E-M81, Algeria shows the lowest frequencies of all Maghreb countries [Supplementary Table S6). However, E-M81 frequencies in Algeria [44.2%) are still significantly higher [p<0.0001) than in Egypt [11.9%). These results confirm that for both uniparental markers, Egypt and to a lesser extent Libya stand out sharply from the Maghreb [16], [27].


Y-chromosome haplogroup J-M267 frequency is also the highest in Algeria. The presence of this clear Middle Eastern haplogroup in other areas has been attributed to prehistoric spreads [25], [79] and to the historic Islamic rule [15]. The localized distribution of the two most common haplotypes found in Algerians belonging to J1-M267 [44] points to an ancient implantation of this cluster in the country. However, the notable incidence of J2-M67 is most probably due to Aegean contacts [79], [80].

The unexpected presence of the European male lineages R-M412, R-S116, R-U152 and R-M529 in the Mahgreb could be the male counterpart of the maternal gene flow signaled by the mtDNA haplogroups H1, H3 and HV0. In fact, there are several haplogroups with clear geographical origins from European or North African sides of the Mediterranean, but also present on the opposite side. This could be used to estimate the respective levels of gene flow between areas, assuming that their present day frequencies in the source countries were the same when they spread to the other Mediterranean shore. Thus, mean frequency values for the native North African male clusters E-M81 and E-V65 in the Maghreb [Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya), are 40.03±11.66 and 3.40±0.60 respectively. The mean values for the same markers in western-central Mediterranean Europe [Iberian Peninsula, France and Corsica, Italy, Sardinia and Sicily) are 1.86±1.28 and 0.26±0.8 respectively. Taken together, these values would suggest around 5% male Maghreb input in Mediterranean Europe. In turn, E-V13, R-M412, R-S116, and R-U152 could be used to infer the male European input in the Maghreb, giving a value around 8%. Applying the same reasoning, mtDNA U6 and M1 frequencies on the European side would indicate the maternal gene flow from the Maghreb, the estimated value being around 10%. However, when we tried to calculate the European maternal input into the Maghreb using the H1, H3 and HV0 haplogroups, we realized that their respective mean frequencies in Mediterranean Europe [38.33+4.31, 17.27+3.57 and 5.23+1.06) are within the same range as those found in the Maghreb [42.05+4.92, 13.1+3.51 and 6.99+0.90). This would imply a 100% European contribution to the maternal pool of the Maghreb. The fact that the three markers show similar frequencies on both sides rules out stochastic processes as a possible explanation, but further analyses, based on complete mtDNA sequences, are mandatory to investigate alternative scenarios.

Genetic and geographic distances faithfully correlate for both uniparental markers [Figure 2), indicating populations from both sides of the Mediterranean remained apart until meeting in the Levant. This similarity allowed us to confront the main maternal and paternal discriminating contributors to the PCAs spatial distribution. Some equivalences are expected such as mtDNA U6a and Y-chromosome E-M81 and E-V65 affecting Maghreb countries, and that the West African mtDNA L clades and Y-chromosome R-V88 pulls W. Saharan-Mauritanian further over, or that the Mediterranean Europe distribution is largely determined by mtDNA and Y-chromosome lineages with origins and/or dispersions within Europe. However, these coincidences only reflect present-day frequencies, not common past histories. Furthermore, in spite of the similarities, differences among male populations are significantly greater than among the female. For instance, the mean FST distance between Algeria and other Maghreb countries for Y-chromosome [0.061) is nearly three times higher than for mtDNA [0.023), 5 times higher when based on distances between Algeria and Europe and nearly 8 times higher when involving Middle East populations. Gender specific demographic features were used to explain these differences [15]. There are also differences in male and female affinities between populations. Thus, Tunisia is the most related to Algeria at mtDNA level but W. Sahara-Mauritania is the closest when using Y-chromosome. Moreover, France is the most distant population from Algeria based on mtDNA but Iberia is the furthest when based on Y-chromosome. Finally, in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is the less related population when comparing maternal profiles, but from the paternal view, the most distant area is the Caucasus. There are also coincidences; Italy is the closest European country to Algeria using both uniparental markers. Again, similarities and differences are apparent between both uniparental markers when differentiated genetic components of Maghreb, Near East, Europe, and west and east sub-Saharan Africa are taking into account. For the sub-Saharan East African component, Arabia and Egypt harbor the highest frequencies for both Y-chromosome and mtDNA. However, in the Maghreb, W. Sahara-Mauritania accumulates the maximum male eastern contribution and Tunisia the female one. Comparing the sub-Saharan West African component, the correspondence between male and female inputs is perfect; Iberia and Italy show the highest influences in Europe, W. Sahara-Mauritania and Libya in North Africa and the Levant and Arabia in the Middle East. For the European component, Iberia, France and Italy have the greatest representation in both uniparental markers, and for the Middle East it is the Caucasus. Nevertheless, in the Maghreb, the European mtDNA contribution in Morocco is the largest whereas Y-chromosome influence peaks in Algeria. Finally, the Middle East component shows congruent values for both markers, the Balkans is the region with the greatest Middle East component in Europe; Egypt has the greatest in North Africa and Iran in the Middle East. A big study concerning Y-chromosome in Iran has been published after this analysis was carried out [81], however haplogroup frequencies for both sets of Iranian samples are rather similar, and we do not think its inclusion would modify largely our conclusions.

Recently, it has been reported that the sub-Saharan African gene flow to Tunisia shows a strong sex bias, involving a significantly larger female contribution [p<0.0001) [15]. The same tendency holds for all North African populations except Libya, which could be attributed to insufficient sampling [19]. However, significance levels are more moderate in all instances; for example, probability values in Algeria [0.025) or in W. Sahara-Mauritania [0.043) are two times lower than for Tunisia. The same sex bias is found in the Middle East, reaching significance in Arabia [p = 0.0005) and in the Caucasus [p = 0.045). In Europe, only Italy shows significant differences [p<0.0001) for the gender contribution of sub-Saharan Africans but contrarily, in this case, the male input [3.91%) is highest than the female one [1.35%). On the basis of uniparental markers [82]–[84] and massive genomic analysis [77], [85], the bulk of the sub-Saharan African gene flow has been attributed to historic events such as Romanization, Islamic role and, even more so, the Arab and Atlantic slave trades. A preference for assimilation of females from minority ethnics groups in patriarchal societies has also been put forward [15], [82] to explain the general pattern of sub-Saharan African female integration. The case of Italy could be better explained, at least partially, by more ancient sub-Saharan African inputs into Europe than are thought by several authors to have occurred [83], [84], [86]. However, see Capelli et al. [87] for another point of view. All these uniparental peculiarities could be explained supposing: 1, the existence of several dispersion foci at different times in western Asia, independently influencing the African and European Mediterranean areas; 2, the spread of independent autochthonous lineages in both areas, and 3, bidirectional maritime contacts between areas with minor gene flow.

The inclusion of Algeria offers a more complete view of the North African genetic landscape from maternal and paternal perspectives, showing not only spatial gradients for some lineages but also sexual asymmetry in the relative affinities between populations. Perhaps, the strongest sexual discrepancy refers to the time of the main Middle East and European spreads into North Africa, whereas from the Y-chromosome perspective they seem to have occurred since the Neolithic onwards [26], [40], although see also Luis et al. [88]. From mtDNA [28]–[31] and wide genome analysis [77] the signals of Paleolithic influences are however evident. As the time to the most recent common ancestor through mtDNA is higher than that of the Y-chromosome [89], sex-specific demographic processes are probably the main factor behind this difference. A view reconciling the two perspectives would be that male lineages are better suited for detecting more recent human expansions whereas the ramifications of mtDNA genealogies extend to Paleolithic times and beyondhttp://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0056775.g001&representation=PNG_M
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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 


distance chart here Amun Ra sometimes puts up

At left
South African
African Great Lakes
Tropical West African
Sahelian
_______________________

Now look at
Horn of Africa
North African

these are under the red heading "Near East"
The label doesn't even matter if you pay attention to the distances, they will be in that same position regardless

According to this chart they are closer to Arabs, Europeans, Mespotamians and Indians than they are to other Africans, although they do share ancestry with other Africans
 

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Posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate (Member # 20039) on :
 
Forget about this. This forum is about Ancient Egypt. How do you like this map:



Considering the DNA Tribes results on the Ancient Egyptian mummies, you understand, right?
 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 
View Recent Posts: Amun-Ra The Ultimate
topics started

Complex Genetic History of East African Human Populations (post #0) Egyptology 13 July, 2013


Maps of Civilizations, Kingdoms, Peoples, States, and Cities in Africa through time (post #0) Ancient Egypt 09 April, 2013

Any good oral history books about Africa (and specific ethnic groups)? (post #0) Ancient Egypt 25 March, 2013


Human mutation rate revealed (post #0)

The Peopling Of The Sahara During the Holocene/Green Sahara (post #0)

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Originally posted by Amun-Ra The Ultimate:
Forget about this. This forum is about Ancient Egypt.

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Originally posted by xyyman:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
the term "Saharan-Arabian" has led to a lot of confusion

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Confusing to whom?

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Back to the beginning! In April 20th, 1980 indeed, the collective “soul” of the Kabyle people, of nearly three thousand years aged, in a fabulous and unprecedented popular communion gushed from beneath the tombs of silence, the dismissed calends and the contemptible rule of the established political order in which the human stupidity had, for a moment, thought to lock their still alive burial forever.

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Although 2 mtDNA lineages with an African origin (haplogroups M and N) were the progenitors of all non-African haplogroups, macrohaplogroup L (including haplogroups L0–L6) is limited to sub-Saharan Africa.

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The presence of M haplogroup in Ethiopia, named M1, led to the proposal that haplogroup M originated in eastern Africa, approximately 60,000 years ago, and was carried towards Asia [34].

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The coding regions transitions are likely to change relatively slower than those of hypervariable segments, and hence, likely to remain intact within a clade. To assist in determining which clade to place a monophyletic unit, key coding region transitions have to be identified. In the case of M1, we were told:

We found 489C (Table 3) in all Indian and eastern-African haplogroup M mtDNAs analysed, but not in the non-M haplogroup controls, including 20 Africans representing all African main lineages (6 L1, 4 L2, 10 L3) and 11 Asians.

These findings, and the lack of positive evidence (given the RFLP status) that the 10400 C->T transition defining M has happened more than once, suggest that it has a single common origin, but do not resolve its geographic origin. Analysis of position 10873 (the MnlI RFLP) revealed that all the M molecules (eastern African, Asian and those sporadically found in our population surveys) were 10873C (Table 3). As for the non-M mtDNAs, the ancient L1 and the L2 African-specific lineages5, as well as most L3 African mtDNAs, also carry 10873C.

Conversely, all non-M mtDNAs of non-African origin analysed so far carry 10873T. These data indicate that the **transition 10400 C-->T, which defines haplogroup M**, arose on an African background characterized by the ancestral state 10873C, which is also present in four primate (common and pygmy chimps, gorilla and orangutan) mtDNA sequences.

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"These indicate that the root of L3 gives rise to a multifurcation from a
single haplotype producing a number of distinct subclades... The
simplest explanation for this geographical distribution [haplogroups M
and N], however, is an expansion of the root type within East Africa,
where several independent L3 branches thrive, including a sister group
to L3, christened L4 (Kivisild et al. 2004; Chap. 7), followed by
divergence into haplogroups M and N somewhere between the Horn of
Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Since neither the L3 root type nor
any other descendants survive outside Africa, the root type itself must
have become extinct during a period of genetic drift in the founder
population as it diversified into haplogroups M and N, if the
diversification was outside Africa. If on the other hand the
diversification was indeed within East Africa, then Haplogroups M and
N must have either been carried out of Africa in their entirety or
subsequently have become extinct within Africa, with the singular
exception of the derived M1."

---

quote:

---

Although Haplogroup M differentiated
soon after the out of Africa exit and it is
widely distributed in Asia (east Asia and
India) and Oceania, there is an
interesting exception for one of its more
than 40 sub-clades: M1.. Indeed this
lineage is mainly limited to the African
continent with peaks in the Horn of
Africa."

---

quote:

---

“..the M1 presence in the Arabian
peninsula signals a predominant East
African influence since the Neolithic
onwards.“

---

quote:

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Macrohaplogroup M (489-10400-14783-15043), excluding M1 which is east African, is distributed among most south, east and north Asians, Amerindians (containing a minority of north and central Amerindians and a majority of south Amerindians), and many central Asians and Melanesians.

---

quote:

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"No southwest Asian specific clades for M1 or U6 were discovered. U6 and M1 frequencies in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe do not follow similar patterns, and their sub-clade divisions do not appear to be compatible with their shared history reaching back to the Early Upper Palaeolithic."


[...]


U6a1 and M1b, with their coalescent ages of ~20,000–22,000 years ago and earliest inferred expansion in northwest Africa, could coincide with the flourishing of the Iberomaurusian industry, whilst U6b and M1b1 appeared at the time of the Capsian culture.

---

quote:

---

The results show that the most ancient haplogroup is L3*, which would have been introduced to North Africa from eastern sub-Saharan populations around 20,000 years ago. Our results also point to a less ancient western sub-Saharan gene flow to Tunisia, including haplogroups L2a and L3b. This conclusion points to an ancient African gene flow to Tunisia before 20,000 BP.

[...]

This conclusion points to an ancient African gene flow to Tunisia before 20,000 BP. These findings parallel the more recent findings of both archaeology and linguistics on the prehistory of Africa.

The present work suggests that sub-Saharan contributions to North Africa have experienced several complex population processes after the occupation of the region by anatomically modern humans.

Our results reveal that Berber speakers have a foundational biogeographic root in Africa and that deep African lineages have continued to evolve in supra-Saharan Africa.

---

quote:

---

Regular Middle Paleolithic inventories as well as Middle Paleolithic inventories of Aterian type have a long chronology in Morocco going back to MIS 6 and are interstratified in some sites. Their potential for detecting chrono-cultural patterns is low. The transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic, here termed Early Upper Paleolithic—at between 30 to 20 ka—remains a most enigmatic era. Scarce data from this period requires careful and fundamental reconsidering of human presence. By integrating environmental data in the reconstruction of population dynamics, clear correlations become obvious. High resolution data are lacking before 20 ka, and at some sites this period is characterized by the occurrence of sterile layers between Middle Paleolithic deposits, possibly indicative of a very low presence of humans in Morocco. After Heinrich Event 1, there is an enormous increase of data due to the prominent Late Iberomaurusian deposits that contrast strongly with the foregoing accumulations in terms of sedimentological features, fauna, and artifact composition. The Younger Dryas again shows a remarkable decline of data marking the end of the Paleolithic. Environmental improvements in the Holocene are associated with an extensive Epipaleolithic occupation. Therefore, the late glacial cultural sequence of Morocco is a good test case for analyzing the interrelationship of culture and climate change.

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quote:

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The makers of these assemblages can therefore be seen as (1) a group of Homo sapiens predating and/or contemporary to the out-of-Africa exodus of the species, and (2) geographi- cally one of the (if not the) closest from the main gate to Eurasia at the northeastern corner of the African continent. Although Moroccan specimens have been discovered far away from this area, they may provide us with one of the best proxies of the African groups that expanded into Eurasia. Comparing them with the European and Near- Eastern human groups that immediately pre- and post-dated this exodus is therefore of crucial importance in order to elucidate the nature of the populations involved in it

[...]

---

--J.-J. Hublin, Dental Evidence from the Aterian Human Populations of Morocco
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~bioanth/tanya_smith/pdf/Hublin_et_al_2012.pdf
 

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Posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor (Member # 18264) on :
 
R and it's root!











A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa Fulvio Cruciani et al (2011)

quote:

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The deepest branching separates A1b from a monophyletic clade whose members (A1a, A2, A3, B, C, and R) all share seven mutually reinforcing derived mutations (five transitions and two transversions, all at non-CpG sites). To retain the information from the reference MSY tree13 as much as possible, we named this clade A1a-T (Figure 1).Within A1a-T, the transversion V221 separates A1a from a monophyletic clade (called A2-T) consisting of three branches: A2, A3, and BT, the latter being supported by ten mutations (Figure 1).


[...]


How does the present MSY tree compare with the backbone of the recently published “reference” MSY phylogeny?13 The phylogenetic relationships we observed among chromosomes belonging to haplogroups B, C, and R are reminiscent of those reported in the tree by Karafet et al.13 These chromosomes belong to a clade (haplogroup BT) in which chromosomes C and R share a common ancestor (Figure 2).

---

quote:

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Y-DNA haplogroup A contains lineages deriving from the earliest branching in the human Y chromosome tree. The oldest branching event, separating A0-P305 and A1-V161, is thought to have occurred about 140,000 years ago. Haplogroups A0-P305, A1a-M31 and A1b1a-M14 are restricted to Africa and A1b1b-M32 is nearly restricted to Africa. The haplogroup that would be named A1b2 is composed of haplogroups B through T. The internal branching of haplogroup A1-V161 into A1a-M31, A1b1, and BT (A1b2) may have occurred about 110,000 years ago. A0-P305 is found at low frequency in Central and West Africa. A1a-M31 is observed in northwestern Africans; A1b1a-M14 is seen among click language-speaking Khoisan populations. A1b1b-M32 has a wide distribution including Khoisan speaking and East African populations, and scattered members on the Arabian Peninsula.

---

quote:

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The BT haplogroup split from the root of the Y haplogroup tree 55,000 years before present (bp), probably in North East Africa. The CF(xDE) haplogroup was the common ancestor of all people who migrated outside of Africa until recent times. The defining mutation occurred 31-55,000 years bp in North East Africa and is still most common in Africa today in Ethiopia and Sudan. The DE haplogroup appeared approximately 50,000 years bp in North East Africa and subsequently split into haplogroup E that spread to Europe and Africa and haplogroup D that rapidly spread along the coastline of India and Asia to North Asia.

---

http://www.isogg.org/tree/ISOGG_YDNATreeTrunk.html


Haplogroup CT (M168): Time of Emergence: 70,000 BP, 2800 generations ago beginning of the Last Glacial Period Place of Origin: The African Rift Valleymore
by Gábor Balogh

http://www.academia.edu/4461398/Haplogroup_CT_M168
 

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Posted by xyyman (Member # 13597) on :
 
He! He! He1 You didn't need to nuke him.


This is informative..on hg-A in NW Africa and Arabia


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Y-DNA haplogroup A contains lineages deriving from the earliest branching in the human Y chromosome tree. The oldest branching event, separating A0-P305 and A1-V161, is thought to have occurred about 140,000 years ago. Haplogroups A0-P305, A1a-M31 and A1b1a-M14 are restricted to Africa and A1b1b-M32 is nearly restricted to Africa. The haplogroup that would be named A1b2 is composed of haplogroups B through T. The internal branching of haplogroup A1-V161 into A1a-M31, A1b1, and BT (A1b2) may have occurred about 110,000 years ago. A0-P305 is found at low frequency in Central and West Africa. A1a-M31 is observed in northwestern Africans; A1b1a-M14 is seen among click language-speaking Khoisan populations. A1b1b-M32 has a wide distribution including Khoisan speaking and East African populations, and scattered members on the Arabian Peninsula.
 

---

Posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor (Member # 18264) on :
 
Why is it this clown, Asmahan Bekada, did not use one word on the Vandals?

It's because he is a liar with hideous intentions that's why!

quote:

---

I have been working for a long time and published several articles on Roman pottery in Rome, Italy and North Africa. I have a good knowledge of all the classes of pottery that circulated in the Mediterranean from the Republican period to the 7th/8th century AD and beyond.

The period in question from AD 300 to AD 700, spans more that political transitions: it sees the adoption of Christianity (during the Las Imperial period and the Byzantine times), the Vandal rule and the adoption of Arianism and the Arab/Muslim imposition.

---

quote:

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"And yet the number of the Vandals and Alans was said in former times, at least, to amount to no more than fifty thousand men. However, after that time by their natural increase among themselves and by associating other barbarians with them they came to be an exceedingly numerous people."

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by the lioness,:
they can't deal with it so they spam other stuff, shyt is funny

---

quote:

---

: one of an Upper Paleolithic people of northern Africa closely related to Cro-Magnon man but having a broader nose, a sloping forehead, and heavy brow ridges

---

quote:

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Craniometric data from seven human groups (Tables 3, 4) were subjected to principal components analysis, which allies the early Holocene population at Gobero (Gob-e) with mid-Holocene “Mechtoids” from Mali and Mauritania [18],[26],[27] and with Late Pleistocene Iberomaurusians and early Holocene Capsians from across the Maghreb:

---

quote:

---

*Frequently termed Mechta-Afalou or Mechtoid, these were a skeletally robust people and definitely African in origin, though attempts, such as those of Ferembach (1985), to establish similarities with much older and rarer Aterian skeletal remains are tenuous given the immense temporal separation between the two (Close and Wendorf 1990). At the opposite end of the chronological spectrum, dental morphology does suggest connections with later Africans, including those responsible for the Capsian Industry (Irish 2000) and early mid-Holocene human remains from the western half of the Sahara (Dutour 1989), something that points to the Maghreb as one of the regions from which people recolonised the desert (MacDonald 1998).

---

--Lawrence Barham
The First Africans: African Archaeology from the Earliest Toolmakers to Most Recent Foragers (Cambridge World Archaeology)(2008)


For your comparison:

quote:

---

Evidence from throughout the Sahara indicates that the region experienced a cool, dry and windy climate during the last glacial period, followed by a wetter climate with the onset of the current interglacial, with humid conditions being fully established by around 10,000 years BP, when we see the first evidence of a reoccupation of parts of the central Sahara by hunter gathers, most likely originating from sub-Saharan Africa (Cremaschi and Di Lernia, 1998; Goudie, 1992; Phillipson, 1993; Ritchie, 1994; Roberts, 1998).


[...]


Conical tumuli, platform burials and a V-type monument represent structures similar to those found in other Saharan regions and associated with human burials, appearing in sixth millennium BP onwards in northeast Niger and southwest Libya (Sivilli, 2002). In the latter area a shift in emphasis from faunal to human burials, complete by the early fifth millennium BP, has been interpreted by Di Lernia and Manzi (2002) as being associated with a changes in social organisation that occurred at a time of increasing aridity. While further research is required in order to place the funerary monuments of Western Sahara in their chronological context, we can postulate a similar process as a hypothesis to be tested, based on the high density of burial sites recorded in the 2002 survey. Fig. 2: Megaliths associated with tumulus burial (to right of frame), north of Tifariti (Fig. 1). A monument consisting of sixty five stelae was also of great interest; precise alignments north and east, a division of the area covered into separate units, and a deliberate scattering of quartzite inside the structure, are suggestive of an astronomical function associated with funerary rituals. Stelae are also associated with a number of burial sites, again suggesting dual funerary and astronomical functions (Figure 2). Further similarities with other Saharan regions are evident in the rock art recorded in the study area, although local stylistic developments are also apparent. Carvings of wild fauna at the site of Sluguilla resemble the Tazina style found in Algeria, Libya and Morocco (Pichler and Rodrigue, 2003), although examples of elephant and rhinoceros in a naturalistic style reminiscent of engravings from the central Sahara believed to date from the early Holocene are also present.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by the lioness,:
they can't deal with it so they spam other stuff, shyt is funny

---

There is nothing of actual fact in it, Asmahan Bekada. So all you can do now, is repeat your same rant. As is displayed by multiple sources I have posts.


Successes and failures of human dispersals from North Africa
(2011)











http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618211003612
 

---

Posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor (Member # 18264) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by the lioness,:
they can't deal with it so they spam other stuff, shyt is funny

---

quote:

---

For years, Italian Anthropologist Fabrizio Mori has been trekking into the Libyan Desert to look for graffiti, ancient inscriptions on rocks. Near the oasis of Ghat, 500 miles south of the Mediterranean coast, he found on his last expedition a shallow cave with many graffiti scratched on its walls. When he dug into the sandy floor, he found a peculiar bundle: a goatskin wrapped around the desiccated body of a child. The entrails had been removed and replaced by a bundle of herbs.

Such deliberate mummification was practiced chiefly by the ancient Egyptians. But when Dr. Mori took the mummy back to Italy and had its age measured by the carbon 14 method, it proved to be 5,400 years old—considerably older than the oldest known civilization in the valley of the Nile 900 miles to the east.

The discovery suggested a clue to one of the great puzzles of Egyptology: Where was the birthplace of Egyptian culture? Although many authorities believe it is the world's oldest, they have been perplexed by the fact that it did not develop gradually in the Nile Valley. About 3200 B.C. the First Dynasty appeared there suddenly and full grown, with an elaborate religion, laws, arts and crafts, and a system of writing. Until that time the Nile Valley was apparently inhabited by neolithic people on a low cultural level. Dr. Mori's mummy provides support for the theory that Egyptian culture grew by slow stages in the Sahara, which was not then a desert. When the climate grew insupportably dry, the already civilized Egyptians took refuge in the Nile Valley, and the sands of the Sahara swept over their former home.

The mummy does not prove that there is a civilization buried in the Sahara but it does mean that, in the next few years, the desert will be swarming with anthropologists looking for one.

---

Sourced by: Time Magazine.


http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,865145,00.html





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5bkNlGg0H0

quote:

---

Evidence from throughout the Sahara indicates that the region experienced a cool, dry and windy climate during the last glacial period, followed by a wetter climate with the onset of the current interglacial, with humid conditions being fully established by around 10,000 years BP, when we see the first evidence of a reoccupation of parts of the central Sahara by hunter gathers, most likely originating from sub-Saharan Africa (Cremaschi and Di Lernia, 1998; Goudie, 1992; Phillipson, 1993; Ritchie, 1994; Roberts, 1998).


[...]


Conical tumuli, platform burials and a V-type monument represent structures similar to those found in other Saharan regions and associated with human burials, appearing in sixth millennium BP onwards in northeast Niger and southwest Libya (Sivilli, 2002). In the latter area a shift in emphasis from faunal to human burials, complete by the early fifth millennium BP, has been interpreted by Di Lernia and Manzi (2002) as being associated with a changes in social organisation that occurred at a time of increasing aridity. While further research is required in order to place the funerary monuments of Western Sahara in their chronological context, we can postulate a similar process as a hypothesis to be tested, based on the high density of burial sites recorded in the 2002 survey. Fig. 2: Megaliths associated with tumulus burial (to right of frame), north of Tifariti (Fig. 1). A monument consisting of sixty five stelae was also of great interest; precise alignments north and east, a division of the area covered into separate units, and a deliberate scattering of quartzite inside the structure, are suggestive of an astronomical function associated with funerary rituals. Stelae are also associated with a number of burial sites, again suggesting dual funerary and astronomical functions (Figure 2). Further similarities with other Saharan regions are evident in the rock art recorded in the study area, although local stylistic developments are also apparent. Carvings of wild fauna at the site of Sluguilla resemble the Tazina style found in Algeria, Libya and Morocco (Pichler and Rodrigue, 2003), although examples of elephant and rhinoceros in a naturalistic style reminiscent of engravings from the central Sahara believed to date from the early Holocene are also present.

---

quote:

---

The Garamantes flourished in southwestern Libya, in the core of the Sahara Desert ~3,000 years ago and largely controlled trans-Saharan trade. Their biological affinities to other North African populations, including the Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian and Sudanese, roughly contemporary to them, are examined by means of cranial nonmetric traits using the Mean Measure of Divergence and Mahalanobis D(2) distance. The aim is to shed light on the extent to which the Sahara Desert inhibited extensive population movements and gene flow. Our results show that the Garamantes possess distant affinities to their neighbors. This relationship may be due to the Central Sahara forming a barrier among groups, despite the archaeological evidence for extended networks of contact. The role of the Sahara as a barrier is further corroborated by the significant correlation between the Mahalanobis D(2) distance and geographic distance between the Garamantes and the other populations under study. In contrast, no clear pattern was observed when all North African populations were examined, indicating that there was no uniform gene flow in the region.

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quote:

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This site has been called Gobero, after the local Tuareg name for the area. About 10,000 years ago (7700–6200 B.C.E.), Gobero was a much less arid environment than it is now. In fact, it was actually a rather humid lake side hometown of sorts for a group of hunter-fisher-gatherers who not only lived their but also buried their dead there. How do we know they were fishing? Well, remains of large nile perch and harpoons were found dating to this time period.

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quote:

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The older occupants have craniofacial dimensions that demonstrate similarities with mid-Holocene occupants of the southern Sahara and Late Pleistocene to early Holocene inhabitants of the Maghreb.

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quote:

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These early occupants abandon the area under arid conditions and, when humid conditions return ~4600 B.C.E., are replaced by a more gracile people with elaborated grave goods including animal bone and ivory ornaments.

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quote:

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Principal components analysis of craniometric variables closely allies the early Holocene occupants at Gobero with a skeletally robust, trans-Saharan assemblage of Late Pleistocene to mid-Holocene human populations from the Maghreb and southern Sahara.

---

quote:

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Figure 6. Principal components analysis of craniofacial dimensions among Late Pleistocene to mid-Holocene populations from the Maghreb and southern Sahara.


Plot of first two principal components extracted from a mean matrix for 17 craniometric variables (Tables 4, 7) in 9 human populations (Table 3) from the Late Pleistocene through the mid-Holocene from the Maghreb and southern Sahara. Seven trans-Saharan populations cluster together, whereas Late Pleistocene Aterians (Ater) and the mid-Holocene population at Gobero (Gob-m) are striking outliers. Axes are scaled by the square root of the corresponding eigenvalue for the principal component. Abbreviations: Ater, Aterian; EMC, eastern Maghreb Capsian; EMI, eastern Maghreb Iberomaurusian; Gob-e, Gobero early Holocene; Gob-m, Gobero mid-Holocene; Mali, Hassi-el-Abiod, Mali; Maur, Mauritania; WMC, western Maghreb Capsian; WMI, western Maghreb Iberomaurusian.

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quote:

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Craniometric data from seven human groups (Tables 3, 4) were subjected to principal components analysis, which allies the early Holocene population at Gobero (Gob-e) with mid-Holocene “Mechtoids” from Mali and Mauritania [18], [26], [27] and with Late Pleistocene Iberomaurusians and early Holocene Capsians from across the Maghreb (see cluster in Figure 6). The striking similarity between these seven human populations confirms previous suggestions regarding their affinity [18] and is particularly significant given their temporal range (Late Pleistocene to mid-Holocene) and trans-Saharan geographic distribution (across the Maghreb to the southern Sahara).

---

quote:

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Trans-Saharan craniometry. Principal components analysis of craniometric variables closely allies the early Holocene occupants at Gobero, who were buried with Kiffian material culture, with Late Pleistocene to mid-Holocene humans from the Maghreb and southern Sahara referred to as Iberomaurusians, Capsians and “Mechtoids.” Outliers to this cluster of populations include an older Aterian sample and the mid-Holocene occupants at Gobero associated with Tenerean material culture.

---

quote:

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The reconstruction of human cultural patterns in relation to environmental variations is an essential topic in modern archaeology.

In western Africa, a first Holocene humid phase beginning c. 11,000 years BP is known from the analysis of lacustrine sediments (Riser, 1983 ; Gasse, 2002). The monsoon activity increased and reloaded hydrological networks (like the Saharan depressions) leading to the formation of large palaeolakes. The colonisation of the Sahara by vegetation, animals and humans was then possible essentially around the topographic features like Ahaggar (fig. 1). But since 8,000 years BP, the climate began to oscillate towards a new arid episode, and disturbed the ecosystems (Jolly et al., 1998; Jousse, 2003).

First, the early Neolithics exploited the wild faunas, by hunting and fishing, and occupied small sites without any trace of settlement in relatively high latitudes. Then, due to the climatic deterioration, they had to move southwards.

This context leads us to consider the notion of refugia. Figure 1 presents the main zones colonised by humans in western Africa. When the fossil valleys of Azaouad, Tilemsi and Azaouagh became dry, after ca. 5,000 yr BP, humans had to find refuges in the Sahelian belt, and gathered around topographic features (like the Adrar des Iforas, and the Mauritanians Dhar) and major rivers, especially the Niger Interior Delta, called the Mema.

Whereas the Middle Neolithic is relatively well-known, the situation obviously becomes more complex and less information is available concerning local developments in late Neolithic times.. Only some cultural affiliations existed between the populations of Araouane and Kobadi in the Mema. Elsewhere, and especially along the Atlantic coast and in the Dhar Tichitt and Nema, the question of the origin of Neolithic peopling remains unsolved.

A study of the palaeoenvironment of those refugia was performed by analysing antelopes ecological requirements (Jousse, submitted). It shows that even if the general climate was drying from 5,000 – 4,000 yr BP in the Sahara and Sahel, edaphic particularities of these refugia allowed the persistence of local gallery forest or tree savannas, where humans and animals could have lived (fig. 2). At the same time, cultural innovation like agriculture, cattle breeding, social organisation in villages are recognised. For the moment, the relation between the northern and the southern populations are not well known.

How did humans react against aridity? Their dietary behaviour are followed along the Holocene, in relation with the environment, demographic expansion, settling process and emergence of productive activities.

- The first point concerns the pastoralism. The progression of cattle pastoralism from eastern Africa (fig. 3) is recorded from 7,400 yr BP in the Ahaggar and only from 4,400 yr BP in western Africa. This trend of breeding activities and human migrations can be related to climatic evolution. Since forests are infested by Tse-Tse flies preventing cattle breeding, the reduction of forest in the low-Sahelian belt freed new areas to be colonised. Because of the weakness of the archaeozoological material available, it is difficult to know what was the first pattern of cattle exploitation.

- A second analysis was carried on the resources balance, between fishing-hunting-breeding activities. The diagrams on figures 4 and 5 present the number of species of wild mammals, fishes and domestic stock, from a literature compilation. Fishing is known around Saharan lakes and in the Niger. Of course, it persisted with the presence of water points and even in historical times, fishing became a specialised activity among population living in the Niger Interior Delta. Despite the general environmental deterioration, hunting does not decrease thanks to the upholding of the vegetation in these refugia (fig. 2). On the contrary, it is locally more diversified, because at this local scale, the game diversity is closely related to the vegetation cover. Hence, the arrival of pastoral activities was not prevalent over other activities in late Neolithic, when diversifying resources appeared as an answer to the crisis.

This situation got worse in the beginning of historic times, from 2,000 yr BP, when intense settling process and an abrupt aridity event (Lézine & Casanova, 1989) led to a more important perturbation of wild animals communities. They progressively disappeared from the human diet, and the cattle, camel and caprin breeding prevailed as today.

---

quote:

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The Middle Holocene, and more precisely the period from around 6400 BP and 5000 BP, was a period of profound environmental change, during which the global climate underwent a systematic reorganisation as the warm, humid post-glacial climate of the Early Holocene gave way to a climatic configuration broadly similar to that of today (Brooks, 2010; Mayewski et al., 2004). The most prominent manifestations of this transition were a cooling at middle and high latitudes and high altitudes (Thompson et al., 2006), a transition from relatively humid to arid conditions in the NHST (Brooks, 2006, 2010; deMenocal et al., 2000) and the establishment of a regular El Niño after a multimillennial period during which is was rare or absent (Sandweiss et al., 2007).
This “Middle Holocene Climatic Transition” (MHCT) represented a stepwise acceleration of climatic trends that had commenced in the 9th millennium BP in some regions (Jung et al., 2004), and entailed a long-term shift towards cooler and more arid conditions, punctuated by episodes of abrupt climatic change. Around 6400–6300 BP, palaeo-environmental evidence indicates abrupt lake recessions and increased aridity in northern Africa, western Asia, South Asia and northern China, and the advance of glaciers in Europe and elsewhere (Damnati, 2000; Enzel et al., 1999; Jung et al., 2004; Linstädter & Kröpelin, 2004; Mayewski et al., 2004; Zhang et al., 2000).


Ocean records suggest a cold-arid episode around 5900 BP (Bond et al., 1997), followed in the Sahara by an abrupt shift to aridity around 5800–5700 BP, evident in terrestrial records from the Libyan central Sahara and marine records from the Eastern Tropical Atlantic (Cremaschi, 2002; di Lernia, 2002; deMenocal et al., 2000). From about 5800–5700 BP to 5200–5000 BP, aridification intensified in the Sahara (deMenocal et al., 2000), South Asia (Enzel et al., 1999), north-central China (Zhang et al., 2000; Xiao et al., 2004) and the Arabian Peninsula (Parker et al., 2006). Over the same period, drought conditions prevailed in the Eastern Medi- terranean (Bar-Matthews & Ayalon, 2011), the Zagros Mountains of Iran (Stevens et al., 2006) and County Mayo in Ireland (Caseldine et al., 2005), while river flow into the Cariaco Basin of northern South America decreased (Haug et al., 2001). An abrupt cold-arid epi- sode around 5200 BP is evident in environmental records from Europe, Africa, western Asia, China and South America, (Caseldine et al., 2005; Gasse, 2002; Magny & Haas, 2004; Parker et al., 2006; Thompson et al., 1995).
The above evidence indicates that the MHCT was associated with a weakening of monsoon systems across the globe, and the southward retreat of monsoon rains in the NHST (Lézine, 2009). However, these changes coin- cided with climatic reorganisation outside of the global monsoon belt, as indicated by the onset of El Niño and evidence of large changes in climate at middle and high latitudes. The ultimate driving force behind these changes was a decline in the intensity of summer solar radiation outside the tropics, resulting from long-term changes in the angle of the Earth’s axis of rotation relative to its orbital plane. This was translated into abrupt changes in climate by non-linear feedback processes within the climate system (Brooks, 2004; deMenocal et al., 2000; Kukla & Gavin, 2004).


[...]


In the Sahara, population agglomeration is also evident in certain areas such as the Libyan Fezzan, which (albeit much later) also saw the emergence of an indigenous Saharan “civilization” in the form of the Garamantian Tribal Confederation, the development of which has been described explicitly in terms of adaptation to increased aridity (Brooks, 2006; di Lernia et al., 2002; Mattingly et al., 2003).

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quote:

---

Originally posted by xyyman:
He! He! He1 You didn't need to nuke him.


This is informative..on hg-A in NW Africa and Arabia


quote:

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quote:

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Abstract
The development of new methodologies for high-throughput SNP analysis is one of the most stimulating areas in genetic research. Here, we describe a rapid and robust assay to simultaneously genotype 17 mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) coding region SNPs by minisequencing using SNaPshot. SNaPshot is a methodology based on a single base extension of an unlabeled oligonucleotide with labeled dideoxy terminators. The set of SNPs implemented in this multiplexed SNaPshot reaction allow us to allocate common mitochondrial West Eurasian haplotypes into their corresponding branch in the mtDNA skeleton, with special focus on those haplogroups lacking unambiguous diagnostic positions in the first and second hypervariable regions (HVS-I/II; by far, the most common segments analyzed by sequencing). Particularly interesting is the set of SNPs that subdivide haplogroup H; the most frequent haplogroup in Europe (40–50%) and one of the most poorly characterized phylogenetically in the HVS-I/II region. In addition, the polymorphic positions selected for this multiplex reaction increase considerably the discrimination power of current mitochondrial analysis in the forensic field and can also be used as a rapid screening tool prior to full sequencing analysis. The method has been validated in a sample of 266 individuals and shows high accuracy and robustness avoiding both the use of alternative time-consuming classical strategies (i.e. RFLP typing) and the need for high quantities of DNA template.

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
Troll Patrol at the present time, 2013, which population has more African ancestry Maghrebians or Egyptians?

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Originally posted by xyyman:
He! He! He1 You didn't need to nuke him.


This is informative..on hg-A in NW Africa and Arabia


quote:

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by xyyman:
He! He! He1 You didn't need to nuke him.


This is informative..on hg-A in NW Africa and Arabia


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He does need to nuke me.

so he doesn't have to address modern demographics


so he spams on who they were 10,000 years ago.

Modern Demographics 2013,
this is what Troll Patrol doesn't understand. So he goes into knee jerk mode

A lot of thes articles are about who the population of the Maghreb are today in 2013.
People here can't deal with that so they go back 10,000 and start talking about who they were when the sahara was green.

It's avoidance

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Little is known about the beginnings and spread of food production in the tropics, but recent research suggests that definitions that depend on morphological change may hamper recognition of early farming in these regions. The earliest form of food production in Africa developed in arid tropical grasslands. Animals were the earliest domesticates, and the mobility of early herders shaped the development of social and economic systems. Genetic data indicate that cattle were domesticated in North Africa and suggest domestication of two different African wild asses, in the Sahara and in the Horn. Cowpeas and pearl millet were domesticated several thousand years later, but some intensively used African plants have never undergone morphological change. Morphological, genetic, ethnoarchaeological, and behavioral research reveals relationships between management, animal behavior, selection, and domestication of the donkey. Donkeys eventually showed phenotypic and morphological changes distinctive of domestication, but the process was slow. This African research on domestication of the donkey and the development of pastoralism raises questions regarding how we conceptualize hunter-gatherer versus food-producer land use. It also suggests that we should focus more intently on the methods used to recognize management, agropastoral systems, and domestication events.


This paper was submitted 13 XI 09, accepted 02 XII 10, and electronically published 08 VI 11.

The question of whether understanding of the beginnings of food production is being constrained by definitions and methods of detection that focus on morphological change rather than management is becoming a major theme in studies of the origins of agriculture. Recent research in the humid tropics of southeastern Asia and the Pacific suggests that definitions that depend on morphological change hamper recognition of early farming in these areas (Bayliss-Smith 2007; Denham 2007, 2011). This perspective has so far centered on plants of the humid tropics that have a history of long-term cultivation in agricultural systems but lack morphological change (Denham 2007; Kahlheber and Neumann 2007; Yen 1989). Another feature of both humid and arid tropical agricultural practices that has strained conceptions of early agricultural systems is the variety of economic activities—including fishing, gathering, hunting, cultivation, and herding—that may be combined in complex and diverse subsistence systems (Kahlheber and Neumann 2007; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002; for North America, Smith 2001, 2011).

In their approach to definitions and the question of whether morphological change is an effective marker of domestication, Jones and Brown (2007) focus on selection processes and timing rather than on region. They contend that under certain circumstances, practices of cultivation and protective tending could have resulted in stable long-term systems of food production that depended on plants and animals lacking distinctively domestic morphological and genetic characteristics. Reproductive isolation and morphological change, Jones and Brown (2007) go on to suggest, are linked with later stages of agricultural development, when human populations expanded and people removed plants and animals from their wild ranges.

There is a growing appreciation, however, of differences among species in time elapsed before domestication processes are readily detectable and of variability in the sensitivity of methods that can be brought to bear on any given taxon. In a detailed study of the domestication of goats in western Asia, Zeder (Zeder 2008; Zeder and Hesse 2000) used regional and age- and sex-based variability in animal size to document early herd management, which was followed by diminution in size. In the absence of clear morphological indicators, evidence for management—culling, corralling, and milking—has also been key to a better understanding of early phases of domestication of the horse (Outram et al. 2009). The discovery by Rossel et al. (2008) that donkeys used by Egyptian pharaohs for transport at approximately 5000 cal BP (historic date 3000 BC; table 1) remained morphologically wild 1,000 years after they were thought to have been first domesticated further emphasizes possibilities for underestimating the timing of domestication of large mammals and draws attention to species-specific pathways to domestication (see also Zeder 2011).


Table 1.  Key African animal and plant domesticates, with summaries of sites, date ranges, and arguments for management or domestication processes

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In the light of these different emphases on global, regional, and taxon-specific impacts of late morphological change on general understanding of early food production, we evaluate current perspectives on the beginnings of food production in Africa, a continent that represents the world’s largest tropical landmass. We reexamine evidence of early animal and plant domesticates and employ ethnoarchaeological data on donkey management and breeding behavior to examine species-specific domesticatory practices that influenced selection and the likelihood of morphological change. These analyses allow us to return to the larger question of Africa’s contribution to understanding variability in early agricultural systems worldwide. In most of Africa, pastoralism is considered the earliest form of agriculture, followed by plant cultivation and adoption of mixed herding-cultivation systems.


Early Food Production in AfricaJump To Section...

Africanists have built up a picture of the beginnings of food production in which early dependence on domestic animals and increasing reliance on mobility guided the development of social and economic systems of the Early Holocene and resulted in late domestication of African plants. Specific themes that have emerged include locally and socially contingent responses to large-scale climatic change, domestication of cattle for food and donkeys for transport, intensive hunting and possible management of Barbary sheep, long-term reliance on a broad range of wild plants and animals, and late domestication of African plants.

In this review of the African evidence, we see domestication as a microevolutionary process that transformed animal and plant communities and human societies (see Clutton-Brock 1992), but we examine rather than assume relationships between domestication and long-term genetic and morphological change (see also Vigne et al. 2011). We follow Zeder (2009, 2011; Rindos 1984) in emphasizing long-term coevolutionary relations between people, animals, and plants, but unlike Rindos (1984), we also highlight the intentional role that individuals played in selection (Hildebrand 2003b; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002). Pastoralism is also an important concept for discussions of the beginnings of food production in Africa, and this, we argue, differs from herding or simple keeping of animals because pastoralists rely on moving livestock to pasture and emphasize the social and symbolic role of domestic animals (Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson 1980; Smith 2005; Spear and Waller 1993). This does not necessarily imply, however, a diet heavily based on domestic animals. Historically, African pastoralists prioritized the needs of their herds in scheduling activities and locating settlements (McCabe 2004; Western and Dunne 1979), but they usually relied on a broad range of complementary subsistence strategies ranging from seasonal cultivation, fishing, hunting, and gathering to food exchange or trade (Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson 1980; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Schneider 1979). As a result, it is overly simplistic to rely on high proportions of domestic animal bones to differentiate pastoral from hunter-gatherer or farming sites. Multiple lines of evidence are necessary, including households oriented to mobility—with slope, soil, and vegetation characteristics organized around the needs of domestic herds (Western and Dunne 1979)—animal pens, dung deposits (Shahack-Gross, Marshall, and Weiner 2003; Shahack-Gross, Simons, and Ambrose 2008), milk residues (see Evershed et al. 2008), livestock-focused rock art, and ritual livestock burials (di Lernia 2006).


Domesticatory Settings: Climatic and Social Variability and Subsistence Intensification

Large-scale climate change forms the backdrop to the beginnings of food production in northeastern Africa (Kröpelin et al. 2008). Hunter-gatherer communities deserted most of the northern interior of the continent during the arid glacial maximum and took refuge along the North African coast, the Nile Valley, and the southern fringes of the Sahara (Barich and Garcea 2008; Garcea 2006; Kuper and Kröpelin 2006). During the subsequent Early Holocene African humid phase, from the mid-eleventh to the early ninth millennium cal BP, ceramic-using hunter-gatherers took advantage of more favorable savanna conditions to resettle much of northeastern Africa (Holl 2005; Kuper and Kröpelin 2006). Evidence of domestic animals first appeared in sites in the Western Desert of Egypt, the Khartoum region of the Nile, northern Niger, the Acacus Mountains of Libya, and Wadi Howar (Garcea 2004, 2006; Pöllath and Peters 2007; fig. 1).





During the Early and mid-Holocene, diverse hunter-gatherer groups lived close to permanent water in widely separated regions of northeastern Africa, from the Acacus to Lake Victoria (Caneva 1988; Garcea 2006; Holl 2005; Prendergast and Lane 2010). Ethnoarchaeological research suggests that this social and economic variability played a significant role in pathways to food production in Africa. Recent hunter-gatherers with long-term investment in hive and trap construction and delayed-return social systems and limited sharing have historically been able to accommodate more easily property-rights issues arising out of time investment in agriculture than have those with highly egalitarian norms (Brooks, Gelburd, and Yellen 1984; Dale, Marshall, and Pilgram 2004; Marshall 2000; Smith 1998; Woodburn 1982). Moreover, cattle herding requires significantly greater commitment than cultivation because foragers can tend crops intermittently and accommodate them into flexible hunter-gatherer schedules, whereas animal herds require protection against predators and constant attention (Dale, Marshall, and Pilgram 2004; Marshall 2000). As a result, Africanists have hypothesized that domestication of cattle is more likely to have been undertaken and pastoralism adopted in regions of northeastern Africa that were occupied by complex rather than highly mobile egalitarian hunter-gatherers (Marshall and Hildebrand 2002).

Arguments that complex or delayed-return systems of social organization existed in the Acacus, the Sudanese Nile Valley, and some other regions of the African Early to mid-Holocene are based on elaboration of material culture, including manufacture of ceramics and storage facilities in these areas and highly patterned use of rock-shelter sites and local landscapes (Barich 1987; di Lernia 1999, 2001; Garcea 2004; McDonald 2008). Significant investment in living spaces and limited movement are indicated by hut construction at Nabta Playa in the Acacus Mountains and the northern Sudanese Nile Valley and by isotopic analyses at Gobero in Niger and Acacus sites (Barich 1987; Garcea 2006; Sereno et al. 2008; Tafuri et al. 2006). In the central Sahara, the Sudanese Nile Valley, and the Acacus, human burials are common (Caneva 1988; Honegger 2004; Sereno et al. 2008). Garcea (2004) and di Lernia (1999, 2001) argue that their presence in the Late Acacus phase (ca. 10,250–9600 to 9890–9440 cal BP) may relate to group identities and rights to land.

North African hunter-gatherers of the Early and mid-Holocene employed highly diverse subsistence as well as social systems. Wild cattle (Bos primigenius) were hunted along the Mediterranean coast and the Nile Valley, and small numbers of wild ass (Equus africanus) were also present in many sites (Alhaique and Marshall 2009; Gautier 1987a; Marshall 2007). Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) were the most common animal hunted across North Africa at this time (di Lernia 2001; Gautier 1987a; Saxon et al. 1974). In the Late Acacus sites of Ti-n-Torah, Uan Tabu, and Uan Afuda, intensive exploitation of wild cereals (e.g., Echinochloa, Panicum, Setaria, Digitaria, and Pennisetum) is associated with heavy grindstone use (di Lernia 1999; Garcea 2001; Mercuri 2001; fig. 1). A similar set of wild grass seeds were harvested, processed, and stored in the eastern Sahara during the late tenth and early ninth millennia at Nabta Playa, site E-75-6 (Wasylikowa et al. 1993; Wendorf and Schild 1998; for radiocarbon dates, see table 2). Along the Sudanese Nile, a variety of wild mammals were hunted in conjunction with fishing for large deepwater fish and intensive grindstone use (Caneva 1988; Haaland 1987).


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Taming of Barbary sheep. 

There has been a recurrent suggestion that some North Africans penned and culled Barbary sheep herds during early phases of the Holocene (di Lernia 1998, 2001; Garcea 2006; Saxon et al. 1974; table 1). Earlier arguments for management without morphological change were based on young male–dominated culling profiles from the sites of Tamar Hat and Haua Fteah on the Mediterranean coast (Saxon et al. 1974; Smith 2008; fig. 1). More recent evidence is based on the presence of dung accumulations in the rear of rock-shelter sites occupied by complex hunter-gatherers during the tenth and early ninth millennia cal BP in the Libyan Acacus at Uan Afuda, Uan Tabu, and Fozzigiaren (Cremaschi and Trombino 2001; di Lernia 2001; Garcea 2006). Di Lernia (2001) argues that dense dung deposits in these rock shelters differ from natural dung accumulations characterized by loose and scattered pellet matrices and result instead from use of shelters for corralling animals. Micromorphological analyses of the “dung layer” sediments suggest trampling and indicate the presence of spherulites common in caprine dung, and studies of the plant remains indicate a selected range of plant species suggestive of foddering (Castelletti et al. 1999; di Lernia 2001; Mercuri 1999). Interestingly, Livingstone Smith (2001) notes that hunter-gatherer pottery of Late Acacus levels at Uan Afuda is dung tempered, a characteristic of later pastoral ceramics. The number of Barbary sheep remains declines in later sites, however, and there are no dung deposits that suggest subsequent emphasis on Barbary sheep (di Lernia 1999; Garcea 2001, 2004). Taken together, the micromorphological and archaeological evidence for dung accumulation resulting from penning of Barbary sheep in the Late Acacus rock shelters is suggestive, but additional faunal data and dung deposits are needed from open-air sites.


Domestication of African cattle? 

The evidence for taming of wild cattle during the Early Holocene provides an interesting parallel to that for management of Barbary sheep. Wendorf and colleagues (Gautier 1987b; Wendorf and Królik 2001; Wendorf and Schild 1998; Wendorf, Schild, and Close 1984) have argued that seasonally settled hunter-gatherers of the Nabta Playa region (fig. 1) domesticated African cattle in the Western Desert of Egypt during the eleventh to tenth millennium cal BP (reviews of arguments in Gifford-Gonzalez 2005; table 2). Domestic sheep and goats, on the other hand, were introduced to Africa from southwestern Asia during the early eighth millennium cal BP and postdate the appearance of cattle at all sites except Uan Muhaggiag (Gautier 2001; Linseele 2010; Linseele et al. 2010). The independent domestication of African cattle has been tied to arid episodes, the desire of hunter-gatherers for increased short-term predictability in food resources, and the difficulty of intensifying plant foods under these conditions (Marshall and Hildebrand 2002). Bos remains are ubiquitous in sites of the Nabta and Bir Kiseiba regions (fig. 1) from the eleventh to the tenth millennium cal BP (table 2) but in very small numbers, precluding detailed analyses of morphometric change or reconstruction of culling profiles (Gautier 2001). Linseele (2004) has demonstrated, however, that size decrease is not a useful indicator of domestication in northeastern Africa because the size of African Bos primigenius varied regionally and temporally and because ancient Egyptian longhorn cattle overlapped in size with some wild cattle populations.

Close and Wendorf (1992) and Gautier (1984b, 1987b) also argued, largely on the basis of a well and a watering basin at site E-75-6, that the repeated presence of water-dependent North African B. primigenius in Western Desert sites during the tenth and ninth millennia cal BP (table 2) reflected range extension facilitated by management and watering of cattle (table 1). Bos cranial remains in a human grave at El Barga in northern Sudan further support the presence of cattle in the region during the early ninth millennium cal BP (Honegger 2005:247–248). The earliest evidence of small domestic cattle from the central Sahara dates, however, to the eighth millennium BP (at Ti-n-Torha and Uan Muhaggiag; Gautier 1987b; fig. 1).

To date, the strongest evidence for domestication of cattle in Africa comes from a series of major studies of the genetic characteristics and biodiversity of contemporary cattle breeds. Changing genetic approaches are reviewed by Larson (2011). Initial analyses of maternal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) showed that African cattle shared a distinctively higher frequency of the T1 mitochondrial haplogroup than is common in other regions and a large proportion of unique haplotypes (Bradley et al. 1996). These findings are consistent with an independent African domestication, although the possibility of a demographic expansion of Near Eastern cattle in Africa could not be ruled out (Bradley and Magee 2006; but see Achilli et al. 2008). Recent analysis of single-nucleotide polymorphisms from whole-genome sequences derived from small numbers of cattle demonstrate that African breeds diverged early from the European taurine cattle (Decker et al. 2009). New analyses of high-resolution interspersed multilocus microsatellites on the male-specific region of the Y chromosome demonstrate the existence of an African subfamily in taurine cattle of the Y2 haplogroup (Pérez-Pardal et al. 2009). Associated analyses also indicate that neither the genetic diversity in the African mtDNA T1 haplogroup nor the diversity in the Y2 haplogroup is consistent with the bottleneck that would have been required to fix these haplotypes from Near Eastern taurine cattle (Pérez-Pardal et al. 2010; see also Bovine HapMap Consortium 2009). Taken together with data on variation in autosomal microsatellites (rapidly evolving regions of the nuclear genome) and other data on Y-chromosome variability in African cattle breeds (Bradley and Magee 2006; Hanotte et al. 2002), the genetic data as a whole point strongly to an independent African domestication of cattle (Pérez-Pardal et al. 2009, 2010).

Ethnographic studies suggest, however, that genetic and phenotypic change may have been slow in early northeastern-African cattle and that neither morphological nor genetic studies are likely to detect the early phases of this process. Given recurrent cycles of drought and disease, contemporary African pastoralists manage their herds for maximum growth by keeping a high proportion of females in herds (Dahl and Hjort 1976). However, the main intentional selective processes acting on African cattle are culling and castration, which affect males rather than females (Dahl and Hjort 1976; Ryan et al. 2000). Natural selection in the form of drought and disease often play a larger role in mortality than culling (Mutundu 2005), multiple bulls are common in herds, offtake is low (4%–8%), and culling often takes place after sexual maturity (Ryan et al. 2000). Such processes, together with some introgression with wild bulls, are likely to have worked against rapid morphological change in early pastoral herds and to have resulted in a postmanagement lag in morphological change.


Domestication of the donkey. 

It has long been suggested that ancient Egyptians domesticated the donkey (Equus asinus), although the Near East has also been considered a possible area of origin. Egyptian Predynastic sites have yielded the earliest potential domestic donkeys, which date to the mid-seventh millennium cal BP (historic date 4600–4400 BC; Boessneck and von den Driesch 1990; table 1). Some faunal elements from these sites, zooarchaeologists argue, exhibit size decrease relative to the wild ass (Boessneck and von den Driesch 1990), but widespread morphological change was slow to develop in ancient Egypt. Evidence of bone pathologies from early dynastic donkey burials at Abydos (fig. 1) demonstrates that by approximately 5000 cal BP (historic date 3000 BC), First Dynasty Egyptian kings were using donkeys to carry heavy loads (Rossel et al. 2008). Rossel et al. (2008) show, however, that these animals were not yet morphologically distinguishable from the African wild ass.

Recent studies of genetic variability in modern donkeys suggest that prehistoric pastoralists may have domesticated donkeys on the fringes of the Sahara. Beja-Pereira and colleagues (2004; also Vilá, Leonard, and Beja-Pereira 2006) document the existence of two different haplogroups or clades of domestic donkeys. Their genetic-diversity data suggest two domestication events, both in northeastern Africa. Kimura et al.’s (2010) recent analysis of ancient DNA from the Nubian donkey (Equus africanus africanus) and the Somali wild ass (Equus africanus somaliensis) demonstrates that the Nubian wild ass was the ancestor of modern donkey Clade I but that the ancestor of donkeys of Clade II is currently unknown. This research also documents the ancient distribution of the Nubian wild ass and Clade I donkeys from the Atbara River and Red Sea Hills in Sudan and northern Eritrea across the Sahara to Libya, a geographic distribution that suggests that prehistoric pastoralists domesticated Clade I donkeys (Kimura et al. 2010). However, domestication by pastoralists or farmers of the northern Nile Valley during late prehistoric/early Predynastic times is also a possibility.


The Herding-Hunting Mosaic and the Spread of Pastoralism

In the central Sahara, cattle became common in the eighth to sixth millennium cal BP at sites such as Ti-n-Torha, Uan Muhaggiag, Uan Telocat, Adrar Bous, Gobero, Enneri Bardagué, and Wadi Howar (Clark et al. 2008; di Lernia 2006; Garcea 2004; Gautier 1987b; Jesse et al. 2007; Roset 1987; Sereno et al. 2008; fig. 1). The main advantages for hunter-gatherers of herding cattle over intensification of plant resources or reliance on hunting and gathering are thought to have been decreased reliance on local rainfall and increased predictability in daily access to cattle herds for blood, meat, and ceremonial purposes (Jesse et al. 2007; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002). Foraging continued, but the intensity of the new human-animal relationship would have required ownership patterns and schedules oriented to animal care and transformation of hunter-gatherer societies. Dependence on wild calories could have been somewhat reduced, however, by milking, a practice that archaeologists have tended to assume was adopted after herding for blood and meat and with some difficulty (but see Linseele 2010).

Different genetic bases for lactase persistence in Europe and Africa show coevolution between people and cattle and the strong selective advantage conferred by drinking milk (Tishkoff et al. 2006). Interestingly, recent research has documented lactase persistence among some contemporary African hunter-gatherers. Tishkoff et al. (2006, supplementary information) note that lactase persistence could be selected for by delaying weaning of infants and, moreover, that the trait is also adaptive for digestion of certain roots and barks. This suggests several pathways to lactase persistence among hunter-gatherers and raises the question of whether African herders milked their cattle earlier and incorporated dairy products into their diets with fewer digestive difficulties than previously thought. However, milking scenes depicted in prehistoric African rock art and in Saharan ceramics have so far not produced dates or residues that bear on the antiquity of milking in Africa (Jesse et al. 2007; Marshall 2000).

Oscillating periods of aridity and humidity resulted in periods of increased mobility and occasional depopulation of the Sahara (di Lernia 2002; Garcea 2004; Kröpelin et al. 2008). In the eighth to seventh millennia cal BP, herders combined livestock keeping with hunting and collection of wild grain in regions such as the Acacus Mountains (Gautier 1987b). At Adrar Bous and other sites near lowland lakes, herders also fished and collected shellfish (Gifford-Gonzalez 2005; Smith 1992; fig. 1). Cattle-focused rock art attests to the symbolic importance of cattle for Saharan herders (Holl 2004; Smith 1992, 2005). Hunter-gatherers also flourished during this period at sites such as Dakleh Oasis (McDonald 2008) and Amekni (Camps 1969; fig. 1), creating a mosaic of hunters and herders across northeastern Africa (fig. 1).

Through the mid-Holocene, grasslands became more arid, precipitation became increasingly unpredictable, and desert regions of the Sahara expanded. Northeastern Africans responded to these pressures by heightening mobility, relying on introduced sheep and goats, and decreasing use of wild cereals (Barich 2002; di Lernia 2002; Garcea 2004; Gautier 1987a). It was during this period that the donkey was domesticated (Rossel et al. 2008). Their use would have made increased residential mobility and dispersal of settlements from water possible and would have facilitated long-distance migrations (Marshall 2007).

Significant expansion of the geographic distribution of the dotted-wavy-line ceramic motif and distinctive human mortuary practices in the early seventh millennium cal BP reflect the southward movement of pastoralists, long-distance contacts among Saharan groups, and elaboration of pastoralist ideologies (Jesse et al. 2007; Keding, Lenssen-Erz, and Pastoors 2007; Smith 1992; Wendorf and Królik 2001). Just as in the Mediterranean and western Europe, however, the trajectories of small immigrant groups may have varied greatly (Özdoğan 2011; Rowley-Conwy 2011). Domestic stock appear to the south in the Sudanese Sahel by the early seventh millennium cal BP at Esh Shaheinab and Kadero (Gautier 1984a, 1984b) and by the mid-fifth millennium cal BP in Kenya (Marshall and Hildebrand 2002). Similarly, Saharan lithics and other traces of Saharan herders are first found in the West African Sahel by approximately 4500 cal BP (Jousse et al. 2008; Linseele 2010; Smith 1992). Di Lernia (2006) argues that the widespread ritual burial of cattle across the Sahara at the end of the seventh millennium BP represents a social response to rapid aridification. Cattle burials and associated ritual activity are a prominent feature of site E-96-1 at Nabta (Wendorf and Królik 2001). At Djabarona 84/13, in the middle of Wadi Howar from the beginning of the sixth millennium cal BP, more than a thousand pits are filled with cattle bones and relatively complete ceramic pots (Jesse et al. 2007; fig. 1). As far south as Kenya by the middle of the fifth millennium cal BP, large stone circles such as those at Jarigole were constructed as centers for human burial rituals by southward-migrating herders (Marshall, Grillo, and Arco 2011; Nelson 1995). Hunter-gatherers, however, continued to flourish after the movement of herders into these regions (Lane et al. 2007; Lesur, Vigne, and Gutherz 2007).

Domestication of African Plants

The earliest evidence for domestication of indigenous African plants with morphological change dates only to the beginnings of the fourth millennium cal BP (table 1). Although many Holocene hunter-gatherers of northeastern Africa relied heavily on wild Saharan cereals, high mobility and repeated abandonment of the region seem to have impeded long-term directional selection and morphological and genetic change. Instead, selection processes culminated in morphological change once Saharan herders settled in the southern reaches of the Sahara and more humid Sahelian regions and established more permanent settlements in areas that were still within or close to the edge of the wild range of Saharan species.

Sahelian herders—who also hunted, gathered, and fished—integrated cultivation of domestic pearl millet Pennisetum glaucum into their subsistence economies in one or two domestication events documented at or after 3898–3640 cal BP at sites west of Lake Chad, including Karkarichinkat Nord (KN05), Dhar Tichitt, Birimi, and Gajiganna (D’Andrea, Klee, and Casey 2001; Fuller 2007; Kahlheber and Neumann 2007; Manning et al. 2011; fig. 1, table 1). Morphologically, this is evidenced by changes in seed shedding and shape, although increases in seed size were delayed (D’Andrea, Klee, and Casey 2001). Fuller (2007) argues that the appearance of domestic pearl millet in India in the mid-fourth millennium cal BP indicates a somewhat earlier African domestication and rapid dispersal. Recent research has also shown that the cow pea Vigna unguiculata was also an early-fourth-millennium morphological domesticate, dating to ca. 3898–3475 cal BP at the Kintampo B-sites in the grasslands of central Ghana (D’Andrea et al. 2007; table 2). By contrast, African rice Oryza glaberrima was domesticated in the inland Niger delta of the Niger bend region by the early second millennium cal BP. On the eastern side of the continent, domestic teff Eagrostis tef and finger millet Eleusine coracana were cultivated by Aksumite populations in the Ethiopian highlands by the beginnings of the second millennium cal BP (historic date AD 150–350; D’Andrea 2008). The oil-seed noog Guizotia abyssinica is also present in Late Aksumite contexts (D’Andrea 2008). D’Andrea (2008) points out, however, that morphological change is difficult to identify in the small-seeded cereal teff, which was selected for reliable production under arid conditions rather than for increased seed size. In humid forested southwestern Ethiopia, Hildebrand (2003a, 2003b, 2007) has documented varied selection processes leading to domestication of yams Dioscorea cayenensis and ensete Ensete ventricosum. In these and other areas of Africa, domestic plants are thought to have been advantageous to pastoral hunter-fishers for risk minimization and greater predictability (D’Andrea et al. 2007; Kahlheber and Neumann 2007; Marshall and Hildebrand 2002).

Although morphological change occurred in a range of domesticated African plant taxa, it has been suggested that a number of African savanna plants were cultivated or intensively managed over the long term in ways that did not lead to morphological domestication (reviews in Marshall and Hildebrand 2002; Neumann 2005). Haaland (1999) and Abdel-Magid (1989) argued, largely on the basis of the ∼30,000 grindstones that were unearthed at the site of Um Direiwa, for cultivation of sorghum Sorghum bicolor in Sudanese sites dating to the seventh millennium cal BP (table 1). Mechanisms that they suggested for late morphological change include continued outcrossing between cultivated and wild populations and harvesting through beating into baskets or uprooting. This has led to arguments that sorghum was not morphologically domesticated until it was removed from its wild African range (Haaland 1999; but see Fuller 2003). Although mechanisms exist that may have caused late morphological change in African cereals and harvesting of wild grains was at times intensive, there is no macrobotanical evidence or indication of landscape modification that supports claims for cultivation of African grains before the early fourth millennium cal BP.

In the wetter tropical regions, there is evidence of long-term use of a number of forest taxa without morphological change. Long-term use of oil palm Elaeis guineensis and incense trees Canarium schweinfurthii has been documented across the humid tropics of Africa (D’Andrea, Logan, and Watson 2006; Mercader et al. 2006). This pattern is not confined to forests, however. D’Andrea, Logan, and Watson (2006:216–217) argue that Kintampo people living in the grasslands of central Ghana employed a system of arboriculture that did not rely on management strategies that would result in morphological change. Kahlheber and Neumann (2007) also note that a number of west African park savanna species, such as baobab Adsonia digitata and the shea-butter tree Vitellaria paradoxa, were protected and encouraged but never domesticated. Other wild plants that are still protected and sometimes actively sown in many different African environments include weedy green species ranging in status from crops to semidomesticated or wild (Kahlheber and Neumann 2007; Marshall 2001). Kahlheber and Neumann (2007:333) point out that in the West Africa Sahel, reliance on morphologically wild park savanna species became more evident when economies diversified and populations concentrated close to water 2,000 years ago. In many regions of Africa, Iron Age agriculturalists relied on a particularly broad range of resources, and farmers incorporated diverse domestic crops and managed plants, cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, and donkeys into their agricultural systems and fished and hunted a wide range of wild-animal foods (Casey 2005; Neumann 2005; Plug and Voigt 1985; van Neer 2000).

This brings to the fore the question raised at the outset of whether such diverse subsistence strategies fit current conceptions of agricultural systems. Kahlheber and Neumann (2007:339) are doubtful whether “farming” is an appropriate term for some of these ways of life. Smith’s (2001, 2011) term “low-level food production” has been used in the region, but it does not fully capture the complexities of African settings. The question of whether the Kintampo should be considered “foragers,” “farmers,” or something else has also been reviewed by Casey (2005) and by D’Andrea and colleagues (D’Andrea, Logan, and Watson 2006:216–218; D’Andrea et al. 2007), who argue that although there are clear-cut cases of foragers or farmers in Africa, there are many others that defy simple categorization. Hildebrand’s (2003a) ethnographic research among the Sheko of southwestern Ethiopia and the literature on use of weedy greens in Africa (Etkin 1994; Fleuret 1979; Marshall 2001 and references therein) provide ample evidence that such subsistence strategies have long-term trajectories in many parts of Africa and cannot be dismissed as transitory.


Ethnoarchaeological Insight into Management, Selection Processes, and Domestication of the DonkeyJump To Section...

One approach to better addressing conceptual problems presented by questions of late morphological change and the diversity of economic systems in Africa is to consider pathways to domestication for particular species in light of the potential for morphological change, or lack thereof, in specific social and environmental contexts. The question that we address here is how the behavior of the African wild ass and management of donkeys by herders and small-scale farmers in Africa contribute to selection processes and the likelihood of development of archaeological signatures of domestication in the donkey. This analysis focuses on aspects of the biology and behavior of the donkey and its use as a transport animal that influence management practices in extensive pastoral and agricultural systems and are relevant (sensu Wylie 2002) to ancient settings for domestication. It is often argued, for instance, that sociability and the presence of a dominance hierarchy are desirable characteristics for potential domesticatability (Clutton-Brock 1992; Diamond 1997). African wild ass do not, however, fit this profile. The extant Somali wild ass, or dibokali, is solitary or forms groups with weak short-term associations. It also lacks a pronounced dominance hierarchy (Klingel 1974; Moehlman 2002). This social system profoundly influences donkey behavior under human management.

Recent ethnoarchaeologial research on donkey use and management among Maasai households in Kajiado District of southern Kenya provides the first detailed information on selection processes in a pastoral social and economic context. During 2006, Lior Weissbrod lived in Maasai communities in the study area and collected interview and participant observation data from 26 women from eight households spread among six different pastoral settlements (table 3). The study focused on use and daily management, herd composition, mortality, and breeding behavior. After a 2-year period of severe drought (2004–2006), the donkey holdings of households participating in the study were reduced but still totaled 65.

http://www.jstor.org/literatum/publisher/jstor/journals/content/curranth/2011/658481/658389/20111013/images/large/tb3.jpeg

Donkeys were not regarded as food. They were considered women’s animals, important for transport but without the symbolic status of cattle. Women were the caretakers of donkeys and used them to carry household goods during residential moves, to collect water, and to take intermittent trips to trading centers. Donkeys also carried meat, firewood, and water for large ceremonies. During the dry season, women went long distances for water every other day, returning with a typical load of 50 L per donkey. Children herded household donkeys with the calves, but during the wet season, donkeys were free ranging. Many families penned donkeys within the settlement thorn fence or in calf enclosures at night for protection against predators.

Our data show that the use of donkeys in Kajiado enhanced the flexibility and stability of local herding systems (see also Marshall 2007; Marshall and Weissbrod 2009). Families in the study area who did not own donkeys could not move as a whole away from permanent sources of water and were unable to make optimum use of available grazing. Donkeys were, nevertheless, managed less than other livestock. Marshall (2007) previously noted that the ability of donkeys to dig for water and to protect themselves from predators more successfully than other livestock was associated with low levels of management, which might result in low levels of selection. Our data show that behavior was a factor but that the level of use of donkeys in the study area ultimately determined the degree to which donkeys were herded and penned.

In addition to management practices, we also collected information on reproduction and desired characteristics of donkeys that might be selected for through strategic breeding. Women that we talked to particularly valued strength and calmness in a donkey. Some also mentioned the importance of disease and drought resistance, although they noted that donkeys were less vulnerable to these hazards than other livestock. We found, however, that participants in the study made no attempt at all to influence mate choice among donkeys or to breed for particular characteristics. The ancestry of a particular donkey was unknown except for the female parent. By contrast, research on cattle genealogies shows that Maasai herders memorize these in great detail for several generations (Ryan et al. 2000). The lack of strategic breeding of donkeys is influenced by donkey behavior and herd compositions but is also related, at least in part, to the fact that Maasai herders do not use donkeys as symbols of social transactions in the same way that they do cattle or value color distinctions ideologically.

The dynamics of wild ass mating systems, based on short-lived associations that occur when females move through male territories, influence donkey breeding in the domesticated environment. Maasai women stressed their concern with the aggressive behavior of jacks during mating. Even when they wanted to keep a female from breeding with an especially aggressive jack, women said that they found it impossible to keep the male away. They also noted that estrus jennies might go astray without warning in search of males. They are often lost this way, and we documented a number of cases in which wandering females, as well as males, were cared over a long term by women in distant settlements. Lack of selection because of the difficulty of controlling donkey breeding is, therefore, likely wherever a premium is placed on “wild” characteristics of the donkey, such as strength, rather than on docility and productivity for food. The relatively high proportion of males in herds (one male∶two females) is another factor that makes control over breeding logistically difficult. Because donkey owners kept small herds specifically for transport, they weighed the breeding advantages of females against the superior transport potential of males. The strength of males was greatly favored, and so was their consistent availability for transport use.

Herd growth and mortality patterns also contributed to patterns of selection in domestic donkey herds. Pastoral Maasai donkeys had, on average, a foal every 2 years. Mortality resulted from predation by hyenas, disease, and drought. Herds grew relatively slowly, and additional animals were recruited to herds through gifts, loans, and purchase. Socially based loans or exchanges of cattle are deeply woven into the fabric of Maasai society (Ryan et al. 2000). To a lesser extent, this system is also used for donkeys, and social exchange is a mechanism of selection and gene flow. Animals entering or leaving a herd through loans were carefully selected and predominantly female. In some cases, however, exchanges were involuntary, resulting from donkeys running away.

In the wet season, herds of donkeys made up of animals from different settlements in the same neighborhoods range freely. This practice and the system of intentional and unintentional loans maintain gene flow among settlements. Purchases were rarer than loans also but recruited animals to slow-growing herds and maintained intentional selection on an interregional scale. Men purchased animals when visiting markets, and the strength and price of the donkey were major considerations affecting purchases. Young male donkeys were cheaper than others, and purchases were one male∶two females. There was no intentional culling of donkeys, and donkeys were not eaten, but small, slow-growing, or aggressive males were removed from the breeding pool through castration. We recorded six castrated males (40% of the males studied), and castration of male donkeys was a more important factor affecting the direction of intentional selection than culling or selective breeding.

Very few studies of donkey management and selection have been conducted in settled agricultural villages. Mohammed’s (1991) and Wilson’s (1991) Ethiopian research can, however, be used for comparison with the Maasai pastoral study. They focused on Ethiopian farmers of the central and southern highlands who used donkeys to transport grain to market and for hauling household firewood and water. Most families in the study areas kept one to two donkeys, usually female (Mohammed 1991; Wilson 1991). Donkeys were also loaned to family and friends. In the Awassa region, males were rare (100 females∶1 male); in other regions the number of males was higher (73 females∶27 males). Where males were more common, they were usually less than 4 years old. Mohammed (1991) notes that male donkeys were not castrated. We infer that low proportions of males in herds indicated male culling, although donkey eating was not discussed. People in Awassa did not supervise donkeys when they were not using them, and Mohammed (1991) documents minimal donkey management and poor animal nutrition in this area. Because of the danger presented by hyenas, however, people often brought donkeys inside their houses at night. There was no intentional control over breeding, however. Mohammed mentions that copulation might occur anywhere and was actively discouraged in the market center (Mohammed 1991).


Overview of management and selection. 

In order to consider patterns of directional selection, it is useful to examine factors that affect the likelihood of genetic drift, intentional selection, and reproductive isolation in donkeys managed by pastoralists and small-scale farmers. Culling of male donkeys by Ethiopian villagers and castration of male donkeys by Maasai pastoralists were important factors affecting selection. These practices ensured that males with desired traits, such as strength or size, remained in the breeding pool. Females, on the other hand, were never culled, and management of donkeys was minimal. None of the donkey owners that we studied tried to ensure a diverse set of breeding males, to breed select females or males, or to keep records of parentage. We argue that these management practices are influenced by wild ass and donkey courtship and breeding behavior and have significant consequences for long-term directional selection and domesticatory processes. The data also indicate that different sets of functional and symbolic considerations affect Maasai practices of cattle and donkey management and are associated with differing levels of selective pressure and control of gene flow. In our study area, people also bred or obtained cattle for ideal coat colors and conformation, and it is possible that without this additional symbolic motivation, functional reasons for breeding donkeys were not enough to overcome significant practical difficulties. As research on mammals such as the fur fox (Belyaev 1979; Trut 1999) and the guinea pig (Künzl et al. 2003) has shown, without selective breeding, retention of individual animals with desired traits and culling of others, directional selection may be very slow or fail to occur even in the absence of gene flow from wild populations.

From a wider perspective, there are related issues that work against genetic drift as a major factor driving genetic and morphological change in donkeys. In both the Maasai and Ethiopian Arsi cases, donkeys from numerous households grazed unsupervised in mixed herds, allowing uncontrolled genetic exchange among neighborhood populations. Donkeys were loaned among broad social networks in both regions, and the frequency with which donkeys were taken to market in Ethiopia also provided a wider setting for interbreeding among donkeys from different areas. We argue, however, that in both the pastoral Maasai and Arsi farmer cases, low levels of formal management and lack of intentional selective breeding are linked to donkey biology and behavior, the use of donkeys for transport, and the fact that donkeys are not often eaten. Male culling plays a significantly greater role in animals that are primarily managed for meat—including cattle, sheep, and goat—than it does in donkeys. Although culling and castration affect donkey selection, they are outweighed by lack of directional selection in breeding and consistent gene flow among donkeys over significant distances.

The data for Maasai pastoralists and Ethiopian Arsi farmers also suggest that the potential for gene flow from the wild is likely in both settings but marginally less so in agricultural villages. The Maasai villages studied lie outside the historic range of the wild ass. But it is easy to see that had they not, the runaway tendencies of estrus females would have made the prevention of introgression difficult. Like contemporary herders valuing strength and endurance in their donkeys, historic Beja pastoralists of Sudan and Eritrea intentionally encouraged interbreeding among donkeys from domesticated and wild settings (Baker 1867; Murray 1935). During the 1950s, Nicolaisen (1963) also recorded capture and taming of wild or feral animals by Tuareg pastoralists of the central Sahara.

It is possible, therefore, to begin to identify separate contexts for the domestication process of donkeys in Africa. We predict that ancient Saharan pastoralists reduced the number of breeding males in herds through culling and castration in order to cope with practical difficulties resulting from courtship and breeding behavior in donkeys. Isolation from wild ancestors would have been possible in some pastoral settings as a result of mid-to-Late Holocene climate change, range fragmentation, and pastoral settlement in island or marginal ecosystems. Wild asses may also have been removed from their wild range by pastoral dispersals into the high-altitude Ethiopian highlands and other regions, such as southern Sudan and northern Kenya, outside the historic range of the wild ass.

Selection for morphological change would have been slow until donkeys were removed from close proximity to the wild ass and interbreeding between local donkey populations was restricted. It would appear that reproductive isolation of captive wild asses from free-living populations is somewhat more likely to have occurred in ancient urban settings such as the Predynastic and Dynastic Egyptian towns of the Nile Valley, with permanent walls and high densities of protected agricultural land. Gene flow would still have been possible, however, given the narrowness of the Nile agricultural belt and the mobility of pack donkeys. An appreciation for the advantages of strong animals may also have made interbreeding between captive and wild asses desirable for both villagers and pastoralists.

The lack of morphological change evident in the Abydos donkeys as late as 5000 cal BP (3000 BC; Rossel et al. 2008) demonstrates that size decrease was not generally established until well after this period. It is also conceivable that morphological change did not occur until donkeys were taken across the Red Sea to Yemen or other regions of Asia. Whichever the case, donkeys are a classic example of a species that was used to carry loads for millennia as a domesticate but with late morphological change. We conclude that slow morphological change in domesticated donkeys can be explained by low levels of selection, high potential for interbreeding between founder populations, and potential for introgression with the wild.


Do Holocene Pastoralists in Africa Fit Conceptions of Early Agricultural Systems in Other Regions? 

After examining evidence for the beginnings and spread of food production in Africa and analysis of the way that management and behavioral factors affect the likelihood of morphological change in one large mammal—the donkey—we return to consideration of whether African pastoralism fits current conceptions of early agricultural systems developed for other regions. We start by considering the question of whether recognition of early food production in tropical regions of Africa has been hampered by concepts of domestication that rely on morphological change by focusing on donkeys, cattle, Barbary sheep, African cereals, and West African tropical tree crops.

Some evidence suggests that complex hunter-gathers may have attempted to manage cattle in the northeastern Sahara and, for a time, Barbary sheep in the Libyan Acacus. There is no doubt that short-term participation in domesticatory relations are difficult to recognize archaeologically, but nevertheless evidence for management of Barbary sheep is suggestive rather than conclusive. In contrast, genetic data offer a measure of support for the hypothesis of cattle domestication in Africa. The sociality of wild Bovini, however, and the expectation that wild cattle were used mainly for food suggests strong selection and a pathway to domestication—characterized by a postmanagement lag rather than late morphological change and fewer problems with identification of early domesticates—different from that discussed for the donkey.

Ethnoarchaeological data on the donkey reveal relations among selection processes and slow genetic and morphological change and illuminate conditions under which biology and human management influenced domestication and the likelihood of late morphological change. The biological and behavioral reality of donkeys in current domesticatory settings in Africa is that females actively seek out mates, territorial males are reproductively aggressive, and high proportions of males are advantageous for transport use. These factors interact to make reproduction difficult to control and gene flow likely among donkeys of different households and villages, along trade routes, and between tame animals and wild asses.

Archaeological and genetic data suggest that pastoral societies of the Sahara or the Horn of Africa played an important role in the early development of stable and long-term systems of management of morphologically wild donkeys. Morphological change was late, and mechanisms for this probably included creation of built environments of the Nile Valley, late agriculturally modified landscapes, the high mobility of Saharan pastoralists, and ecological fragmentation created by climatic changes of the mid-Holocene.

Although an appreciation of the likelihood of delayed morphological change and biases against identification of domestic donkeys is novel, Africanists have long discussed the question of whether the lack of morphological change resulted in bias against recognition of cultivation of early cereal crops. There is mounting evidence for long periods of intensive use of wild cereal grasses by Early Holocene hunter-gatherers and early herders of the Sahara without evidence of domestic traits. This has been related to a lack of continuous directional selection as a result of increased aridity and pastoral mobility. Morphological changes in well-known African cereals such as pearl millet and pulses such as cowpeas occur relatively late and in conjunction with pastoral sedentization in better-watered locales within the semiarid Sahel and in the more humid West African woodlands after the fourth millennium cal BP. Recent research in more humid regions of West Africa has revealed, however, a number of tended and managed tree crops, such as incense, baobab, and the shea-butter tree, that were heavily used during the Holocene but remain morphologically wild to this day. This is typical of tropical tree crops worldwide and common in weedy greens.

It is worth reiterating at this point that identification of management of plants and animals before genetic or morphological change is inherently problematic, and the longer the period before morphological change occurs in a particular plant, animal, or setting, the greater the difficulties that arise. It is clear that there are at least three axes of variability in morphological responses of plants and animals to selection during coevolutionary relations with humans. We have found it useful here to conceive of this temporal and spatial variation in terms of a “postmanagement lag” before morphological change, as opposed to “late morphological change” or “regionally clustered variability.”

Our review suggests that all these forms of variability exist in Africa. The available data appear to accord with Jones and Brown’s (2007) suggestion that a long, stable period of management without morphological change or a normal “morphological lag” is common to many domesticates worldwide. In Africa, however, it is not clear that their corollary—that population expansion leads to removal of plants and animals from their wild range and morphological change—holds true. Instead, heightened mobility related to climatic changes and increased aridity ultimately led to the movement of some species out of their wild ranges. Furthermore, early African cereals appear to have been domesticated within their wild ranges and intensified on the edge of these regions. Increasingly settled pastoral communities and management practices that maintained directional selection seem to have been more important factors affecting domestication of these crops than reproductive isolation.

We focused above on the possibility of biases against the recognition of early agriculture in tropical regions. We do not, however, see a cluster of taxa subject to late morphological change in the arid or high-altitude subtropics of Africa; here, species-specific analyses of the likelihood of late morphological change are crucial. We agree with Denham (2007), however, that the biology of many species of the African humid tropics increases the likelihood of a lack or significant delay of morphological change and the potential for interpretive bias. These data are strongest with regard to African tree crops. Despite this, however, there is little evidence that archaeologists have ignored early agriculture in the humid tropics of Africa. There is, in fact, no archaeological evidence that the humid tropical forests were heavily populated by African hunter-gatherers during the Early Holocene, and there are few traces of intensification in these regions until after they were settled by food producers (see D’Andrea, Logan, and Watson 2006; D’Andrea et al. 2007; Mercader et al. 2006 and references therein). Nevertheless, as Africanist paleoethnobotanists have pointed out, much work remains to be done on the nature of agricultural systems dating to the past several thousand years in the humid tropics (D’Andrea, Logan, and Watson 2006; Hildebrand 2007; Kahlheber and Neumann 2007).

We conclude that there is no indication of significant regional-scale biases that would have affected current interpretations of the sequence of plant and animal domestication in Africa or geographic patterns of the timing and spread of food production. The larger patterns, as we see them, are that some complex hunter-gatherers of the Early Holocene in North Africa successfully managed cattle, developed pastoral social and subsistence systems, and spread over vast areas of the Sahara. Other such groups in North Africa may have experimented with management of Barbary sheep, but this was short-lived. Later, during the mid-Holocene, there is evidence that donkeys were domesticated by African pastoralists in the Sahara and the Horn of Africa and possibly by Predynastic Egyptians in towns along the Nile. These animals remained morphologically wild for long periods. The earliest plant domesticates in Africa are associated with decreased mobility as pastoralists moved into better-watered locales within the semiarid Sahel and into West Africa. It can also be shown, however, that in some humid tropical regions of Africa, clusters of species existed with a long history of cultivation or tending by established agricultural communities and with biological traits amenable to management but no traces of morphological domestication.

African patterns of food production were distinctive. Animals were domesticated before plants, herding populations became more mobile than their forager ancestors, the subsistence system was characterized by a few morphologically wild domesticates (e.g., the donkey), a wide range of wild resources in ecodiverse combinations continued in use, and mosaics of hunter-gatherers and herders occupied varied regions. Pastoralism developed early in the arid topics, whereas the beginning of farming based on domesticated plants was late.

These African data are informed by and provide perspectives on pathways to food production in other regions. In discussions at the Wenner-Gren conference in Temozón in 2009, Meadow (2009) and Fuller (2009; also see Fuller 2006) argued that South Indian patterns of early pastoralism and subsequent domestication of local millets and pulses are reminiscent of Africa. Similarly, pastoralism has long been considered an early phenomenon in the Andes (Aldenderfer 2003; Browman 1974; Mengoni-Goñalons and Yacobaccio 2006) and the Zagros (Abdi 2003; Hole 1996). Mobile pastoralism is also a major theme in data emerging on the beginnings of food production in central Asia (Frachetti and Benecke 2009; Outram et al. 2009). In addition, Belfer-Cohen and Goring-Morris (2011) and Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen (2011) document African-like mosaics of hunter-gatherer and early-food-producer settlement in the Levant during the Early Holocene. Evidence is also mounting that shows continued reliance on wild resources and ecodiverse strategies pursued by small-scale food producers or low-level farmers of the Americas and subtropical and tropical regions (Denham 2011; Fritz 2007; Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Smith 2001, 2011) and perhaps even temperate regions of Asia (Crawford 2011; Lee 2011; Zhao 2011). Understanding ways in which specific strands such as these contribute to larger similarities and differences in the warp and weft of data on the beginnings of agriculture requires attention to methods of detection of early phases of domestication, information on specific social contexts, and regionally focused and temporarily expansive research. These kinds of data are only just beginning to emerge from Africa, which, as this summary demonstrates, has much to contribute to unraveling patterns of variability in global pathways to food production.


Acknowledgments 

We are grateful to Ofer Bar-Yosef, Douglas Price, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and our companions in Temozón for the genesis of this paper and for challenging and enriching our views about domestication and the spread of food production. The donkey ethnoarchaeological research could not have been conducted without the expert knowledge and gracious support of the people of Kajiado. We are also grateful to the Kenya National Museums and Dr. Purity Kiura for their support and to the government of Kenya for permission to undertake research. This paper has benefited greatly from the thoughtful comments of reviewers. Research was supported by National Science Foundation grants BCS-0447369 and BCS-0536507.

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

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Originally posted by xyyman:
He! He! He1 You didn't need to nuke him.


This is informative..on hg-A in NW Africa and Arabia


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He does need to nuke me.

so he doesn't have to address modern demographics


so he spams on who they were 10,000 years ago.

Modern Demographics 2013,
this is what Troll Patrol doesn't understand. So he goes into knee jerk mode

A lot of thes articles are about who the population of the Maghreb are today in 2013.
People here can't deal with that so they go back 10,000 years and start talking about who they were when the sahara was green.

It's avoidance

For intsance who are the people of the United States? About 77% European, Hispanic 16.9%, 13% African

The popualtion of the U.S. today is vastly foreign
natives are only 1.2 %

Now look at the Maghreb

xyyman has the ability to look at some of the material and take something from it. Troll Patroll tries to bury it by spamming information that does not deal with the present population which is the topic of this article and with many articles that come out he does the same thing, spam reaction

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

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Let me repeat it again for you. The author of that study claims that the building up of Paleolithic to Mesolithic Algeria came from Europe and Eurasia. However, anthropology and archeology shows that the bulk of the people came from the South.

You are ignoring this!

No one is saying the people of North Africa don't have admixture. Although some are completely foreign. Due to recent invasions. However, some Hg's are not Eurasian or European, but arose within Africa as I have cited.


The author also doesn't mention the Vandals or Moriscos.


He doesn't speak of and on demographic population shift, not by far. Except for "sub-Saharan slaves. The author lies! The author carefully selected studies to support his prejudice theory. And so do you.

Most of the Tuareg population lives in the South of the Sahara. At the border of the sub-Sahara. The Tuareg are the main bulk up of the ancient Northwest African inhabitance. All the way from Mali-Senegal to the Magreb. Yet the author has the nerve....? He needs to say this stuff he published amongst the Tuareg.

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the two 16145 – 16222 haplotypes sporadically detected in the Iberian Peninsula [44] and unpublished results] belonged to the North African subgroup as they shared the coding 10257 mutation, in addition to the H1 diagnostic transition 3010, with the totally sequenced Mauritanian sample (Figure 2). It seems that the 10257 transition defines a new subgroup within H1. This fact
points to a possible, although not recent, North African
demic influence on the Iberian genetic pool.

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The Garamantian civilization flourished in modern Fezzan, Libya, between 900 BC and 500 AD, during which the aridification of the Sahara was well established. Study of the archaeological remains suggests a population successful at coping with a harsh environment of high and fluctuating temperatures and reduced water and food resources. This study explores the activity patterns of the Garamantes by means of cross-sectional geometric properties. Long bone diaphyseal shape and rigidity are compared between the Garamantes and populations from Egypt and Sudan, namely from the sites of Kerma, el-Badari, and Jebel Moya, to determine whether the Garamantian daily activities were more strenuous than those of other North African populations. Moreover, sexual dimorphism and bilateral asymmetry are assessed at an intra- and inter-population level. The inter-population comparisons showed the Garamantes not to be more robust than the comparative populations, suggesting that the daily Garamantian activities necessary for survival in the Sahara Desert did not generally impose greater loads than those of other North African populations. Sexual dimorphism and bilateral asymmetry in almost all geometric properties of the long limbs were comparatively low among the Garamantes. Only the lower limbs were significantly stronger among males than females, possibly due to higher levels of mobility associated with herding. The lack of systematic bilateral asymmetry in cross-sectional geometric properties may relate to the involvement of the population in bilaterally intensive activities or the lack of regular repetition of unilateral activities.

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

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this is basic to the thread topic

why they are who the are, the average Alegerian of today, is a second question. The first question before you get to that is how African is the average Algerian, the "why" comes after that

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Yes, and I elaborated on that.

If you want the answers you're looking for you have to look at all the aspects. Calling it spam, is nearly naive rubbish.


See spread of the L clade, and it's timing according archeological and anthropological data.

http://tinyurl.com/ob2z4d8


Is R clade really older?

http://oi44.tinypic.com/2eo8a4o.jpg


Is there a possibility West Saharans relate to Tuaregs?








Hg M and N see Fig.3:


Tishkoff S A , M. K. Gonder, B. M. Henn, H. Mortensen, A. Knight, C. Gignoux, N. Fernandopulle, G. Lema, T. B. Nyambo, U. Ramakrishnan, et al.(2007).History of Click-Speaking Populations of Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation. Mol. Biol. Evol., 24(10): 2180 - 2195. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/24/10/2180.full.pdf+html
 

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Posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor (Member # 18264) on :
 

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

---

this is basic to the thread topic

why they are who the are, the average Alegerian of today, is a second question. The first question before you get to that is how African is the average Algerian, the "why" comes after that

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For some reason the author doesn't mention the progenitor E-M215.









E1b1b. M215


Ethiopia and Sudan harbor the highest levels (30-40%) of the E1b1b (M215) subclade. The information on the E1b1b (M215) subclade is generally superseded by the information from the descendant lineages. Based on the profile of its distribution and the degree of STR diversity in this subclade, it is believed to originate in East Africa. The TMRCA estimate is 20-26kya and by 17kya this subclade had migrated to Northeast Africa. It may be that the Nile River Valley acted as a migratory corridor for this subclade and some of its important descendants described below. This also fits with its higher prevalence among Nilo-Saharan language groups versus Afro-Asiatic language groups.


The M35 predecessors, P2 and M215 are also thought to have an East Africa origin based on STR variation. M35* and M78 have been found in Europe and the Middle East and may have participated in the demic diffusion of agriculture during the Neolithic Era. M35* is found in East Africa (e.g. Ethiopia) and is absent in Oman and Egypt, so the M35 descendants in Oman are likely to have more recent origins as evidenced by the presence of the subsequent SNP variations and the E1b1b1/M35 descendant subclades (E1b1b1a, M78 or E1b1b1b, M81 or E1b1b1c, M123). The STR variation in Egypt is greater than Oman, pointing to an older establishment of M35 in Egypt and supporting the notion that the Levantine corridor through Egypt was the route for the spread of M35 lineages in the Middle East. The timing for this migration coincides with the Mesolithic Era. It is found in present day countries of Lebanon (16%), Turkey (11%), Iraq (11%) and surrounding regions.
 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 
^^^ we are observing a person who has no understanding of modern demographics

someone in a state of high emotion who, instead of analysis destroys threads with copy and paste spam no one is going to read

It's a good example of how not to debate in a forum
 

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Posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor (Member # 18264) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
^^^ we are observing a person who has no understanding of modern demographics

someone in a state of high emotion who, instead of analysis destroys threads with copy and paste spam no one is going to read

It's a good example of how not to debate in a forum

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
^^^ we are observing a person who has no understanding of modern demographics

someone in a state of high emotion who, instead of analysis destroys threads with copy and paste spam no one is going to read

It's a good example of how not to debate in a forum

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Mixed ancestry

Algerians are of mixed ancestry, mainly of Berber or Arab origins, but also with descendents of Europeans (such as the French or Spanish) and Sub-Saharan Africans. Skin, hair and eye colour vary greatly.

Nine out of ten people live along the northern coastal region, where the major towns and cities are situated. In the Saharan regions of the south, some communities remain nomadic or semi-nomadic, such as the Tuaregs and Gnawa.

Most people speak a North African dialect of Arabic known as darja. But education and the written language are in classical Arabic. Many Algerians also use French, the language of the country’s coloniser – see History & Politics. However, younger generations tend to be less fluent in French, since schooling is in Arabic.

Around a fifth of the population speaks Berber as their mother tongue. This is not an official language of the country, although Berber groups – such as the Kabylie, Aures, M’Zab and Hoggar – would like it to be. Rather than learning Arabic, many Berbers prefer to use French as their choice of second language.

The place of religion

The vast majority of Algerians are Sunni Muslims, though in some places, there are minority groups of Christians. A rise in fundamental Islamic groups within Algeria caused serious conflict in the past – see History & Politics – and there is debate among many Algerians about the place of religion.

Some of the population practice very traditional versions of Islam, where women wear hijab dress, covering everything except the face and hands, and men leave beards untrimmed. Other Algerians prefer a more moderate religious approach and Western-style dress is common.

In certain places, such as Ghardaia – see Map – Islamic dress codes are enforced in public.

Dance, music and the arts

Algerian culture has been experiencing something of a revival, with traditional forms of dance and music (such as Chaabi) becoming more widely taken up once again.

Famous films
Algeria is famous for its independent films, with Algerian movies frequently winning accolades both at home and abroad.
Local instruments such as the oud (a stringed lute-like instrument) and maqrunah (an Arabic wind instrument which can be fitted with a pouch, similar to a bag-pipe) provide unique regional sounds.

Music is also influenced by global trends. Rap-style Rai is a modern form of Algerian songs with a message and is popular among younger generations.

Traditional arts and crafts, such as rug-making, pottery, embroidery and jewellery-making, are practised across Algeria, though certain regions are known for particular items, such as the carpets of Ghardaia and the silver jewellery and swords of the Berber and Tuareg regions.

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
^^^ we are observing a person who has no understanding of modern demographics

someone in a state of high emotion who, instead of analysis destroys threads with copy and paste spam no one is going to read

It's a good example of how not to debate in a forum

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quote:

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Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by the lioness,:
[qb] Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

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this is basic to the thread topic

why they are who the are, the average Alegerian of today, is a second question. The first question before you get to that is how African is the average Algerian, the "why" comes after that

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quote:

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Mixed ancestry

Algerians are of mixed ancestry, mainly of Berber or Arab origins, but also with descendents of Europeans (such as the French or Spanish) and Sub-Saharan Africans. Skin, hair and eye colour vary greatly.

Nine out of ten people live along the northern coastal region, where the major towns and cities are situated.

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by the lioness,:
[qb] Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

---

this is basic to the thread topic

why they are who the are, the average Alegerian of today, is a second question. The first question before you get to that is how African is the average Algerian, the "why" comes after that

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quote:

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Mixed ancestry

Algerians are of mixed ancestry, mainly of Berber or Arab origins, but also with descendents of Europeans (such as the French or Spanish) and Sub-Saharan Africans. Skin, hair and eye colour vary greatly.

Nine out of ten people live along the northern coastal region, where the major towns and cities are situated.

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As with the Kabyle, their berber component is already mixed.

So they are berber, who already are a mix that includes European and Arab but the quote is not sure even "Berber or Arab" then there is even more later input of more Europeans, French and Spanish

/close thread

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quote:

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suggest these possibilities as factors in their consideration of the asymmetric assimilation of females of non-African origin into Berber-speaking populations whose males currently have a predominance of lineages defined by the African M35/81 biallelic marker.

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"We conclude that the origins and maternal diversity of Berber populations are old and complex, and these communities bear genetic characteristics resulting from various events of gene flow with surrounding and migrating populations."

"The Berber tribes were far removed from each other and this was one reason why Morocco was often invaded"

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Back to the beginning! In April 20th, 1980 indeed, the collective “soul” of the Kabyle people, of nearly three thousand years aged, in a fabulous and unprecedented popular communion gushed from beneath the tombs of silence, the dismissed calends and the contemptible rule of the established political order in which the human stupidity had, for a moment, thought to lock their still alive burial forever.

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--Dr. Dahmane At Ali.
Associated Professor, University of Pisa, Italy.


http://www.amazighworld.org/eng/human_rights/index_show.php?id=67



 

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Posted by the lioness, (Member # 17353) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:

quote:

---

Originally posted by the lioness,:
[qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by the lioness,:
[qb] Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

---

this is basic to the thread topic

why they are who the are, the average Alegerian of today, is a second question. The first question before you get to that is how African is the average Algerian, the "why" comes after that

---

quote:

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Mixed ancestry

Algerians are of mixed ancestry, mainly of Berber or Arab origins, but also with descendents of Europeans (such as the French or Spanish) and Sub-Saharan Africans. Skin, hair and eye colour vary greatly.

Nine out of ten people live along the northern coastal region, where the major towns and cities are situated.

---

As with the Kabyle, their berber component is already mixed.

So they are berber, who already are a mix that includes European and Arab but the quote is not sure even "Berber or Arab" then there is even more later input of more Europeans, French and Spanish

/close thread

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You finally got it? After a billion times explaining it. SMH lol

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quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:

quote:

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Originally posted by the lioness,:

quote:

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Originally posted by Troll Patrol aka Ish Gebor:

quote:

---

Originally posted by the lioness,:
[qb] [QUOTE]Originally posted by the lioness,:
[qb] Troll Patrol, the average resident of the United States is about 1.2% native

how African would you say the average Algerian of today is?

---

this is basic to the thread topic

why they are who the are, the average Alegerian of today, is a second question. The first question before you get to that is how African is the average Algerian, the "why" comes after that

---

quote:

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Mixed ancestry

Algerians are of mixed ancestry, mainly of Berber or Arab origins, but also with descendents of Europeans (such as the French or Spanish) and Sub-Saharan Africans. Skin, hair and eye colour vary greatly.

Nine out of ten people live along the northern coastal region, where the major towns and cities are situated.

---

As with the Kabyle, their berber component is already mixed.

So they are berber, who already are a mix that includes European and Arab but the quote is not sure even "Berber or Arab" then there is even more later input of more Europeans, French and Spanish

/close thread

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You finally got it? After a billion times explaining it. SMH lol

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you didn;'t explain shyt I've been saying the same thing from the start, that just you trying to come up with an excuse for spam

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What you interpret as spam is actually scientific evidence from several disciplines to debunk that biased nonsense you've posted.


And yes, I did say the same thing from the start, thread after thread.







 

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