Wednesday, September 27, 2017

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.

24 comments:

bellbeakerblogger said...

Excellent post. I made one final comment concerning mobility, but you have addressed it as well. Mobile pastoralists really aren't limited by space as you've said. It's possible great distance was covered in weeks.

Gaspar said...

This scenario for R1b-V88 has already been noted a long time ago

http://www.academia.edu/3642572/Unraveling_the_Prehistoric_Ancestry_of_the_present-day_Inhabitants_of_Northeast_Africa._An_Archaeogenetic_Approach_to_Neolithisation

andrew said...

@Gaspar Thanks for the heads up. Good to know that there is academic agreement with this conclusion which was new to me.

Anonymous said...

There is the question of their original language, before the contact with Cushitic speaking women. Some have noted "Western European" (Germanic, Celtic, Italic) type words in the proto-Chadic lexicon, notably the two words for "fish", one word looking like the word for "carp", and the other word looking like the word "salmon" (I think this "salmon" like word for fish shows up in Berber as well)>

andrew said...

Cool. Thanks for the tip.

Darayvus said...

I wonder: why Cushitic?

Cushitic today is clustered in the Horn of Africa. Before the Ethiopian Semites got there, Cushitic was found further west, yes. But so were Nilotic / Nubian languages.

Why not Tamazight "Berber"? I'd like to see the studies that link Chadic more with far eastern Cushitic rather than with the people who were, like, right to the north.

Ryan said...

This seems needlessly complex. There's Els Trocs with R1b-V88 in the Iberian Neolithic at 5178-5066 BCE and Vlasa37 with R1b-V88 in the Danube Gorges Mesolithic at 6767-6461 BCE.

So we already know R1b-V88 was in the Balkans and in close proximity to the Near East before the Neolithic.

We know that R1b-V88 was present in at least some members of the Cardial Pottery Culture.

We know that the Cardial Pottery Culture had a significant genetic impact on North Africa.

What more is needed? There's no need to invoke a migration directly from the steppe to North Africa, and if that is in fact what happened, why is there no steppe ancestry in Els Trocs?

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an earlier entry though - mesolithic peoples were plying the Mediterranean from 11,000 BCE.

https://publications.ub.uni-mainz.de/theses/volltexte/2017/100001355/pdf/100001355.pdf

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/02/10/013433.full.pdf

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/21/191569

andrew said...

@Zimbri

Because linguistic evidence shows a strong affinity between Chadic and Cushitic and the mtDNA evidence shows a connection between Chadic and Cushitic populations.

andrew said...

@Ryan

"There's Els Trocs with R1b-V88 in the Iberian Neolithic at 5178-5066 BCE and Vlasa37 with R1b-V88 in the Danube Gorges Mesolithic at 6767-6461 BCE.

So we already know R1b-V88 was in the Balkans and in close proximity to the Near East before the Neolithic.

We know that R1b-V88 was present in at least some members of the Cardial Pottery Culture.

We know that the Cardial Pottery Culture had a significant genetic impact on North Africa.

What more is needed? There's no need to invoke a migration directly from the steppe to North Africa"

Because V88 is highly concentrated in Chadic language people while it is rare in North Africans, and the non-Chadic V88 can be explained pretty well by introgression from Chadic people to neighboring populations. In contrast, in CP Neolithic populations you see only sporadic V88. Having V88 sporadically in lots of places does make sense if there was a diaspora of V88 people as the ecology collapsed in many directions.

V88 also almost certainly can derive from the core EEF population of the CP Neolithic, as that is strongly associated with Y-DNA like G and to a lesser extent assimilated I, while Y-DNA R1b, even in its rather basal V88 form is strongly associated with steppe populations.

"if that is in fact what happened, why is there no steppe ancestry in Els Trocs?"

The same reason that there isn't steppe ancestry in V88 Africans. There were many generations of dilution, leaving only the Y-DNA trace. In Els Trocs that would be dilution with EEF. In Chadic people, it would be dilution with autochronous Africans.

"I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an earlier entry though - mesolithic peoples were plying the Mediterranean from 11,000 BCE."

There is good evidence that the ethnogenesis of the Chadic linguistic population is at 5200 BCE at Lake Chad. Also, the older the source, the more evenly mixed between different populations you would expect V88 to be. But, V88 percentages vary dramatically between African populations.

andrew said...

@Zimbri

Also, Berber ethnogenesis is almost surely much younger than Chadic based upon the estimated age of private Berber haplotypes and linguistic variability. There were no Berbers in existence ca. 5200 BCE. The Berbers came into being many thousands of years later.

andrew said...

@Gaspar Very much enjoyed the article you linked although it was outdated as to the geographic origins of Y-DNA R1 and not very specific about the source of the V88 people and didn't integrate archaeological data. It did offer more animal DNA that I provides, however, which generally speaking corroborates the narrative.

Also the data in that paper suggests a not insignificant frequency of R1b-V88 in the Nile region, although its sources are conflicting on that point, and a higher frequency of V88 in the Southern Nile, which I propose that the pre-Chadic migrants acquired Cushitic wives, than in the Northern Nile. The Swa Berber mentioned live quite close to the Nile and share lots of other genetic affinities with Egyptians as opposed to modal Berbers.

Ryan said...

@Andrew - "Because V88 is highly concentrated in Chadic language people while it is rare in North Africans, and the non-Chadic V88 can be explained pretty well by introgression from Chadic people to neighboring populations."

Unless you propose that Chadic people's non-Afro-Asiatic Eurasian ancestors teleported to the Sahara, this has no bearing on their origins. Whether their source was the Mediterranean or Black Sea, they still had to have passed through North Africa to get there. Presumably changes in climate and culture drastically reduced their genetic legacy later.

"Y-DNA R1b, even in its rather basal V88 form is strongly associated with steppe populations."

Not it isn't, at least not exclusively. The vast majority of ancient/pre-Bronze Age R1b samples we have are from WHG populations with minimal steppe ancestry. Villabruna made it to Italy with R1b at 14kya with little (~5%) steppe ancestry so any of his descendants

In terms of V88 there isn't a single steppe sample that is positive for that marker. Not one. I don't know where you're getting this from but it's not correct.

"Having V88 sporadically in lots of places does make sense if there was a diaspora of V88 people as the ecology collapsed in many directions."

This is also what you would expect from a founder effect coming after a long distance migration, no matter who made that migration. You are discarding the actual archaeological record using an argument that would invalidate your own theory.

What ecological collapse though? This is 5100 BCE. The Green Sahara is still going.

"The same reason that there isn't steppe ancestry in V88 Africans."

And which reason is that? Because neither population had any steppe ancestry to begin with? That's not much of an argument on your part.

Not to mention modern African samples are 7,000 years older than Els Trocs. That's ~230 generations to have your ancestry diluted.

By contrast El Trocs lived just ~13 generations after the exit you propose from the steppe but doesn't


"There is good evidence that the ethnogenesis of the Chadic linguistic population is at 5200 BCE at Lake Chad."

Sorry, I should have been clearer - I meant the entry into North Africa, not necessarily the Chad basin. I agree completely on the timing of the ethnogenesis.

"Also, the older the source, the more evenly mixed between different populations you would expect V88 to be. But, V88 percentages vary dramatically between African populations."

Where are you getting that from? Y-chromosomes don't diffuse like a gas. There's a lot of structure and different expansions affecting one another.

Keep in mind too that the Green Sahara wasn't uniform - there were distinct drainage basins and river systems. Different founder groups may have (almost certainly) colonized different areas.

By the way I think we only have 2 Y chromosomes for CPC - so 50% R1b-V88 with a small sample is all we know.

And cow DNA doesn't match your theory by the way. Virtually no European admixture in Kuri cows. Lots of Indian admixture but though - apparently in two waves. One with the spread of Islam and one around 1000 to 2000 BCE. Maybe Berbers were that earlier pulse?

andrew said...

@Ryan The timing isn't bad for the Berbers to be associated with the introduction of the camel.

The climate breakdown is about 5500 BCE which would disperse people and then after that there is a gradual recovery.

Y-chromosomes do diffuse rather like a gas, although how fast depends upon rates of endogamy. But even quite weak endogamy with neighboring populations has a big effect over centuries.

I think there is very little doubt that the ultimate origin of Y-DNA R is in the east and that it slowly made its way to the west. And, so far as I know, there is no ancient Bug-Dneister Y-DNA period. Admittedly, that is a hypothesis and its makes the overall narrative falsifiable. But, the southern Steppe is where Y-DNA R1b in general is found, and the area to the north of that is where R1a is found, so you'd expect a very basal form of R1b to be in the same vicinity and sample sizes aren't large enough to provide meaningful data about very old time periods.

Ryan said...

@Andrew - "Y-chromosomes do diffuse rather like a gas, although how fast depends upon rates of endogamy. But even quite weak endogamy with neighboring populations has a big effect over centuries."

No they really don't. Gas diffusion is driven by the random motion of particles. Mating patterns are not random. That's why we see the huge pulses of Y-DNA sweeping entire continents.

"I think there is very little doubt that the ultimate origin of Y-DNA R is in the east and that it slowly made its way to the west."

We know R1b made it to Italy by 14 kya though. It came from the east but a very very long time ago. It seems to have arrived in Europe at the same time as the typical WHG population formed either. That migration is so old as to be irrelevant when talking about the Neolithic.

"the southern Steppe is where Y-DNA R1b in general is found"

It's really not. At least, it's not exclusive to there. It was the dominant HG lineage in much of central Europe - all the way along the Danube and up into Germany. And as I pointed out, we know it was also present in Italy from an early date too.

"you'd expect a very basal form of R1b to be in the same vicinity and sample sizes aren't large enough to provide meaningful data about very old time periods."

V88 isn't basal. It's just a different branch. Agreed that the sample sizes are crap though for sure. The number of samples that were successfully tested for downstream markers is even smaller.

Keep in mind by the way that it is R-Z2103 found in Yamnaya. That makes sense - R-Z2103's distribution matches pretty closely the current and historical distribution of IE languages - all the way from the Atlantic to Pakistan and Western China. There's no L51 there though - not in Yamnaya, and not in eastern Indo-European groups. For example, as far as I know Pakistan's R1b is 100% R-Z2103 or close to it. So it looks like R1b in PIE wasn't old and diverse, but actually from one fairly derived branch only.

Something you may find interesting though - while the idea of Basque as an Afroasiatic language has been discredited, the cognates between Basque and Afroasiatic have not.

http://www.euskaltzaindia.eus/dok/ikerbilduma/53336.pdf

Maybe the cognates between IE and Chadic aren't from an IE substrate, but from a common substrate in both IE and Chadic (or even between all 3 of IE, Chadic and Basque).

andrew said...

I am not aware of any IE cognates in Chadic languages.

Ryan said...

Isn't that part of your argument though?

andrew said...

No. I assume that all IE linguistic roots were lost in a shift to Afro-Asiatic languages.

I rely on pastoralism, the archaological history of the Pontic-Caspian area and its vicinity, the timing of Chadic ethnogenesis, the linguistic ties between the Cushitic and Chadic languages within Afro-Asiatic, the mtDNA links between Cushitic and Chadic populations, the Y-DNA R1b-V88 distribution in Africa, the age of the Berber language family and the genetic profiles of the Berber peoples, and phylogenetic information about Y-DNA R1b-V88 with likely geographic associations.

andrew said...

For future reference re R1b distribution in the Neolithic in the Carpathian Basin:

http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2015/06/ancient-dna-from-carpathian-basin-5700.html

(No R1 in a transect of ancient DNA samples in the covered first wave Neolithic area samples until the Bronze Age.)

Ric Hern said...

I still think R1b (V88) will be found near the Source of Cattle domestication in Eastern Anatolia. Probably spread from the Balkans to Eastern Anatolia during the Mesolithic and eventually Southwards into Egypt and beyond after they adopted or domesticated cattle.

Migration into the Sahara during the Early Subpluvial +-7000 bC and reaching as far as Tenere around 4600 bC.They probably migrated through Lybia where cattle use were detected dating back to 5500 bC....

andrew said...

"I still think R1b (V88) will be found near the Source of Cattle domestication in Eastern Anatolia."

Do you have any basis for thinking this?

Y-DNA haplogroups G and I are predominant among first wave Neolithic peoples with Anatolian first farmer autosomal DNA.

DDeden said...

I completely missed this post. Much thanks, Andrew, it ties together some very loose threads.

andrew said...

Razib posts on some recent relevant papers that confirm that R1b-V88 is European in origin with Sardinian clades being the most basal https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/02/13/when-western-near-eastern-farmers-carried-north-eurasian-y-chromosomes-into-central-africa/

andrew said...

https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2017/08/r1b-v88-out-of-balkans-and-into-africa.html

andrew said...

Another paper pointing to Ukrainian origins for African R1b. https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2022/05/05/eurasia-the-stone-age-and-revenge-of-the-danes/comment-page-1/#comment-26746