The Source Of the Proto-Chadic Y-DNA R1b-V88 People Of Africa

For reasons that I spell out in several comments to a post at the Bell Beaker blog, I think that there is very good reason to think that the Y-DNA R1b-V88 bearing Chadic people are derived from migrants who originated in the Bug-Dneister culture of Ukraine departing about 5500 BCE.

They made their way to the Southwest to Western Anatolia then along the Levantine coast to Cairo, Egypt then down the Nile to Upper Egypt or Sudan and then up what is now a dry riverbed, but then was the White Nile tracing it to its source, and then making their way over the low mountains/hills there to Lake Chad, where they settled around 5200 BCE, having picked up Cushitic wives not long before making the final leg of the 300 years long folk migration.

The cultural changes, language shift to the language of their wives, and the great time depth of this journey limits our ability to discern what they were like culturally during their long journey during which proto-Chadic ethnogenesis took place.

This trip was probably made in several periodic spurts, but these cattle herders were probably periodically forced to uproot themselves and move on by climate change events happening at the time and unfriendly and possibly more militarily powerful farmer neighbors.

I will copy some of the analysis that supports this and throw in some maps as well as time allows.

Ultimately, however, I'm really quite comfortable that this is now a solved mystery to the fullest extent it may ever be possible to solve it.

UPDATE September 29, 2017

After rereading Chapter 8 of David Anthony's "The Horse, Wheel and Language" (2007), it was possible to further narrow the window of space and time.

Cattle were only widely adopted by the Bug-Dneister culture in the Dneister River Valley on the western edge of the Bug-Dneister culture's range and became a majority food source in the time period from 5400 BCE to 5000 BCE, which means that the departure had to take place between 5400 BCE and 5200 BCE and could have take much less than the previously estimated 300 years, indeed definitely no more than about 200 years and possibly quite a bit less than that. This would have put them at the tail end of the introduction of cattle into the region where they arrived.

Map of the Dneister basin per Wikipedia

The Bug-Dneister people of the Dneister basin were concentrated in a region of forest-steppe roughly corresponding to the northern half of the eastern border of Moldova, a stretch of river about 100 miles long and perhaps 20 miles wide. This is an area between the size of the state of Rhode Island and the state of Delaware.

David Anthony speculates that the Bug-Dneister people may have spoken a language that was part of the same language family that was ancestral to the Indo-European languages, but he does not make a particularly confident pronouncement on that point.

Unlike their Cris culture neighbors to their immediate west in Moldova, from whom they acquired cattle husbandry and some limited farming of several ancient kinds of wheat (a smaller number of crops than the Cris people cultivated), they did not eat sheep. The Bug-Dneister people provided more of their diet through hunting than the Cris did. The Cris people were early European farmers derived from Anatolia and were ultimately replaced by LBK (Linear Pottery) farmers who never crossed the cultural dividing line of the Dneister River.

This narrow window in time and space for the source population is comparable to the precision with which the place of origin of (1) the Bantu expansion (near the coastal southern border of Nigeria), (2) the Asian component of the founding population of Madagascar on a particular part of the southern coast of island of Borneo, and (3) the founding population of the Austronesian people on a particular part of the island of Formosa. The window for the place of origin of European Roma is also quite specific in time and place. END UPDATE

The comment chain is below (with some typological corrections).

Bell Beaker Blogger in the main post:

I'm still puzzled by the presence of V88 in the Sahel. I figured it'd be present among the Cardium/Impresso peoples, but that hasn't panned out so far. Maybe it comes from Iberia with Beakers or MN Iberians?

My First Comment:

My read of the data is that V88 has its source in a male dominated pastoralist group that makes its way from the Steppe to the Levant to the Nile. These proto-Chadic people marry Cushitic wives the encounter in what is now Upper Egypt or Sudan, and then migrate up the now dry White Nile River bed and hop over the divide between the Nile Basin and the Lake Chad endoheric basin ca. 5200 BCE. I collect some of the evidence for that case at this post. Eventually, over the centuries, some V88 bleeds out via admixture with neighboring groups into nearby non-Chadic populations.

His Response:

There's no doubt in my mind that it originates somewhere in the vicinity of the Western or Northern Black Sea. I'm just curious as to what archaeological culture it is associated with and what direction it took. After that, everything you've said above I agree with.

My Second Comment:

The strong corroboration from multiple lines of evidence of the 5200 BCE arrival at Lake Chad date and the requirement that they would have had to have been pastoralists for the duration of their long distance journey puts some pretty tight bounds on potential archaeological cultures at the place of origin. The first wave Neolithic reached Egypt around 7000 BCE (very early), but probably reached the Steppe somewhat later (the Horse, the Wheel and Language would be good to narrow the candidate cultures), so you've got many centuries less than an 1800 year window in a pretty specific geographic location among people who are not directly traceable to Anatolian Neolithic migrants but did pick up animal husbandry in that time frame. 

There aren't a lot of choices when it comes to direction of travel either. They either went to the east of the sea and over the mountains through Armenia or eastern Anatolia and then down into the Fertile Crescent, or they crossed the isthmus and straits to the west of the sea and travelled through western Anatolia. Either way, eventually they have to stroll down the Levantine Coast or along its foothills across the Sinai to Egypt (the route through Yemen isn't suitable with herds of cattle traveling along with you), then down the Nile and turn west at the White Nile until you reach its source and go over the low rise mountains between the source and Lake Chad. 

Along the Black Sea coast you can't start much further west than the Danube and you can't start much further east than the foothills of the Caucasus. Given that they are basal R1b and not basal R1a, they've pretty much got to be nowhere north of Ukraine. Given these pretty tight geographic boundaries, the less than 1800 years temporal window, the requirement that they be pastoralists, the requirement that the archaeological culture can't be dead large numbers of centuries before 5200 BCE, and the requirement that the not be EEF stock, the range of possibilities is pretty narrow. I'd also strongly favor cattle herders over sheep and goat herders, because it is pretty clear that the proto-Chadic people had cattle among the livestock that they were herding. Realistically, they probably had to be around at their point of departure sometime in the window of 6000 BCE to 5200 BCE. 

The time depth and probably language shift and their cultural ethnogenesis following their marriages to local women all make any effort to use linguistic, legendary or cultural cures to identify them probably futile. The trip also predates any written records of any kind by thousands of years and doesn't seem to have left any notable traces of V88 that persisted en route. 

As far as I'm concerned, a route the long way around the Mediterranean via the Straits of Gibraltar is basically unthinkable knowing that they interacted with Cushitic women en route and ended up at Lake Chad.

His Response:

From what I've seen of the V88 tree, I would also favor this Eastern origin. I guess it will just take ancient DNA from Saharan and Sudanese burial sites to pinpoint it to a at least one defined culture. It wouldn't surprise me if it expanded about the same time as M269 due to the way they both seem to have explosive characters.

My Third and Final Comment:

The culture they passed through in the Levant would have had to be Pottery Neolithic which was in the Fertile Crescent from 6400 BCE to 4500 BCE. The Ubaid culture would have been in Southern Mesopotamia and probably wouldn't have been encountered. Apparently, sheep and goats reach Egypt around 6000 BCE, so they would have had to have reached Egypt after 6000 BE. If they took a western route they might have encountered the fringes of the early Vinca culture of the Balkans (5700 BCE to 4500 BCE) but probably wouldn't belong to it. The Vinca did have cattle, however. 

The Cucuteni–Trypillia culture ca. 5200 BCE to 3500 BCE is in the right place (centered on Moldova), but timing-wise would more likely be the culture immediately after the proto-Chadic migrants left. They too had cattle. 

The Starčevo culture, sometimes included within a larger grouping known as the Starčevo–Kőrös–Criş culture, is at about the right time (6200 BCE to 4500 BCE) and in about the right place, the north banks of the Danube, but they were a settled farming community and would be pushing the boundaries of being too far west as a starting point. So, probably a culture contemporaneous with them, but further east and without farming. 

Linear pottery also involves farmers and is too far west and north. 

Now, the Bug-Dniester culture was the archaeological culture that developed in the chernozem region of Moldavia and Ukraine around the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers flourished from 6300 BCE to 5500 BCE, which is just about right in terms of timing and location. They adopted cattle-breeding from the Cris people to the west ca. 5800 BCE to 5700 BCE, but were only primitive and recent farmers who weren't very admixed with the Cris, so this culture would be a very attractive candidate as a source for V88 people in Africa. 

The Dnieper–Donets culture comes to late (flourishing ca. 5000 BCE to 4200 BCE), even though they are in pretty close to the right place and they were still transitioning out of a hunter-gatherer period at that point. But, while this culture is ruled out, the fact that cattle herding hadn't reached as far east as the Dnieper by 5000 BCE and that cattle herding was a technology moving from west to east at that point in time, pretty much narrows our geographic range to someplace west of the Dnieper and east of the Danube. 

The bottom line from a pretty straightforward analysis is that the Bug-Dniester culture is pretty much far and away the most plausible candidate for a source of V88 people in Africa in terms of the nature of their animal husbandry, the timing, the location relative to hunter-gatherer and farming cultures of the time, and the fact that they have a location which would be plausible for R1b-V88 people to be located at that point in time.

Assuming that the Bug-Dniester culture is the solution, I think the route is pretty clear as well. A route that goes generally southwest from the Bug-Dniester region through Moldova, through Romania, through Bulgaria, through Western and Central Anatolia, through Syria and Lebanon and Israel to Cairo, Egypt and the south along the Nile is really the only route that makes sense for them. (Obviously, I am using modern anachronistic location designations). This also narrows the timing of the trip to a departure between 5800 BCE and 5500 BCE, a mere 300 year window and probably closer to 5500 BCE than 5800 BCE. This leaves them in a wandering folk migration mode until they settle at Lake Chad, of at least 300 years and possibly 400-500 years, although one could imagine the trip being made a series of periodic spurts rather than continuously, settling down for a few generations here or there along the way, then uprooting themselves and moving on again, perhaps driven by climate change to continually uproot themselves until they reach their promised land.

His Response:

Im interested in the possibility that many cultures of pre-history scouted for not only islands, but distant lands that were favorable to their way of life and poorly defended. I'd give the example of the Polynesian scouting or post-exploration colonialism. So I'm definitely down with a possibility that pastoralist societies might send adventurers out to very distant lands to find favorable conditions for grazers and wagons. Obviously the wet phase Sahara had the right stuff for someone. It could be that instead of diffusion always, that some archaeological cultures literally packed up and headed VFR direct two thousand miles in one direction.

A Response From "Rob":

Bug Dniester ? Steppe ?
Seems far fetched
You do realise that V88 was in El Trocs

Bell Beaker Blogger's Response To Rob:

That's true, but Els Torcs was an epi-Cardial site which complicates it's relationship with the Bug-Dneister, Northern Nubia and the Levant. 

Bug-Dneister does have a wavy-line combed, point-based pottery tradition that has some ancient parallels in Nubia, and a theory by Dymtro Gaskevych below suggests contact or colonization between these remote places. 

Here's his abstract: 

"North-Pontic Impresso: Origin of the Neolithic Pottery with Comb Decoration in the South of Eastern Europe. Archaeologists so far have connected appearance of ware with pointed and rounded bottoms and comb decoration on the northern part of the Black Sea area with spread of inhabitants of northern and northeast regions to the south. Large series of absolute dates of Neolithic sites of Eastern Europe have been received in the Kiev radiocarbon laboratory recently. They have shown that such pottery appeared in the northern part of the Black Sea area earlier than on the Upper Dnieper region, the Volga river region, the Kama river basin and the Trans-Ural area. These data suggest incorrectness of existing hypotheses. Alternatively to these, the author proposes to regard North-Pontic Neo-lithic with comb decorated pottery as a part of the area of Mediterranean Neolithic cultures with Impresso ware. The possible Mediterranean prototype of the North-Pontic pottery with comb decoration could be ware of the North Africa Neolithic known as the «Saharan Sudanese Complex» or the «Khartoum Mesolithic». Formed in 9—8 thousand сal BC, in the middle 7 thousand сal BC it could diff use to the Near East, and further — to the Northern Black Sea coast. Radiocarbon dates show high speed of this process. It corresponds to concept of «leapfrog colonization» founded on a coasting (model of «maritime pioneers» by J. Zilhᾶo). Occurrence of the Neolithic pottery in the region only aft er formation of the Bosporus Strait which has united the Black Sea with the Mediterranean supports possible maritime colonization of the Northern coast of the Black Sea too. Sites left by the Mediterranean migrants with full «Neolithic package» have not been found in the northern part of the Black Sea area so far. It can result from their position on nowadays fl ooded fertile lowlands along the coast of the sea, the level of which rose more than 10 m over the last 8.5 thousand years. On the other hand, one fragment of the vessel with Cardium decoration was found on the Savran' site of the Bug-Dniester culture. It suggests settlement here of some Mediterranean makers of Cardium ware in the northern part of the Black Sea area, or of their contacts with local population. Availability of ware with comb and linear decoration, all attributes of which are met in ceramics of Impresso-ware zone, and also specifi c «Neolithic» fl int implements, bones of domestic animals, polished stone artifacts, found on Neolithic settlements of the North-Pontic area, also can be evidence of contacts of the local population with Mediterranean migrants who lived on the Black Sea coast.

North-Pontic Impresso: Origin of the Neolithic Pottery with Comb Decoration in the South of Eastern Europe (In Russian) (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314114394_North-Pontic_Impresso_Origin_of_the_Neolithic_Pottery_with_Comb_Decoration_in_the_South_of_Eastern_Europe_In_Russian [accessed Sep 28, 2017]."

Possibly a scenario is a secondary expansion or reflux of Neolithized Hunger-Gatherers?

Post-Script

The route I proposed avoids exposure to Caucasian farmer or Caucasian hunter-gatherer DNA which is appropriate, because as of 4300 BCE, ancient DNA from inland Tanzania reveals that none of this kind of DNA had reached the area yet.

I used Google maps to work out a realistic estimate of how long a journey this would be by foot and how much time in transit would be involved.

From Odessa, Ukraine, which is close to the origin of the Bug-Dneister culture to Lake Chad, by foot along more or less the route I suggested  is a distance of about 8,267 km which would take 1,665 hours to travel by foot. Obviously, this is a long trip, but for semi-nomadic cattle herders over 300 years, it would be no big deal in terms of possibility, an average of 28 km per year (about 18 miles per year which a family with a herd of cattle could travel in two or three days at a fairly leisurely pace). But, this is still far more mobility than, for example, feudal European farmers who might never travel more than 10 km from home in their entire lives of several decades, would experience.

More realistically, the community would actually migrate five times, once every two generations on average, about 1,653 km per trip, about 1,008 miles which might be five or six months of traveling every sixty years or so, perhaps over a period of two or three years with annual stops at suitable points en route.

Of course, this mystery is really not very old. 

Until we could do significant numbers of fairy high resolution Y-DNA tests sufficient to distinguish Y-DNA R1b-M269 found in Western Europe from Y-DNA R1b-V88 found mostly in the Sahel of Africa, there was no way to even know that there was an undocumented mass migration that happened sometime in pre-history. Yet, this has only been possible for ten or twelve years, tops, if that.

Moreover, to solve the question with any confidence, we needed ancient Y-DNA R1b and we didn't have that until the last couple of years, so before then, there simply wasn't enough information to solve this mystery with any confidence.

We also needed good archaeological data from the vicinity of Lake Chad, which we have only had for something like four to six years, and good ancient climate indicators which are perhaps fifteen or twenty years old tops, but have improved significantly within the last decade.

Where Did Their Wives Come From?

To find wives who spoke Cushitic languages, the proto-Chadic men probably found wives in the Southern part of Sudan (but not South Sudan) near the fork of the White Nile when it existed. Wikipedia has this to tell us about that period of history:

Prehistory 

See also: A-Group culture, Sabu-Jaddi, and C-Group culture 

By the seventh millennium BC, people of a Neolithic culture had settled into a sedentary way of life there in fortified mud-brick villages, where they supplemented hunting and fishing on the Nile with grain gathering and cattle herding.  

During the fifth millennium BC migrations from the drying Sahara brought neolithic people into the Nile Valley along with agriculture. The population that resulted from this cultural and genetic mixing developed social hierarchy over the next centuries become the Kingdom of Kush (with the capital at Kerma) at 1700 BC. 

Anthropological and archaeological research indicate that during the predynastic period Nubia and Nagadan Upper Egypt were ethnically, and culturally nearly identical, and thus, simultaneously evolved systems of pharaonic kingship by 3300 BC. Together with other countries on Red Sea, Sudan is considered the most likely location of the land known to the ancient Egyptians as Punt (or "Ta Netjeru", meaning "God's Land"), whose first mention dates to the 25th century BC.

"The A-Group culture was an ancient civilization that flourished between the First and Second Cataracts of the Nile in Nubia. It lasted from c. 3800 BCE to c. 3100 BCE."

"The C-Group culture was an ancient civilization centered in Nubia, which existed from ca. 2400 BCE to ca. 1550 BCE."

Thus, the A-Group and C-Group cultures post-date the proto-Chadic people.

Sabu-Jaddi Rock Art site in Sudan is a unique cluster of more than 1600 rock drawings of animals and daily life details and occasions from different historical periods expanding for more than 6000 years Neolithic through different eras of Nubian civilization, located in the Nile Valley in Sudan 600 km northwest of Khartoum in the third cataract region, the Mahas region between the villages of Sabu and Jaddi.

This rock art site might actually include some images from the time period of 5500 BCE to 5200 BCE when this great migration took place. 

The timing is such that it wouldn't be impossible for the proto-Chadic people to have been the original source of cattle in Neolithic Egypt and Sudan, which took place sometime after 6000 BCE, but still did happen in the early Neolithic of the region. The description above notes the presence of cattle in the dry period the concentrated people in the Nile Valley and that would have been the dry period during which the proto-Chadic migration took place.