Thoughts on this?
Why would pre Neolithic Nile valley skulls be very negroid looking? Could IBMs cro-magnon features be the result of a lack of samples. I’d imagine IBM and Nile HG would either be genetically identical or Nile valley is more W.E shifted.
I also think we’re underestimating the amount of southern Levant PPNB that entered the Nile. In one of his previous tweets he said they flooded it(no pun intended).
Until recently I had mistakenly believed it was the Kebarans that expanded into North Africa to form populations like the Iberomaurisians and the Egyptian Hunter Gatherers.
Kebarans only formed around 23000 years ago. The earliest IBM sites date back 25000 years ago.
IBMs were described as having cro-Magnid like skulls. IBMs were tall, had large cranial sizes and very robust physical statures with very high levels of sexual dimorphism. None of this sounds like Kebaran influence.
What population do you think brought Paleolithic north africas west Eurasian ancestry into the region? U/emotion… (can’t remember your name,sorry) showed me a G25 model where you can model IBMs with a small chunk of gravettian ancestry on top of Dzudzuana ancestry. Materially it lines up because of the similarity in tool kits but I don’t see how gravettians cross the Mediterranean into Africa.
Maybe Levantine Aurignacian? I barely know anything about them. They were in the Levant before the Kebarans but I don’t know what their genetics consisted of.
One more small question, do you think they were more or less basal Eurasian than Dzudzuana. Most academics put basal eurasians homeland around the gulf area. If Dzudzuana first pops up around 30000 years ago and their related ancestry reaches the furthest corner of North Africa 5000 years later I’d imagine they didn’t stay around the gulf too long to pick up anymore B.E ancestry.
Amhara and Oromo are both artificial constructs and you can’t differentiate us from one another.
Got somewhat bored today so I went and made some models, if you want to me to model something feel free to contact me.
As usual, all Z scores above two and all standard errors below 5 for optimal quality.
In total, only Kenya_PN_Elmenteitan and Kenya_EarlyPN showed levels of PPN that was consistent with a good Z scored but almost all other PN samples rejected it outright including Zagros weirdly. I made sure to double check thoroughly and honestly I don't know how to interpret some of these results so maybe someone can come up with an explanation for this.
You can model most PN samples as a two-way of Natufian and Dinka but this can be pushed further using a 3-way including Mota, and this seems to somewhat improve the p-value and fitting.
Let me know if I made a mistake or have any suggestions for improvisation.
As expected, the addition of the diverse Bale National Park samples for Oromos and Semien National Park for Amhara has noticabily impacted the averages for these two populations. Check yours. The new dataset was posted in my earlier post. Here is my distance.
Are there any plans to extract DNA from Ancient Axumite & Pre-Axumite Burial sites from the 1st Century CE & before? It’s insane how little attention Axum gets compared to fellow Ancient Afro-Asiatic civilisations such as the Nile Valley one [Egypt & North Sudan] in the world of genetics.
Hello, I have a question. Does anyone else think that G25 and determining ancestry based on genetic proximity and distance is just nonsense? How did this method of determining ancestry become popular when it is illogical in the context of determining ancestry and ancestry? Because there may be contemporary residents of one country who are descendants of their ancestors in the same country, but there is a country in the other half of the continent that appears in G25 as genetically closer to the ancestors of those people.
I’ve been scrolling through G25 plots and every one I look at Agaws cluster right there with other ethio-semites and have around 20-22% Semitic related ancestry.
Everytime you hear someone talk about population history in the horn they’ll say rthiosemites are 75% Agaw and 25% Semitic . Am I the only one that just doesn’t understand that. If that was true then wouldn’t there be a lot of genetic difference between agews and ethiosemites. They have near identical Neolithic Splits though.
The only counter I’ve read is because of intermixing with ethiosemites which is kind of funny. How do you mix with a group and end up with nearly the same amount of Semitic related ancestry. Something ain’t adding up.
The haplogroup spreads are also very similar with agaws averaging around 22% J in a study of 257 people.
Is it just agews getting hit with the protosemetic wave but retaining their Cushitic language?
I’ve read that proto agews worshipped some sort of Proto Hebraic Religion so they were definitely influenced by semites.
It’s kind of a touchy subject but I thought I’d still ask because I’m curious on everyone’s thoughts and this is a genetics and culture subreddit on the horn.
How do you think the lack of women’s rights have affected the growth of the entire Horn of Africa.
You look at the not only the state of the region today but also the past and you see child marriage being the norm with girls as young as 8 sold off into marriage, widespread Female Genital Mutilation
across the region and even type 3 being practiced with those practicing the Islamic faith and practices such as Telefa still being practiced in rural areas where girls as young as 10 are kidnapped and raped with the intention of getting them pregnant to secure a marriage.
You look at other regions of the world where historically only around 20%-30% of men reproduced.
I can’t begin to imagine the number in the horn, especially when you can just buy a little girl off her parents or kidnap one to secure a marriage.
Historically, if women actually had a say in who’d they would’ve married how different do you think the region would be?
Do you feel a lot of people have reproduced that should’ve had no right to?
Yoruba.DG
Model: Yoruba.DG
Sources: Tanzania_Pemba_600BP 90.7%, Morocco_Iberomaurusian 9.3%
p = 0.163
chisq = 16.7
Status: PASS
This passes, and the Morocco_Iberomaurusian component is supported with Z = 2.90, but the overall fit is only moderate. p = 0.163 is decent.
Gambian.DG
Model: Gambian.DG
Sources: Tanzania_Pemba_600BP 88.3%, Morocco_Iberomaurusian 11.7%
p = 0.579
chisq = 10.4
Status: PASS
This one looks good. The p-value is solid, chisq is reasonable, and the Morocco_Iberomaurusian component has Z = 3.07, so it is meaningfully supported. This is the best of these three.
Kongo.DG
Model: Kongo.DG
Sources: Tanzania_Pemba_600BP 96.2%, Morocco_Iberomaurusian 3.8%
p = 0.161
chisq = 16.7
Status: PASS
This passes, but it is not very strong. The Morocco_Iberomaurusian component is only 3.8% with Z = 0.928, so it is not clearly required.
It should be noted that Tanzania_Pemba_600BP is modeled as 100% Bantu South Africa Ovambo in another study. ( https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Admixture-history-of-ancient-African-populations-A-Overview-of-coexistence-of-distinct_fig3_342135975 )
Mostly Bantu genetically. I tried several other source combinations but couldn’t get any to work as well as this one.
The Taforalt ancestry within West Africans is based on Figure 2 of this study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/423079v1.full
So T-L208 originates from Saudi man over a thousand years ago coinciding with the spread of Islam. The sample even shows Saudis in the Makkah region! I think it’s extremely likely T-L208 originates from one of the Sahabas spreading Islam to the Somalis.
They’re definitely the most confusing ancient African population so I kind of want to know as much as possible.
How far shifted are they compared to other paleolithic african populations? I understand they diverged relatively early from the movement out of Africa but looking at IBMs G25 plot they still very clearly get read like African ancestry, just a slightly more Eurasian shifted version. Does anyone have a simulated ANA G25 Plot comparing them to other Palaeolithic pops in Africa?
Do you think they had ancestry from populations like the Aterians? I know they lived way way way before them but where could they have possibly gone, they were isolated in north west Africa. The only other possibility seems to be extinction.
This ties to my other question but is it basically confirmed they were haplogroup E. The reason I’m asking this is because DE is supposedly Eurasian in origin but E is found almost exclusively in Africa with many putting its origin in the horn. What are the chances Kebaran brought in E? And if not why do people put its origin in AEA/AWA related peoples when Ancestral North Africans clearly don’t descend from them? Maybe ANA does have East / West African related ancestry.
The qpAdm models posted here were selected based on the best overall fit parameters among the tested runs: passing p-values, lower chisq values, feasible positive weights, reasonable SE values, and source components that stayed meaningful rather than collapsing to zero or becoming unstable. The p-value indicates whether qpAdm rejects the model; generally, p > 0.05 is considered a pass, with higher values usually meaning a more comfortable fit. The chisq value measures mismatch between the model and the data, so lower chisq is generally better when comparing similar models with the same Right/outgroup set. The weights are the estimated ancestry proportions assigned to each source population. The SE, or standard error, shows how uncertain each weight is; smaller SE values mean the estimate is more stable, while very large SE values mean the exact percentage should be treated cautiously. These models should still be understood as proxy models rather than literal ancestry percentages, since sources like Natufian, Dinka, Kenya Pastoral Neolithic, Syria Umayyad, Yemen/Socotri, etc. may represent broader ancestral streams rather than direct ancestors.
It seems the images aren’t viewable on desktop but it works on the Reddit app on iPhone.
Here’s the plain text version for all of them:
Model: Yemen_Medieval_Soqotri.AG
Sources: Syria_TellQarassa_Umayyad 92.0%, Ethiopia_4500BP 8.0%
p = 0.268
chisq = 9.95
Status: PASS
Model: Kenya_IA_Pastoral.AG
Sources: Israel_PPNB 22.2%, Dinka 77.8%
p = 0.368
chisq = 8.73
Status: PASS
Model: Somali.HO
Sources: Israel_Natufian 39.3%, Dinka 45.9%, Ethiopia_4500BP 14.7%
p = 0.572
chisq = 2.92
Status: PASS
Model: Ethiopia_BetaIsrael.HO
Sources: Kenya_IA_Pastoral 59.6%, Syria_TellQarassa_Umayyad 40.4%
p = 0.451
chisq = 8.85
Status: PASS
Model: Eritrean.HO
Sources: Kenya_IA_Pastoral 50.0%, Yemen_Medieval_Soqotri 50.0%
p = 0.528
chisq = 8.06
Status: PASS
Model: Somali.HO
Sources: Kenya_IA_Pastoral 76.1%, Yemen_Medieval_Soqotri 23.9%
p = 0.164
chisq = 13.0
Status: PASS
Model: Ethiopia_BetaIsrael.HO
Sources: Kenya_IA_Pastoral 58.8%, Israel_Ashkelon_IA2 41.2%
p = 0.245
chisq = 11.5
Status: PASS
Model: Eritrean.HO
Sources: Kenya_IA_Pastoral 47.8%, Israel_Ashkelon_IA2 52.2%
p = 0.333
chisq = 10.2
Status: PASS
Model: Eritrean.HO
Sources: Dinka 41.9%, Turkey_Marmara_Barcin_N 17.1%, Iran_GanjDareh_N 6.5%, Israel_Natufian 34.6%
p = 0.135
chisq = 13.7
Status: PASS
Genuinenly curious. And whats with the obsession with g25, g25 isnt peer reviewed, is it because their software is advanced and organized? its literally one person who guesses peoples make up, its not nearly as consistent with others.
