Decent resolution composite Berber YDNA from The Berber and the Berbers, Genetic and linguistic diversities, Jean-Michel Dugoujon et. al (2009)
Update: With respect to R-P25 (x M269) found in the Siwa and Mozabite Berbers, there is an even more exact breakdown of the lineage in this table from another publication using the same samples as above. It shows for the Siwa Berbers, the 26.9% of R-P25 (x M269) being further resolved to 23.7 % R-V88* (x M18, V8, V35, V69) plus 3.2% R-V69 (a branch of R-V88), similarly for the Mozabite Berbers, the 3% of R-P25 (x M269) is all resolved to R-V88* (x M18, V8, V35, V69). |
| Phylogeny of the 29 biallelic MSY markers (in bold) tested |
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Curious.
ReplyDeleteSiwa Berbers are a world apart in all senses, with high founder effects of what is probably R1b1c-V88 and B, and instead almost no E1b-M81.
On the other hand NW African Berbers are totally dominated by E1b-M81, which is a clade almost endemic of the region. Instead its East African and East Mediterranean cousin, arguably associated to the expansion of Afroasiatic languages, E1b-M78, is rare.
I also miss European R1b-M269 and I, which have been found at relatively high frequencies in the Guanche mummies, presumed of deep Berber stock. In these R1b-M269 made up 10%, while I was almost 7%. Ancient Guanches also were anomalous relative to these pockets of surviving mountain Berbers because they had relatively low E-M81 (27%) and high E-M78 (23%), also high J1 (17%) and K* (probably T, 10%).
Therefore one wonders how well these isolated mountain Berbers represent ancient (pre-Arab) Berber stock and if, as may happen with present day Celts, their genetics rather represent for the greatest part a pre-Berber, pre-Afroasiatic stock instead.
What do we know of more cosmopolitan groups like Kabyles?
“Siwa Berbers are a world apart in all senses, with high founder effects of what is probably R1b1c-V88 and B, and instead almost no E1b-M81. “
DeleteIt is also interesting that they have E-V6, which is known only in East Africa and who's relationship with newer found polymorphisms upstream of E-M81, M78,etc.. after the publishing of this paper is as of yet unknown.
“On the other hand NW African Berbers are totally dominated by E1b-M81, which is a clade almost endemic of the region. Instead its East African and East Mediterranean cousin, arguably associated to the expansion of Afroasiatic languages, E1b-M78, is rare. “
Yes, and also notice how E-M2 (x M191) is almost uniformly present from the NE berbers to the NW berbers, usually this lineage is attributed by mainstream academia to the Arab slave trade, but its uniformity looks to me like it may be something way older in North Africa, we need to see STR variance of the haplotypes and compare it with other African E-M2 lineages.
“I also miss European R1b-M269 and I, which have been found at relatively high frequencies in the Guanche mummies, presumed of deep Berber stock. In these R1b-M269 made up 10%, while I was almost 7%. Ancient Guanches also were anomalous relative to these pockets of surviving mountain Berbers because they had relatively low E-M81 (27%) and high E-M78 (23%), also high J1 (17%) and K* (probably T, 10%). “
I am not sure if those 30 samples you referenced are a representative of the general berber or North West African YDNA landscape, if you look at the “NWA” samples (221), which are samples from Bosch + Flores (2001), E-M81 is at 65%, R-M269 is at 4% , E-M78 is at 7 % and so forth, in other words, closer to the berber results in this post than the results of the 30 “ABO” samples are.
“Therefore one wonders how well these isolated mountain Berbers represent ancient (pre-Arab) Berber stock and if, as may happen with present day Celts, their genetics rather represent for the greatest part a pre-Berber, pre-Afroasiatic stock instead. “
Could be, it is speculated that ancient European mtDNA, possibly from SW Europe Ice age refugia, exist in the genepool of NW berbers, perhaps this could have been accompanied by some European YDNA in the pre-Afroasiatic past of NW Africa as well, however, I am not sure if R1b in Europe is old enough to accommodate such a scenario.
“What do we know of more cosmopolitan groups like Kabyles?”
Not sure....
Regarding E-M33* and E-M2*, I'd say that the single Guanche mummy with the first lineage (as well as ancient Guanche mtDNA L(xM,N) - there can even be one or more Iberian ancient mtDNA like that also), simply confirm that at least some of those trans-Saharan lineages were present in NW Africa and possibly even as far as Europe long before the trans-Saharan slave trade began.
DeleteProbably in the Neolithic (at least), when the Sahara was largely inhabitable and inhabited, there were some genetic exchanges. Maybe even earlier in some cases although between pluvials and semi-pluvials I expect that nearly all trans-Saharan genetic flow took place along the Nile and the Red Sea. Without camels the desert was impossible to cross.
This offers narrow time frames for "molecular clock" calibration (if such thing is possible at all): lineages that must have crossed through the Western or Central Sahara, must have done so in the Abbassia Pluvial, the Mousterian Pluvial or the Neolithic semi-pluvial: three relatively narrow windows. The first one corresponds almost without doubt to the migration "Out of Africa".
In this case, as Y-DNA is subject to the forces of drift and founder effects much more than mtDNA, I'd say that the trans-Saharan E(xE-M35) in general probably arrived, at least largely, in the Neolithic period. But for mtDNA I would consider older periods also.
As for E-V6, my first impression is that it just shows the undeniable deep Egypt-Sudan-Horn genetic connections, also probably apparent in different ways in the two largest Siwa lineages, however these rather seem to speak of Egypt-Sudan-Central Africa (in both directions probably).
As for the Guanche mummies it is true that it's difficult to get conclusions from them. Probably Canarian Aborigines, even if Berber by language and customs, had their own peculiarities as well. It's plausible that some founder effects might even have arrived from Europe at some moment, impacting specifically in the Canary islands but it's not impossible also that the Guanches preserved lineages comparatively wiped out in the mainland.
In the case of undeniably North African aboriginal mtDNA lineages like U6, the Canary Islands is known to still hold a great deal of diversity distinct from both North Africa and Iberia (where U6 is also somewhat important, specially in the West, but less basally diverse than in Morocco). This suggests that the Guanches were relatively peculiar, even if most related to mainland North Africans.
The notion that the linguistic diversity within the Berber language family is only on a par with that of Germanic or Romance languages (and hence, arguably derived from a single proto-language in that time frame, despite an apparent lack of demic turnover in that time frame) is fascinating. This might, for example, coincide roughly with the introduction of the camel saddle in time depth.
ReplyDeleteThe authors also point to a major population bottleneck for the Siwa in the 7th to 12th centuries CE.
It is argued (in Wikipedia at least) that Proto-Berber (stage 2) could be as recent as 3000 years ago but there is another Proto-Berber (stage 1), which should be as old as 7000 BP (roughly as old as Indoeuropean). Similarly I can only imagine that there was a pre-proto-Germanic before proto-Germanic but after the generic Western IE of Corded Ware - and we know that there was an Italic stage (and possibly a Celto-Italic one before it) that pre-dates Latin and Vulgar Latin (proto-Romance).
DeleteAnyhow, if the stage 2 of Proto-Berber (i.e. the common ancestor of modern Berber languages) was in fact a bit older (c. 2-3,000 BCE) and the stage 1 was also somewhat older (c. 10,000 BCE), then we could equate stage 1 with the arrival (and branching out) of Afroasiatic with Capsian culture and stage 2 with Megalithism, which is also the period of the Libu threat to Egypt.
There's no reason to imagine any more recent scenario of language homogenization in ancient Tamazgha (from Egypt to Canary Islands) after Megalithism. There is no known indicator that the introduction of dromedary caused anything other than Tuareg expansion southwards, while Iron Age Phoenician and later Roman hegemony would rather have kept Berber languages fragmented, as well as their polities, being impossible to identify any poltical-cultural expansion in North Africa c. 1000 years ago other than that of the Phoenician colonial empire.
This would push Afroasiatic and Northern Afroasiatic towards somewhat earlier dates than the mere 10,000 years that Wikipedia suggest and that would seem to be a bit late for the Epipaleolithic archaeological evidence, which should place pre-proto-Semitic (or the Eastern branch of Northern Afroasiatic) in Southern Palestine c. 10-11,000 BP, at the Harifian genesis (that would later cause the Circum-Arabian Pastoralist Complex, probably at the origin of Semitic proper).
So in the end everything seems to match better, with archaeologically documented Prehistory at least, if we push the general Afroasiatic and Berber dates a bit towards the past. This is consistent with the oldest range of proposed dates for Proto-Aforasiatic, which are as old as c. 16-18 Ka. BP but not with the most recent proposed ones of c. 10-7.5 Ka BP.
Any age < 15 KYA for the origin of Afroasiatic seems unrealistic given that each branch of Afroasiatic has a distinctive development of vocabulary for food production, which would imply that proto-Afroasiatic would have been around way before the gradual transition of hunting and gathering to settled agriculture....
ReplyDeleteI expect that the branches have pretty different ages of origin. Berber looks much younger than I expected given their genetics. (Re Camels, the notion would be similar to Latin v. Celtic. Berbers may have long spoken an AA language, but one of those language became dominant much more recently, perhaps the early adopter of camel riding in warfare, within Berbers, causing language shift from one Berber language to another for all Berbers.)
ReplyDeleteChadic also looks reasonably young (younger than PIE, e.g.) and IMHO has a source in a single mass migration from outside Africa that experiences language shift to an AA language with major substrate influences.
Coptic is attested in writing ca. 5.5 kya and is surely at least as old as the Egyptian Neolithic and possibly older. Semitic is attested ca. 4.5 kya and again surely meaningfully older although the deep origins of Semitic are a bit sketchy - it could easily go back as far as Jerico (which could be a source for all other AA languages), but could easily have arrived from Africa in some prehistoric Egyptian expansionary phase as well. Indeed, the two ideas are not inconsistent (AA could have a root in the language of Jerico, but Semitic could be Coptic derived in deep history).
Omotic, in my view, is probably a partial creolization or Cushitic subject to strong areal affects from nearby Nilo-Saharan speakers in a specific confined geographic area on their boundary and not a "normal" and co-equal "branch" of Afro-Asiatic in a branching tree linguistic model.
Cushitic could be the territory of the source for AA or could be a consequence of Nile sourced people speaking a Levant or Nile sourced language expanding into Cushitic territory.
Genetics doesn't provide a definitive answer, at least at this point, to the AA origins questions.
Food production in Africa is closer to 9kya (oldest evidence of domesticated cattle) than 15 kya, so one needn't go back to that great a time depth. There are multiple independent domesticate groups in the AA territory (Fertile Crescent domestications, supplementary Egyptian domesticates like the Donkey, Ethiopian domesticated including coffee, Sahel agricultural domestates), so distinctive food production vocabulary could indicate wandering words with varied sourcing. Chadic and Cushitic would have been close to Sahel and Ethiopian domestication sites. The northern tier would not have been. The existence of proto-agriculture gathering of wild type plants could also be a source of non-uniform food production language. In the case of Chadic, substrate influence in the face of mass language shift could also be at work.
For a list of Y-dna Haplogroups of almost all North African populations studied so far (included the ones above) look at
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-DNA_haplogroups_by_populations_of_North_Africa
... as we can see in this list, in some cosmopolitan samples like in Tunis or Zaghouan, J1e frequency is very high (up to 45%) and even greater that E-M81.
ReplyDeleteMin-Max frequencies of major haplogroups in NW Africans based on the samples studied so far
ReplyDeleteE-M81: 30-100%
E-M78: 0-17%
E-M123: 0-11%
J1e: 0-45%
J2: 0-6%
R1b-M269 :0-16%
R1a: 0-4%
G: 0-3%
@ Andrew, recent Genetic data has shown that omotic speakers are distinct in their model based Genome-wide profile than Nilo-Saharans on an African level , which does not sustain the idea that omotic would be a hybrid language between Cushitic and Nilo-Saharan, unless it happened with absolutely no gene-flow, unlikely, what it rather better supports is the idea that it is an independent branch within Afroasiatic, as maintained by most contemporary Afroasiatic experts (sans Greenberg), a branch that is also thought to have diverged the earliest. With respect to your idea that Cushitic may have originated in the Levant, then what happened to their descendants in the Levant?, you would need a scenario of Semitic completely replacing Cushitc speakers in the Levant to sustain such an idea, not only that, it would have to be in such an early phase of the development of the language branch that the migrants that putatively would have brought it into East Africa (before it was replaced by semitic in the Levant) would have to have done so very early on as to support the huge diversity of the language group that we see in East Africa today, I see no need for such a far fetched scenario when you have a much simpler explanation.
ReplyDelete@ Raphael, please keep your thoughts and comments in one post at a time. I looked at the data you provided, if you take out the cosmopolitan North Africans and Arabs, and keep only the Berbers (which is the topic of this post) you still get ~65 % E-M81, if you take out the Siwa Berbers you get ~ 77% E-M81, which is not contradictory with the entry of this post.
@Etyopis
ReplyDeleteYes (I am myself E-M81 of Kabyle background), but as demonstrated by authors of most of these studies (see Ennaffa 2011), the difference in NW african haplogroup distribution is generally not between Berber and Arab speaking group but between rural and urban communities.
Just skimming through the MSY data In Enaffa 2011, The Jerbian Arabs of Tunisia had 61% E-M81 while the Jerbian Berbers had 77% E-M81, in addition the Arabs had 17% F-M89 while the berbers had it at 6%, even-though the difference doesn't look that large, since the Arabs were most probably Berbers in the past for the most part, there still seems to be a little difference....
ReplyDelete