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Inspection of Keita’s term of "coastal northern [African] pattern"
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Supercar: [QB] Since, Obelisk_18 apparently saw it fit not to give a feedback, I'll go ahead and answer the following in a more direct manner anyway: [QUOTE]Originally posted by Obelisk_18: So you think, according to your assessment of Keita's work, that dynastic northern egyptians were black mixed with Asiatic? I seem to think so to, I think the Ramesside family is a perfect example of this.[/QUOTE]It is contextual. Here is what Keita thinks happened in northern Egypt during the proto-dynastic era to the Old Kingdom: "The phenotypic situation can also be interpreted as representing [b]two differentiated African populations, with [i]northerners having diverged early and notably from the southerners[/i], or an [i]early ancestral group, by drift and gene exchange with the Near East.[/i][/b] (This however, [b]would not negate their lineage relationship with southerners.[/b]) [b]**Later**[/b], depending on "starting" orientation, the [b]**dynastic Lower Egyptians by convergence, secondary to gene flow and micro-adaptation, either became more African "Negroid" (Howells 1973) or became more mediterranean "White" (Angel 1972).**[/b] Making a neat north/south "racial" division in dynastic Egyptian epoch [b]would be difficult (and theoretically unsound[/b] to most current workers), although trends can be recognized. These racial terms are unnecessary. The variability in the population in Upper Egypt increased, as its isolation decreased, with increasing social complexity of southern Egypt from the predynastic through dynastic periods (Keita 1992). The [b]Upper Egyptian population apparently began to converge skeletally on Lower Egyptian patterns through the dynastic epoch[/b]; whether this is primarily due to gene flow or other factors has yet to be finally determined. [b]**The Lower Egyptian pattern is [i]intermediate[/i] to that of the various northern Europeans and West African and Khoisan series.[/b] And then, Keita concludes with: This review has addressed several issues regarding the biological affinities of the ancient inhabitants of the northern Nile Valley. The morphological metric, morphometric, and nonmetric studies demonstrate immense overlap with tropical variants. General scholars must understand that a "shift in paradigm" from "Negro"-only-as-African has occurred, just as Nordic-only-as-European was never accepted. Actually, it was always biologically wrong to view the Broad phenotype as representative of the only authentic "African," [i]something understood by some nineteenth century writers[/i]. [b]**The early Nile Valley populations are best viewed as part of an African descent group or lineage with tropical adaptations and relationships. This group is highly variable, as would be expected. Archeological data also support this position, which is not new.**[/b] [b]Over time[/b], gene flow (admixture) did occur in the Nile Valley from Europe and the Near East, thus also giving "Egyptians" relationship with those groups. This admixture, if it had occurred by Dynasty I, little affected the major affinity of southern predynastic peoples as illustrated here. As indicated by the analysis of the data in the studies reviewed here, the southern predynastic peoples were Saharo-tropical variants." [QUOTE]Originally posted by Obelisk_18: But do you think northern europeans would be an appropriate cranial group to compare with egyptians, due to the wide geographical distance between the two regions? And who said Middle Easterners (who are racially, Caucausian) have crania exactly like europeans? Get back to me. Peace. :D [/QUOTE]You may have noticed that Keita put the term European in quotation marks, meaning presumably European metrics, as various European researchers have noted as template values or standards by which to adjudge European cranio-metrical analysis. There is no way of knowing just by craniometry, to adjudge whether a given specimen from a geographical location outside of Europe, which nonetheless is relatively 'generalized' when compared with European specimens, that recent gene flow is accountable for such. Specimens from the Levant, for example, and mind you without skin attached, may well seem 'generalized' when compared with European specimens, meaning that, contrasting dicriminants are relatively shallow. Heck, even some specimens from the Sahelian regions, and the African Horn for example, may be relatively 'generalized' when compared with "Near Eastern" or "European" specimens; again, the point being that the constrasting morphological discriminants are relatively lesser when compared to specimens elsewhere with relatively sharper morphological discriminants. Needless to say, when talking about discriminants, final assessments are usually made in general terms, with regards to frequency of the variables under testing. Some specific traits are relatively more frequent in some pooled samples than others. For intance, while the so-called "Elongated" African specimens, when pooled together, may appear relatively 'generalized' with respect to those from southwest Asia and northern Eurasia, they also overlap with the so-called "Broad" types in some instances. For intance, although perhaps not as frequent as amongst the "Broad" types, prognathism may be relatively more frequent in the "Elongated" specimens than in some northern Eurasian specimens, prompting someone to call the phenomenon as a "hint" of "sub-Saharan", as Brace for example, inaccurately utilized the term "sub-Saharan". Here are some interesting and instructive excerpts from Keita's notes: “Kerma in the Sudan was the center of the early Kush state. These crania date from 2000 to 1800 BC. Collett (1933: 258) notes that: an attempt to divide the whole into two contrasting groups showed that it was quite [b]impossible to distinguish the negroid specimens [i]with any degree of exactness.[/i][/b] Hence [b]it was concluded that the safest procedure was to treat the total series as if it represented a single racial type which would obviously be one possessing negroid characters.”[/b] “These crania are easily seen as “Elongated African” (Hiernaux, 1975) or “Nilotic Negro” (Rightmire, 1975a,b), rather than hybrids. The choice of Kerma as the series representative of Nubia is based on the observation that it lay in the middle range of Nubian variation (Mukherjee et al., 1955) and by Crichton’s (1966) views that Nubian series are the most appropriate comparison series of a Negroid people in studies examining Egyptian variation in its African context Ethnic Nubians, called Nehesy by the ancient Egyptians, vary in their phenotype. However, Egyptians, even those with the stereotypically Negroid (Broad) phenotype, were not called Nehesy, reinforcing the idea that Nehesy was an ethno-geographic, not “racial” term (Drake, 1987). The pharaoh who forbade the northern migration of riverine Nubians into Egypt was of an obviously “Negroid dynasty (Yurco, 1989), known to have southern origins.” [b]Hiernaux (1975) has accounted for variation in Africa using a nonracial approach; he does not specifically address the northern Nile Valley in great detail, but his concepts, based on micro-evolutionary principles (adaptation, drift, selection), are applicable in this region in the light of recent archaeological data.[/b] For example, in living and fossil tropical Africans, narrow faces and noses (versus broad “Negro” ones) do not usually indicate European or Near Eastern migration or “Europoid“ (Caucasian) genes, called Hamitic as once taught, but represent indigenous variation, either connoting a hot-dry climatic adaptation or resulting from drift (Hiernaux, 1975). Hiernaux calls this morphology “Elongated African.” Some of the neolithic Saharans of tropical African affinity (Sutton, 1974; Hiernaux, 1975; after Chamla, 1968) who emigrated to the Nile Valley (Hassan, 1988) might be an example. The view that “elongated” characteristics are indigenous and equally tropical African (“Black) for specific archaeological series and peoples is supported by Gabel (19661, Hiernaux (1975), and Rightmire (1975a,b). [b]The range of variation, “Broad” (stereotypical “Negro”) to Elongated, can be subsumed within a single unit designated Africoid, thereby acknowledging the wider affinities and multiple tropical microadaptive strategies, as well as drift.[/b] Hiernaux’s perspectives are relevant to the creators of ancient Nile Valley culture, which is an integral part of, and [b]originated in a larger African context[/b] (Frankfort, 1950; Childe, 1953; de Heinzelin, 1962; Arkell and Ucko, 1965; Fairman, 1965; Clark, 1970; Shaw, 1976; Vercoutter, 1978; Aldred, 1978; Hassan, 1988), and is [b]not simply a part of, or a corridor to or from the “Mediterranean world”-a cultural construct with [i]limited explanatory[/i] power today, as noted by Herzfeld[/b] (1984), and almost certainly less in the early Holocene. [b]“Mediterranean,” connoting a “race,” “one interbreeding population,” at the craniometric level, is [i]questionable[/i] as defining the “Middle East” during the Bronze Age (Finkel, 1974,1978), [i]invalid as a term linking geography to a uniform external phenotype[/i] (see Snowden, 1970; MacGaffey, 1966; Keita, 1990), [i]inaccurate as a metric taxon[/i] for many groups previously assigned to it[/b] (Rightmire, 1975a,b), and [b]problematic as a bony craniofacial morphotype denoting a “race” or Mendelian population because of its varied soft-part trait associations and wide geographical distribution (see “Hamitic” in Coon et al., 1950; Gabel, 1966; MacGaffey, 1966; Hiernaux, 1975; Rightmire, 1975a)… Conclusions from cephalometric work imply the presence of southern phenotypes in the north in Old Kingdom times (Harris and Weeks, 1973), which become “foreign” in a chronological sense by New Kingdom times. Northern and dynastic Egyptians were postulated to be different from early southerners because of the invasion of a “dynastic race” or gene flow from the Near East (Smith, 1916; Derry, 1956; Trigger, 1987). Careful reading of these studies suggests synchronic and diachronic craniofacial variation in the north. Howells’ (1973) study which included the late dynastic northern “E” series, shows its “intermediateness,” since with a synthetic cluster technique it groups with northern Europeans but with a divisive method with tropical Africans (and of the Broad, [b]not Elongated physiognomy[/b]). Both approaches are valid but some investigators claim that the divisive technique produces more “natural” groups (Blakith and Reyment. 1971). Howells interprets the “E” series as being less Negroid than the pre-dynastic Nakadans, and “basically as European but converging on sub-Saharan Africans either through genetic contribution or environmental adaptation.” “Genetic contribution” is a more likely explanation given northern Egypt’s location, although it is not clear what the geographic origin of the “first” pre-Neolithic northern Egyptian populations was. The “E” series comes from the most cosmopolitan area of the country and from the era of foreign domination and settlement from northern Libya and the Near East. The “intermediateness” of the “E” series illustrates the nature of populations below the species or subspecies level (Abott et al., 1985)." - Keita Watch this space! [/QB][/QUOTE]
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