Natufian Origin for Afroasiatic?

(for the unwashed, like me) wikipedia The possibility of Natufians speaking proto-Afro-Asiatic, and that the language was introduced into Africa from the Levant, is approved by Colin Renfrew with caution, as a possible hypothesis for proto-Afro-Asiatic dispersal.

Are we overturning the ‘out of Africa’ hypothesis? If not, presumably those who came out of Africa (to the Levant) already spoke a language. Was that proto-proto-Afro-Asiatic?

Are p-p-AA’s descendants still spoken in Africa (where?) Or did it get wiped out by Levantines spreading/trading back into Africa (again, where?) [wikipedia on Proto-AA is so vague/speculative as to be useless.]

Is it just that we’re at the event horizon, because it’s all so long ago? We have a hazy emanation from proto-Afro-Asiatic; older than that is just a black hole.

This hypothesis makes excellent sense.

–Are we overturning the ‘out of Africa’ hypothesis? If not, presumably those who came out of Africa (to the Levant) already spoke a language. Was that proto-proto-Afro-Asiatic?

Natufian evolved from Kebaran culture – c. 18,000 – c. 12,500 BC, which represented break of cultural continuity with preceding Antelian culture (and the Antelians were likely to be descendants of those out of Africa types)

18,000 BC is a period after end of Last Glacial Maximum, so it fits very well.

Very advanced Kebarans came from some LGM refugium and overrun the Levant, gradually evolving into Natufian. There was an article a year ago which claimed that agriculture was invented in the Kebaran stage (about 15000 BC), but died out due to later climatic change. Their Natufian descendants had to reinvent it again.

AFAIK, some linguists argue with accepted dating of proto-Afroasiatic, placing it several millenia earlier. If they are right, proto-Afroasiatic would have been spoken by Kebarans and Natufians would speak some branch of it (which would include both Semitic and proto-Egyptian, I believe).

I love reading about this stuff. I more or less follow Cavalli-Sforza’s genetic arguments, but I’ve long suspected that he was out of his depth when he ventures into linguistics. In other words I share your suspicions about mixing language and genetics.

I love reading this stuff too. There seems to be no limit to how much you can just make stuff up — I mean make the (lack of) evidence fit almost any hypothesis.

Khan: Among the Masai, who have a clear minor West Eurasian ancestral component, albeit far less than Ethiopians, … So were there people to-ing and fro-ing in and out of Africa all the time?

Even if we can trace their genes, I’m a lot less than convinced they all took their language with them. You have to make a separate case for that. We recently discussed the Angles/Saxons and Vikings on NW Europe. The Vikings who became Normans seem not to have taken their Norse language with them into Britain, even with Norse left over after the Danelaw.

For a number of reasons (linguistic and otherwise) I am convinced that there have been a number of trans-Pacific voyages, both voluntary and otherwise (given the sea currents), although not necessarily involving large numbers of people. This opinion is independently being shared by increasing numbers of scholars.

Indeed, it would be a miracle if absolutely no such crossing had taken place during the entire early Holocene.

it seems to me that the great time depth attributed to D-Y results from accepting the increasingly doubtful assumption

It’s also that Athabaskan is said to be about as diverse as Indo-European, so Proto-Na-Dene must have a time-depth greater than IE, since Eyak and Tlingit are much more remote from Athabaskan than the Athabaskan languages are from each other. How much longer ago, then, must it have been before Proto-Na-Dene and Proto-Yeniseian were unified? Of course this argument is not really quantitative (we know that languages do not all evolve at the same rate), but it is suggestive.

I thought there was some back-tracking on the Yenisei-Na Dene hypothesis, but I haven’t been following this very closely. Does the hypothesis continue to be accepted by a substantial number of linguists who are competent to evaluate it? (And recognizing that there are some who insist on very high standards of proof of genetic affiliation, and who will probably never accept it.)

About Na-Dene, doesn’t everybody (or reasonably close to everybody) accept that it represents a post-Beringian migration by boat from Asia?

The only reason I mentioned D-Y as a possible deeper time depth is that I couldn’t remember the details of Vajda’s proposal off the top of my head, so I figured I might as well hedge. I do remember that Vajda in one of his talks gives a very surprising dictum to the effect that Algic was a late Beringian migration (so apparently he believes there were several of those) that is related to Dene-Yeniseian.

Greg: Vajda in one of his talks gives a very surprising dictum to the effect that Algic was a late Beringian migration (so apparently he believes there were several of those) that is related to Dene-Yeniseian.

This is new to me, but again I have not been following the D-Y hypothesis very closely. A late Beringian migration, perhaps, but grouping Algic and D-Y does seem surprising!

@Razib:

The paper doesn’t have anything at all to do with the Chadic language group. The name “Chadic” leaves something to be desired as the accepted name of the Afroasiatic subgroup, as it certainly invites this very misunderstanding. It doesn’t at all mean “languages of Chad (the country)”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chadic_languages

I’m not in the least suprised that there are genes in Chad which have returned to Africa from elsewhere. Quite apart from the obvious (the Banu Hilal) there were Jewish tribes in the Sahara prior to Muslim times. And I myself have met blue-eyed black Africans as far south as Burkina Faso.

There’s no doubt at all that Africa has been far from cut off genetically from Eurasia at any point. But that actually undermines the idea that Afroasiatic originated in Asia, by underlining the fact that genetics really has little to tell us about language prehistory.

by underlining the fact that genetics really has little to tell us about language prehistory.

genetics has falsified the initial demic diffusion model of colin renfrew. genetics has also falsified he cultural diffusion model of thai languages into mainland southeast asia. genetics has confirmed that the bantu expansion was almost a total replacement/folk wandering until you hit south africa. genetics shows that lowland PNG pops who speak austronesian languages have some asian ancestry.

other stuff too.

marie-lucie: Said by whom? I know little about the Athabaskan languages, but I am skeptical of this statement.

Thank you! I wanted to say that, but I have no leg to stand on.

I think D-Y spread along the arctic coast and then up along the rivers Yenisei and Mackenzie. The distance along the coast is no longer than that of the Inuit expansion. The coastal Post-Proto-Dene-Yeniseians may have been (pick one or more) absorbed/marginalized/inadvertently infected with disease/killed/pushed inland by one or more of a series of arrivals through the Bering Strait, of which the most recent was the speakers of Proto-Eskimoic.

Couldn’t Afro-Asiatic have spread into North-Africa from the Fertile Crescent in several waves? Chadic would constitute the deepest layer, maybe identical to the Natufian expansion, but was (pick one or more) absorbed/marginalized/inadvertently infected with disease/killed/pushed inland by one or more of a series of arrivals from the Levant, of which the most recent was the Arabic speakers.

A much more serious objection (to my mind) to the thesis of a Levant homeland for Afroasiatic is the absence of any evidence in the Levant of a non- or pre-Semitic Afroasiatic language. […] For both Berber and Egyptian it has been argued […] that their relative uniformity […] which in both instances involved the elimination of a much more linguistically diverse landscape.

By the same token, any non-Semitic AA languages in the Levant might also have been eliminated, leaving only Semitic and the overseas varieties. I don’t seriously argue for this position, but it is good to keep an open mind (though not so open that your brains fall out). As you yourself pointed out, Corsican varieties are the most diverse of the Romance languages, even though the family did not originate in Corsica.

I always found it odd that there should be such a sharp divide between the two branches of Semitic, as the East Semitic languages were geographically less isolated from many West Semitic languages than many West Semitic languages were isolated from one another.

Not so odd when you reflect that except for internal reconstruction (which is inherently unanchored) we know nothing about what Akkadian might have looked like before Sumerian affected it.

Here’s Vajda’s dictum that I mentioned above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0QnAqQUmw, approx. 56:00 to 59:00

However, it looks like I misremembered part of his remarks. He doesn’t comment one way or the other on a linguistic relationship between Algic and Dene-Yeniseian. He says that Dene-Yeniseians and Pre-Algonquians were geographically closer in Siberia and that they share a lot of folklore.

John Cowan: Surely Omotic is the deepest.

Well, yes, quite likely, but I didn’t want to go there..If AA came from Southwest Asia, and Omotic is AA, then I think it represents a different mechanism of dispersal, and the greater divergence might e.g. be due to a strong substrate. I also didn’t bring up the complexities of Cushitic.

@Greg P the idea that the to-ing and fro-ing resulted in a linguistic map where most of the diversity is in Africa, giving the impression that AA originated there even though it was actually from the Levant, …

No I didn’t speculate that (proto-)AA originated in Africa. I said there must have been an ancestor of proto-AA. And that (or its ancestor) must have come ‘out of Africa’. Unless someone is going to argue humans (and their languages) didn’t originate in Africa at all.

… looks pretty ad hoc … I see nothing other than ad-hockery throughout the thread. Neither could it be any different: there’s just not enough evidence. Most of the languages were never written down.

@Razib genetics has falsified … hasn’t shown whether the languages did or did not travel, even if the genes did (not).

…with the Southernmost point of the continuum spreading along the coast of Yemen, Oman, then spreading into the Persian Gulf and thence entering Mesopotamia…while the Northernmost would spread into Sinai and thence along the Eastern Mediterranean coast…with, ultimately, the two long-sundered points of the continuum coming into contact again in the Middle East. It would fit the data, wouldn’t it?

That would require leapfrogging over the Sumerians. And while their language has a substrate, that looks stunningly much like IE, not like AA at all. (Some words from this “Euphratic” language also seem to have reached Akkadian without going through Sumerian, IIRC.)

we know nothing about what Akkadian might have looked like before Sumerian affected it

What is Eblaite like? Is it known well enough to tell whether it has as much Sumerian influence?

David M: the Sumerians. … their language has a substrate, that looks stunningly much like IE

I don’t know too much about the Sumerian language but I don’t remember reading about a substrate to it, let alone one like IE. I have a vague impression that someone (perhaps you) mentioned an article which I then read, about lexical resemblances with IE in some ancient language, could that have been it? but as you well know, lexical resemblances are not necessarily indications of a “substrate”. Anyway my recollection is rather vague but I would like to know more about this alleged substrate.

I hardly know anything about the Sumerian question, but Whittaker has proposed an Indo-European substrate, calling it “Euphratic.”

“Unless someone is going to argue humans (and their languages) didn’t originate in Africa at all.”

I suspect that language, abstract art, and representational art all emerged in the upper paleolithic, and in Africa first. My pet theory, since there isn’t any increase in brain size, is that there was increasing neurodiversity, and that all these things aided communication between autistic and allistic people in the same or neighboring communities. Reliance on “tone,” and “facial expressions” can impede communication.

A tiny percentage of Neandertal DNA is found all over Africa, so evidently there has been some back-migration. It’s by no means limited to speakers of AA, though.

it is found in yoruba, so yeah. david reich told me didn’t see much in dinka though. surprising to me.

m.-l.: For a number of reasons (linguistic and otherwise) I am convinced that there have been a number of trans-Pacific voyages, both voluntary and otherwise (given the sea currents), although not necessarily involving large numbers of people. This opinion is independently being shared by increasing numbers of scholars.

So far, the only unequivocal linguistic evidence for trans-Pacific contact is *kumara, the Eastern Polynesian name for the sweet potato, a word from a probably Ecuadorean source, brought over together with the plant in pre-European times. A more recent claim, for Polynesian linguistic traces in California, doesn’t pass muster. The physical evidence has not been overwhelming, so far. There’s been a back-and-forth over the genetics of South American chickens, which I haven’t been keeping up with. Matisoo-Smith and Ramirez have described some prehistoric crania from Isla Mocha by the Chilean coast with Polynesian morphology, but so far there are no DNA results from them.

Piotr: Indeed, it would be a miracle if absolutely no such crossing had taken place during the entire early Holocene. Actually, it is quite likely that it hasn’t. Colonization of small islands shows up very clearly in the archaeological record. Since there is no evidence of pre-Austronesian colonization in remote Oceania, it would be hard to explain a cross-Pacific voyage, difficult under any circumstances, which somehow either failed to notice any intermediate islands or avoided colonizing them.
The ca. 1,000-year pause in Austronesian eastward expansion, between the settlement of West Polynesia and of East Polynesia, and the 300-year pause between the latter and the settlement of New Zealand and Hawai‘i (and perhaps Rapanui as well) shows that the push to the eastern Pacific was not something that would happen casually, even by people who were capable and interested in finding new islands to colonize.

Y, I suppose you refer to the book Polynesians in America, written by a number of scholars, which deals mostly with the South Pacific. This is not (or not mostly) what I am referring to.

The Polynesian expansion occurred mostly over the enormous expanse of the Pacific Ocean, some of it at its widest, where most of the lands are small islands, and it took impressive navigational skills to reach the farthest ones from Asia. I am talking mostly about the North Pacific, where the situation is quite different. On the Asian side as one follows the coast northwards there are some substantial islands and peninsulas rather than vast distances over open water, and the distance between Asia and America gradually diminishes as one gets closer to the North Pole. The strong Japanese current first flows North, then curves East and South down the North American coast. A boat following this current, or carried by it, will not quite reach the Bering Strait, because of the Aleutian “belt” of small islands which seems to deflect the current toward America. This current still brings Japanese flotsam to Southern Alaska and British Columbia, including not only recognizable fishing gear but sometimes wrecked boats and occasionally human survivors.

Unlike the Polynesian expansion which spread a single language family and basic culture over a huge maritime environment, the North American West Coast was home to a large number of different families crowded between the ocean and the mountain chains of the interior. Culturally there was almost as much diversity, from hunter-gatherers to former empires of great sophistication. Among these very diverse populations, there are still resemblances of many kinds with a number of Asian cultures, in terms of social organization, beliefs, art forms and motifs, myths and legends, and many other features. The varied nature and geographical extant of these various resemblances makes it unlikely either that they are coincidental or that they result from a single, millennia-old migration on foot, on sleds or in small boats.

Y: Actually, it is quite likely that it hasn’t.

Just to be clear, I was thinking about the “sub-Beringian” coastal route in the North Pacific, not Polynesian-style transoceanic dispersal with advanced seacraft and navigational methods.

The Sahara had a green episode between 11.5 kya and 5 kya, and subsequent to this we find Afro-Asiatic languages along north, south, east and northwest fringes, suggesting an era of early broad expansion followed by multiple isolations after 3000 bce. If AA is demonstrably older than 11.5 ky, the homeland would likely be in one of the fringe areas. It wouldn’t be in the pre-green Sahara itself. Both Chad and the Levant are candidate areas. Chad has the diversity, but weren’t the smoothing effects of politics, writing, etc. already in play in the Levant by the times of Ebla and Ugarit, and certainly ever since? The good news is, we can totally eliminate Norway.

Thanks Y and Piotr.

I did not mean to suggest that the cultural resemblances I was referring to had to be the result of accidental voyages, only that navigation in the North Pacific in the Asia-to-America direction was not only possible but favoured by the maritime and geographical conditions. Therefore it is to be expected that there were a number of crossings, whether intentional or not. An intentional crossing is reported in a semi-legendary Chinese tradition of an emperor sending a ship or even a fleet with many young people on board, probably intended to set up a colony or colonies on the other side of the ocean. At least one person came back and wrote a report about the regions visited, with details that seem to correspond to the actual North American coast.

Of course, not every period of history has been favourable to ocean crossings and explorations. The Viking voyages and parts of the Polynesian expansions took place during periods of warmer climates, not during “Little Ice Ages” when rougher seas and sometimes the presence of icebergs made navigation too dangerous.

Y, I am not sure what you mean by the usual mechanisms of cultural spread from North Asia into North America, most of which had to have occurred by boat, except in the very Far North on ice over the Bering Strait.

Euphratic seems awfully early and awfully far south for western Indo-European. Which seems most likely?

1. Indo-European spread and diversified at an early date, and one branch of Indo-European reached southern Mesopotamia.

2. Some other macro-Indo-European or northern Mitian languages paralleled phonological developments in western Indo-European, and one branch of these reached southern Mesopotamia. I’m not sure how likely this is– do Uralic or Altaic forms fit? Whittaker’s examples of Indo-European grammar embedded in these loanwords would be a mistake.

3. Indo-European spread and diversified at the usual dates, such as Anthony’s, and one group of western Indo-Europeans were Isoted/Grantvilled through time and space into late prehistoric Mesopotamia.

4. Whittaker’s whole theory is a mistake.

Better link for Whitteker (Though David’s seemed to work for several people, I had to Google and found a link with an extra /old/).

To Marja’s list I’d add

5. Before being imposed on a pre-existing Mesopotamian civilization, Sumerian was spoken somewhere in close contact with that extreme of the (Meta)-Proto-Indoeuropean dialect continuum, wherever that was at the time, that later gave rise to NW-PIE.

I note from Whitteker’s article that none of the proposed Eufratic toponyms has topological reference — something like Gate of the Gods can be reapplied when a new center of worship is built. If a Mesopotamian river name could be interpreted as ‘noisy one’ vel sim in Euphratic, it would be a better argument for locating it there.

m.-l., do the Alsea stories have parallels in Asia (other than the Jaanese 4 days/4 years motif)? Are they in any of the standard indexes of folklore motifs?

(By “the usual mechanisms of cultural spread from North Asia into North America” I meant substantial population movements, or cultural spreads through things like economic exchanges or cross-marriages; as opposed to casual or accidental contacts.)

See Boas’s discussion in section III, especially pp. 383–385.
Mythology and folk-tales of the North American Indians

Very well said, and I like your idea of a “historical sociology” field.

All seconded.

If there existed language isolates among the sea of Bantu languages (as we have by now figured there indeed are within some parts of Niger-Congo — Laal, Bangime, Jalaa — or for that matter, the undemonstratedness of the inclusion of Adamawa or Mande), then showing historical genetic continuity would not budge one bit the linguistic conclusion that they’re regardless language isolates.

Basque is such a case, BTW. On the grand European gradient of ancestry in terms of Early European Farmers, Western Hunter-Gatherers and Yamnaya, the speakers of Basque are exactly where you’d predict from geography alone, and their Y chromosomes are almost all R1b, which was introduced into western and even central Europe from Yamnaya.

“But Uralic is supposed to be related to Indo-European.”

While a couple of people from Leiden have argued for that in recent years, the vast majority of both IEists and Finno-Ugrists reject such a connection. Of course, Uralic does have a number of quite uncontroversial early Indo-European loanwords.

As for connecting Na-Dene and Yeniseian, doesn’t anyone else feel this might be complicated by Yaroslav Gorbachov’s thesis that Yeniseian might be traced to significantly further south in Mongolian/China, crossing the West Sayan mountains only in relatively recent times?

[those who reject a relationship between IE and Uralic] don’t propose any suggestions for what IE or Uralic could be more closely related with.
LH: Why isn’t it enough to say “insufficient evidence”? To get somebody declared not guilty of a crime, you don’t have to produce an alternative perpetrator.

You don’t have to, but many people have spent years on death row (or even been executed), often on flimsy evidence, only to be cleared by the discovery of an alternative perpetrator against which the evidence was compelling.

Back to language classification, here is another case in the “Penutian phylum”.

After Dixon and Kroeber classified a group in California as “Penutian”, Sapir, who had been working on the Takelma language of Southern Oregon, was “struck by resemblances between Takelma and Yokuts” (the latter being one of the original Penutian group, in Southern California), but he did not add Takelma to that group, preferring a geographically-based classification in which Takelma was included in a tripartite “Oregon Penutian” group along with Kalapuya in the Central valley and three “Coast Oregon” languages (Alsea, Siuslaw and Coos). Apart from Takelma which he had studied personally, Sapir relied on data supplied by Frachtenberg on the other Oregon languages. Meanwhile F had published a paper comparing some Takelma words with similar ones in Chinook and Kalapuya. F’s paper is heavy on lexical resemblances, but refrains from putting T and K together because of morphological differences. Nevertheless, a hasty reading of the paper (which is rather confusing) gives the impression that he thinks that the two are closely related. Later, after more Kalapuya data had been collected (by Melville Jacobs), Swadesh gathered some of the material for one of his famous lists of basic vocabulary, and concluded that the K and T were indeed closely related and together formed a group he called “Takelman”.

If you look up major reference words such as Campbell’s 1997 work on the historical linguistics of Native American languages, or Goddard’s edited Volume 7 (Languages of the Smithsonian Handbook of Native American Languages), you will see “Takelman” described as an ‘obvious’ family or words to that effect. What is obvious to someone seriously comparing the two languages T and K is that the authors of those descriptions never bothered to look at the languages themselves. Also, none of them even mentioned Sapir’s observation about Takelma and Yokuts. Indeed, Takelma and Yokuts are very similar, especially in their complex verbal morphology, while Kalapuya morphological structure is completely different from theirs. Lexical resemblances between T and K should be attributed to a period of close contact, at a time when the two languages (not contiguous in the historical period) occupied adjacent territories. Of course, linking one language of Southern Oregon (Takelma) most closely with one of Southern California (Yokuts) is not obvious at first sight, but many other families on the West Coast (and elsewhere) occupy territories which are not close to each other.

At least one linguist working on Kalapuya (one of very few) concluded that Swadesh must be right, that T and K shared a “special relationship”, so old that the two languages had had time to completely restructure their respective morphologies (while a number of their words were still practically identical). This conclusion does not make any sense either from principles of language classification or from everything that is known about the consequences of language contact (e.g. Sarah Thomason’s work).

I don’t understand. Why are they under any obligation to propose such suggestions? Why isn’t it enough to say “insufficient evidence”?

“Insufficient evidence” is enough for “we can’t tell if they’re each other’s closest relatives”; it’s not enough for “they’re as distantly related as languages can be”. That’s surprisingly often confused in historical linguistics.

A few Kalapuya words were apparently recorded on Francis Drake’s voyage.

One click away from Vajda’s presentation is another presentation by him (27 minutes) which is cautiously optimistic about Dene-Caucasian and is explicitly completely agnostic on whether there’s an exclusive Dene-Yeniseian subgroup in it. It’s from 2013. Calls for more research on comparative polysynthetic verb morphology; doesn’t mention Bengtson’s 2008 paper on that subject, nor of course Guillaume Jacques’s very recent conviction that the polysynthesis of the Rgyalrong and Kiranti languages is cognate and will one day make it possible to reconstruct such morphology for Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

Another candidate for a particularly close relative of Yeniseian is… *drumroll*… Hattic. It’s long, but make sure not to skip the interspersed critical comments on the current state of “Sino-Caucasian” reconstruction.

t””’wṯw

On academia.edu I see two apostrophes on top of each other, then an inverted one, and then again two normal ones on top of each other. I guess that’s an egyptological transcription. The lack of vowels fits that of course.

DM, Y: Indeed there is only one Kalapuya word, pdo, probably of the same origin as wapato (but not ‘potato’).

It is not out of the question that Drake could have gone farther North than California, but in that case he might have encountered speakers of Alsea, Siuslaw, Coos, Tillamook and several others coastal languages, but hardly speakers of Kalapuya who lived in the interior, quite far from the coast.

Lyon has done a lot of research, but does not seem to be aware of the most recent results. Note the map with “Takelman-Kalapuyan” as a single family (refuted in Mithun 1999). He also mentions Molalla but is not aware of Harris’ 2006 dissertation which is a grammar of the language. On a more basic level, he keeps referring to the words on the old lists as “cognates” of words recently attested in the various languages. But “cognates” refers to words for which a common genetic origin has been demonstrated. Here the words recorded 300 or so years ago could be the same as in more recent lists, or they could be borrowings between languages, therefore not “cognates” of any reported words.

Y, You are right. I read or rather skimmed rather quickly as it was obviously useless to try itemizing the wrong or doubtful stuff. “Much ado about nothing”.

There’s actually quite a lot that is known about Francis Drake’s landing in America .

His Norwegian name is (quite boringly) Kornelius Kvakk. I thought of that just a couple of days ago, in the Eider Museum on Vega, having the idea that he might be brought over as an eider duck (Somateria mollissima), maybe a faux Dano-Norwegian Evald Edder-Duun.

The name ‘Cornelius Coot’ has a touch of Dutch that suits an American city founder, and more so back when the location of Duckburgh was less Pacific.

The missing link.

Not that the link was very important.

David M.: But the best remains Cyrano de Donaldac

This one? A very good name, although it don’t seem to be attested outside the apocryphal Italian tradition.

In the mirror universe I am chuckling through a goatee at the word “quack” from a hus overlooking a fjord.

My layman’s understanding is that Scandinavian Donaldism generally discerns several layers of canonicity. The bulk of stories in the Scandinavian tradition are not considered at all. The sacred core is the long stories with both script and artwork by the great Carl Barks in the years roughly 1942 to 1967. The newspaper strips by Bob Karp and Al Talioferro from the same period enjoy a similar status, but due to the nature of the material they are less important for establishing Duckburg’s history and major geneologies. Stories co-authored by Barks are somewhat less canonical. A more recent addition approaching canonical status is the work of Don Rosa. While clearly secondary to the established canon, and even including some elements from apocryphal sources, especially Italian, its apparently deep insights into Duckburg society soon gave it a strong position

Sorry, I missed a bunch of the comments in this thread and am too busy to catch up on all of them. But the basic gist is that Norwegian ducks speak Proto-Afro-Asiatic? I guess I’m not all that surprised, I think.

Thread win goes to Trond Engen. 🙂

(Several waves of Nllotic speakers too, of which the Maasai may belong to the most recent. All the Nilotic languages south of the Turkana seem to have had similar relationships to Cushitic and to indigenous hunter-gatherers.)

afroasiatic and austronesian speakers practise circumcision, hinting at shared origin; the connection between the two language families are not well established but tentalizing

From the news article in Nature today:

[A] team led by population geneticist Andrés Moreno-Estrada, at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity, in Irapuato, Mexico, analysed DNA from 166 people currently living on Rapa Nui, as well 188 individuals from more than a dozen other islands across the Pacific. They identified Native American ancestry in the Rapa Nui, but also in people from the remote eastern Polynesian islands of Palliser, Nuku Hiva in the Northern Marquesas, Fatu Hiva in the Southern Marquesas and Mangareva. Comparisons with genetic material from Native American groups suggested that Zenu people, an indigenous group in Colombia, carry DNA most like that found in Polynesians.

Moreno-Estrada’s team then attempted to determine when the two populations had interbred — to distinguish ‘pre-Columbian’ contact between the groups from mixing that took place in the centuries after European colonization of South America and Polynesia. Based on the length of shared DNA segments — which shorten in successive generations — the researchers estimate that people in remote eastern Polynesia interbred with South Americans between 1150–1230 AD, while those in Rapa Nui mixed closer to 1380 AD. They also found evidence of mixing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Some researchers have proposed that Polynesians voyaged to the coast of South America. But Moreno-Estrada thinks that contact occurred in Polynesia — and that it may have involved a single group of Native Americans. The team calculated similar dates for the appearance of Native American ancestry on different islands, while another analysis found that the South American DNA segments in the genomes of people from different Polynesian islands appear to have come from the same Native American people. Archaeological evidence suggests that there were maritime trade routes between Mexico and Ecuador around the same time, Moreno-Estrada says. “Maybe a small raft of Native Americans sailors got adrift into the Pacific.”

Moreno-Estrada thinks that the Polynesians who settled Rapa Nui around 1200 AD already carried South American ancestry. But Paul Wallin, an archaeologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, wonders if groups of Native Americans might have also travelled there from South America at a later date. Large stone monuments, similar to those in South America, were first constructed on Rapa Nui around 1300-1400 AD, hundreds of years before they appeared on other Polynesian islands, he notes.

I suppose you have the actual article, which takes more time. I’m pretty much stuck at reporting the news, And as chance would have it, I was just looking for the right discussion to latch onto when you told of the Árpád study in the other thread.

politically fraught issues

probably more basic than that. Generally, the patients don’t ask anyone to poke in their ancestry. More and more often, they also expect to receive identical care regardless of their self-defined “race” or “ethnicity”, and the high goal is to stop asking about this information ( which is very dependent on the cultural norms and expectations, and is obviously a very imperfect proxy for the genetics … although medical care obviously uses many more kinds of imperfect correlates to the health issues to predict risk levels or to inform care modalities ).

So the high goal is, to stop asking altogether, and to figure out just the “genetic” components of one’s ancestral makeup as narrowly as needed for the clinical problem at hand, and to keep this knowledge purely internal. (Don’t ask and also don’t tell).

But sometimes the reliance on the self-reported ethnicity is so pervasive (and so wrong) that we publish some summary stats, to drive home the point that genetically, many people are not quite what they describe themselves (a good example is the pre-conception carrier status screening for the diseases which are common in some ethnic groups … and therefore rarely screened in other ethnic groups, which is bound to miss many dangerous outcomes). Here is the recent paper, titled “Genetic ancestry analysis on >93,000 individuals undergoing expanded carrier screening reveals limitations of ethnicity-based medical guidelines”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41436-020-0869-3

But the broader genetic side of ancestry is such a bone of contention between the humanities and genetics that you shouldn’t expect me to expound on it. It’s just too easy to inflame people, and the opinions are too strong to touch.

The notion of “selfish gene” boldly fuses the two world views. Do not confuse with “selfie gêne”.

It’s the actual genes that give predisposition for illnesses

The reality is more nuanced. Most genetic associations with the clinical outcomes are correlative rather than causative, and their ability to predict our health hinges on correlation between the nearby parts of the genome (the true causative genetic variant is assumed to be somewhere in the vicinity of the associated marker, but most of the time it remains unknown). The local correlative patterns within our chromosomes differ a lot between different ancestries (the more generations have passed since the separation of the ancestral populations, the more dissimilar are the genetic correlations). It’s been known for several years that as a rule, genetic discoveries made in the Europeans fail to replicate in the Africans because of the 50,000+ years which separate their ancestral paths ( https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003566 )
But to make new discoveries, one typically needs hundreds thousand study subjects. It’s very hard to recruit this many study participants in most non-European groups, and as a result, we know much less about the gene-health correlations in the minorities.

getting away from ideas of immaculate purity to a common understanding of the complex but intertwined nature of genetics, language and culture will be good for the minorities of the world.

One would hope that knowledge is power, but genetics has been stained forever by the words and acts of the eugenicist politicians who practiced their prejudice in the name of genetics without knowing a thing about the science of heredity. I don’t think it will ever recover. And most humanities students heard at least something about the groundbreaking 1972 study of Richard Lewontin which is said to have proved that races or continental ancestries have no genetic underpinning whatsoever, that all the differences are purely social. It’s probably not Lewontin’s fault, since back in the day, DNA was all but impossible to study, and very little was understood about genetic diversity of the mankind. He tried nevertheless, selecting (as we can see in hindsight) both inappropriate markers and faulty metrics of diversity, but it was a bold, thought-provoking study which accelerated a long, long process of understanding human population genetics better and better with every year. For the social scientists though, the 1972 paper remains the end of the road, not its beginning.

So on the one hand most people are taught that there are no genetic differences between ethnic groups (a very Eurocentric approach, paradoxically, since it’s more or less true in the “homogenous” Europe, but hardly anywhere else). On the other hand, there is a strong push to bring more social fairness into medicine by allotting as much care to the minorities as to the “whites”. It sounds absolutely noble until you realize that more isn’t always better. Allotting more mammograms and breast biopsies than a woman’s risk level requires is bound to hurt, not help, yet the breast cancer risk levels are higher in the white women, so the suggested way to equalize the minorities would cause overdiagnosis and overtreatment without the commensurate benefits. And I am not making it up about “equalizing breast cancer predictions”. This very new piece on racial justice in medical care, just published in the influential New England Journal of Medicine, lists breast cancer risks in Table 1.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2004740

“Genetics is a whore of imperialism” (c) Trofim Lysenko, 1948.

I think the core problem is that real scientific genetics matches quite poorly with lay “commonsense” understandings of biological heredity, and “commonsense” ideas about “race” are accordingly based on profoundly unscientific conceptions of genetics. (This reminds me of the fact that no less a public intellectual than Noam Chomsky seems to have remarkably naive ideas about what a gene actually is and does.)

Because “commonsense” ideas about heredity and “race” are, frankly, very often racist, the tendency for those of us who know better is to downplay the whole complex of ideas, as a sort of shortcut; certainly a preferable response would be instead to try to improve the public’s understanding of genetics. If this can be achieved, it will put an end to all the “scientific racism” crap. It will also cut the legs from under the sort of right-wing arsehole who pretends that the nasty liberals are simply refusing to face inconvenient scientific truths. You know their names …

In NZ, there’s a high correlation to certain diseases (diabetes, heart disease) amongst the Pacific Island population. Is that genetics? Or is it that they adopt a diet and lifestyle

It’s not “or”, it’s “and”. We have a strong Tongan / Samoan / Fijian community here which is disproportionately affected by COVID19, and the community convened a task force to help prevent illness. From line 1 they explain it’s part comorbidities (diabetes and high blood pressure) and part the must-hug-and-kiss culture where social distancing may construed as disrespect.

The principal genetic factor behind obesity in the Polynesians (which helps drive up diabetes and heart disease rates, and which is about 50% heritable in this population) has been identified in 2016. https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3620 It is a “thrifty” variant of a fat-storage gene CREBRF, which is present in half of the population and increases BMI on average by 1.5 kg/m2 (but does not, by itself, increase diabetes risks). The “thrifty gene” shows a very string signature of selection, and it’s tempting to remember the classic “famine gene” theory of James Neel. Basically if your ancestors were critically threatened by starvation, then it may have been advantageous for them to accumulate fat in good times to survive the lean times. Perhaps the Eastern Polynesian ancestors faced death of starvation on their interisland voyages, and having more fat storage helped them to survive. But it goes without saying that this one “thrifty gene” doesn’t explain the whole picture with obesity in Polynesia. There may be additional, more subtle genetic factors (which are much harder to discover since one needs many more participants to uncover less potent variants), and there are definitively cultural factors at play too. Studying the genetics of obesity is generally hard because its spread in families is increased by both assortative mating (people tend to pick their spouses who are more like themselves) and by the intra-family diffusion of habits.

Studying the genetics of diabetes is also very hard because about half of its heritability is due to the nearly-intractable HLA group of immune system genes. Remember that much of the diabetes is due to the autoimmune issues. The numerous HLA genes are responsible for presenting targets for the immune system to attack, and for our immune personal uniqueness in general. They are all over chromosome 6, they are extremely diverse in some parts and too similar to even tell apart in other parts – a technical nightmare for a researcher, really. Besides, the intra-familial share of habits muddies the waters with diabetes, too.

With heart disease at large, there is a lot of genetic knowledge. Dozens of genes with really severe risk levels, ranging from lipid metabolism to the heart muscle makeup (but these mutations are understandably rare!). Hundreds of small-effect variants which are much more common, and, taken together, account for substantial risk variation. A geneticist’s excitement about it is quickly tempered by understanding that, to predict near-term heart disease, one must also take into account the well-known risk factors such as cholesterol /LDL, triglycerides, inflammation markers. But once these factors are taken into account, the independent genetic effects diminish so much that it’s easy just to shrug them off. Basically most of the heart-risk”gene effects” were being channeled through the things like cholesterol, and, once we’d actually do the bloodwork, we would have already figured out almost all of what the genes would have told us.

Paradoxically, the paradagm of blood testing followed by diet / lifestyle changes and statins have proved so efficient that even the greatest genetic cardio risk discoveries of the 1990s kind of fell into oblivion, and these were mutations with HUGE effect sizes, like the one which sort of conspired with the Stalin’s regime to kill my great grandfather Gertz Gonikberg and both of his brothers. This mutation obliterates low-density lipoprotein receptor gene (LDLR) and hampers removal of “bad cholesterol”. Often, its carriers would accumulate so much cholesterol by their 50s or 60s that they’d get yellow splotches of cholesterol plaques on the whites of their eyes! Of course their heart would get weaker with age too. Of the three brothers, Mark died of a heart attack during the first wave of the purges. Iosif died under torture, when the arrestees were forced to crouch and march along a hallway in a crouched position. He fell and couldn’t rise. The NKVD interrogators kicked his lifeless body to no avail. My Gertz also died during interrogations a year later, but there was no witness to tell how it happened; we can only surmise that it was the story with the heart giving way under torture. Obviously it wasn’t the gene alone which killed them; their other – huge – risk factor was their involvement in revolutionary activities in their younger years. Anyway to cut the story short – nobody is killed by LDLR in this day and age. No genetic testing even needed. People get routine bloodwork, their abnormal cholesterol shows up on the tests, they are treated and that’s the end of it.

The reality is more nuanced.

I know. I just couldn’t think of a better way to put it briefly without opening other cans of worms, and my comment was too long already.

Thanks for the discussion!

Why did he return to the USSR?

Part family reasons, part total disillusionment in the exiled Menshevik party (of which he was a Foreign Bureau, really the Politbureau member) and an illusion that he can help the toiling masses of Russia. He was primarily a union organizer rather than a politician, and in 1920-1921 he fought against the government takeover of the union controls, organized strikes, and was exiled to Turkestan. His old union movement pals inside the Bolshevik hierarchy helped to replace his exile with deportation to Germany, against NKVD’s furor. But his wife and son weren’t allowed to join him (he was married to a Bolshevik doh). Then his wife also secured a permission to leave, on medical grounds, to treat TB. In Germany, he continued to work for the family publishing business, Kniga publishers, translating technical and popular literature, importing textbooks for Soviet Russia’s colleges, while his wife found a job in the sprawling Soviet Foreign Trade Mission in Berlin.

4 years later, his wife was transferred to the Moscow office of the Berlin Mission, and the family has become separated again. Gertz was tired of pointless squabbles of the Menshevik expats, and exasperated about the party’s total loss of connections within Russia, so he offered to return to Russia to help rebuild the Menshevik ranks. This would require feigning loyalty to Stalin, and the Menshevik party forbade him to play the schema. But he activated his old union connections, secured a permission to return, published an obligatory denunciation of his Menshevik past in Pravda, and was promptly expelled from his old party. In the USSR Gertz was still denied jobs and promotions because of his now-denounced Menshevik past, so he wrote to Stalin directly and apparently received some sort of a stamp of approval which protected him through much of the Purges. He was only arrested in December 1938. Needless to say, by then he was just as disillusioned about the 1930s’s Moscow as he once was of the 1920s’ Berlin…

Strangely, Gertz’s horrible death might have been a blessing in disguise for the family. By then, my gramps was a young PhD researcher in the poison fumes lab of NII-6, the military R&D center which is more famous for its Katyusha rockets. He probably would have died there in one of their many industrial accidents, but he was fired and evicted after his father’s arrest, and found a more safe civilian job. His Thesis remains classified to this day.

There’s a book in it…

There is a lot of weird and juicy details about publishing (part preserved at the Hoover Inst at Stanford, part in the state archive in Moscow, part in the correspondence of the authors). How they needed to smuggle manuscripts in diplomatic pouches because the Soviet secret services would confiscate all manuscripts no matter the cover letters from the trade authorities. How they invented ways to pay the authors despite the hyperinflation madness of the Weimar Germany. How they used connections in the Berlin Mission to fend off the inquiries from the People’s Commissariat of People’s Education trying to bypass the Kniga Publishers’ import monopoly.

All three Gonikberg brothers were in publishing, the older one with the government (he’s mentioned by Chukovsky in this capacity), the younger two in the Kniga.

@Dmitry Pruss: That’s all quite amazing stuff. My Menshevik great-great grandfather, great grandfather, great aunt, and great uncles left the Russian Empire in 1905–1907, before the Revolution; and they all came to America, where they all dropped Menshevism in fairly short order. My great grandfather did remain very, very active in Jewish unionism, although his brothers (two of whom he actually worked for) became capitalist business owners.

>>they all came to America, where they all dropped Menshevism in fairly short order.

I just started reading “Twenty Years with the Jewish Labor Bund”, which is dedicated to Leo Melamed, the guy who revolutionalized commodity futures trading. His parents were hardcore Bundists in Poland… I guess he didn’t share their Socialist ideals 🙂

Perhaps there is some sort of law of Conservation of Paranoia. We can at least hope so …

I think that using words as mnemonics for what was really numbers all along was a very common thing in phone systems. My grandfather’s delicatessen in Copenhagen had “Eva 1277,” and for a long time (on ‘demi-automatic’ exchanges) that meant dialling 38 for EV and asking the operator at the Eva exchange for 1277. (Danish dials had different letters than US ones). Of course there was a time when even the big exchanges were plugboard-based and you’d ask for other exchanges by name, but Copenhagen started getting dial phones in the twenties.

Outside Copenhagen everything was manual until around 1970, and you’d turn the handle and tell the operator the town to connect to — I think you could ask for the Copenhagen exchanges directly. And once automation came, you’d dial 01 38 12 77 for the shop.

@languagehat: Of course, “BUtterfield 8” was well known enough as a cultural signifier that it was the title of a 1960 Elizabeth Taylor movie (based on the 1935 novel of the same name).

Area codes (which also became automated with the elimination of human-operated exchanges) in America were chosen so that the largest cities would be the easiest to dial. Rules specified that no regular area code or exchange could begin or end with 1, and the second digit, in contrast, originally had to be 1 or 0. So New York got 212, Chicago 312, and Los Angeles 213, the shortest dialing patterns consistent with the rules.

I remember seeing a huge news posting back in the day on how the old mechanical exchanges in the US had all sorts of shortcuts — like a 5 would usually just reset the first Strowger selector so that a very small exchange might only have 4 levels, and the first two 5’s in the prefix were just for show.

In that system the area codes could be overlaid on the prefix, and a 0 or 1 on the second level would connect to inter-area code equipment banks (and would never be used locally).

Where is the word? Have a version with proper vinyl dynamics and the shout.

A once famous American novel that drew its title from a named telephone number was John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8. To hear how that rang in Makedonija, give the kol gerl a kol at

https://www.ebay.com/itm/BUTTERFIELD-8-LAURENCE-HARVEY-ELIZABETH-TAYLOR-1960-RARE-EXYU-MOVIE-POSTER-/123698620797

Elizabet Tejlor and Edi Fišer!

I once read in a Chilean newspaper that the two most famous Elizabeths in the world were Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth the Queen Mother. What about the Queen herself, I thought, is she less famous than her mother? However, she is not la Reina Elizabeth but la Reina Isabel. Not Isabel Taylor, however.

why do onions need 5 times as much as we do? Why do lungfish need 40 times much?

That seems a totally meaningless metric to me (not a geneticist, but originator on this thread of the remark about junk DNA).

5 time or 40 times as much of what? And why should that metric be any more meaningful than some claim about the amount of common DNA between humans and earthworms? Your point is (presumably) that onions are not more complex organisms than humans. But ‘complex’ by what metric? If they “need 5 times as much” DNA, it must be that they are 5 times more complicated; or perhaps the complexity is an exponential ratio, or combinatorial? [**] How are you measuring whatever it is that you claim isn’t proportional to the amount of DNA?

It seems to me geneticists — or rather, the people explaining genetics in TED talks — are making a terrible hash of whatever they’re trying to say.

If what you’re trying to say is that hardly any DNA is “functional”; then tracing genetic descent across widely-dispersed populations; and then trying to claim that a genetic connection has any implication for something so culturally-determined as language; seems to me a chimera — whether it’s the Faculty of Language gene for Merge, or the Natufian origin for AustroAsiatic, or wherever the discussion had got to (I’ve rather lost track).

Addit [**]: Or perhaps onions are less complicated organisms, but the info is encoded in a very inefficient way; whereas when evolution got to humans, it could encode DNA into a high-level language. That is taking the DNA as a program written in Assembly code vs written in APL.

My favorite RNA is one that is used for dealing with problem mRNA chains—specifically those that lack a stop codon. (These mRNAs could either be the result of transcription errors or the transcription of certain pseudogenes.) If a ribosome comes to the end of a mRNA without a stop codon, it doesn’t release the mRNA or the peptide chain under production. It just stalls, with the end of the defective mRNA still attached to the ribosome. That’s where the special RNA takes over. One end of it behaves like a tRNA, charged with an alanine, which instead of binding to a particular codon presented by the ribosome, binds to the ribosome with the stalled mRNA. The alanine gets added to the peptide chain, then the other end of the RNA follows the mRNA into the ribosome, behaving like an extension of the mRNA. It codes for six or seven more amino acids, which are translated as usual, then a stop codon. When the stop codon is reached, the ribosome releases the RNA and protein, just like normal, and the sequence of amino acids that have been added to the end of the protein signal for it to be broken up immediately.

If a ribosome comes to the end of a mRNA without a stop codon, …

You appear to be describing something akin to a (very sophisticated) Markov Algorithm — could be as sophisticated as a self-correcting Turing machine. I’m not seeing why @David M says there’s not “any such thing” as a programming language/set of instructions going on. (By which I mean something whose behaviour is isomorphic to interpreting a set of instructions; I am not making metaphysical claims about an mRNA chain ‘being’ a program nor the replicator ‘being’ a computing device.)

And yes, it is amazing that random chance + natural selection could have arrived at such an algorithm.

Amazing. It sounds like European green frogs (Pelophylax esculentus) on steroids.

Do the parthenogenes have two full (identical) copies of the mothers chromosomes?

Yes, except they’re all male, because the sex chromosomes of birds work the opposite way from those of placentals & marsupials.

Parthenogenesis has been observed before in turkeys. Outside of birds, komodo monitors have done it. Mammals apparently can’t do it at all, though why is not quite clear to me. Whole species of lizards do it.

Would parthenogenesis potentially be more common in species that had gone through such a severe population bottleneck

No idea. But other than by chance (in the mentioned turkeys), it may occur more often after long periods of isolation; in the komodo dragon in question it was mentioned because she had been kept in a zoo alone for years.

Whereas a WW offspring almost certainly wouldn’t work because there are adaptive traits coded on the Z that aren’t found on the degraded W?

Yes.

With a result that parthenogenic chicks are always male, remedying the situation in which there were no males in the population to father offspring?

Yes.

Or are eggs in rare occasions created with a full duplicate genome? Ab ovo as it were.

If I understand what I’m reading in wiki, it looks like human and bird oocytes are held in an initial diploid stage until meiosis occurs later in the life of the mother.

Yes, meiosis sometimes just fails. That’s also a source of triploid organisms (which usually don’t get far, but there are exceptions).

Or maybe they go through meiosis, but with no sperm present, but four whole genomes present, one of the meiotic genome halves binds to another?

Yes; fertilization of an egg that has undergone meiosis by a “polar body” is known to occur.

Thanks for bringing up the condor story. I read about it a few weeks ago, in a company-internal science channel referring to the Atlantic, and didn’t have time to track down and read the full paper (and with a growing backlog of papers from this site alone, still haven’t had time to read it). Anyway, I couldn’t get my head around this quote from the linked article:

When a cell divides in two to make an egg cell, the other half becomes a polar body, which contains a near-identical copy of DNA. Normally, the polar body disintegrates. But studies of other birds have revealed that on occasion, the polar body somehow merges again with the egg, acting like sperm fertilizing it. Because of birds’ chromosome system—ZZ makes males and ZW makes females—all avian parthenotes are males. If an egg with a W chromosome merges with its polar body, the resulting WW embryo will not be viable. Only the ZZ parthenotes ever hatch.

I would have thought that the polar body consists of the discarded parts of the cell, and that to produce a ZZ offspring, a Z egg would have to be fertilized with the Z polar body of a W egg. If so, the question is why also ZW fertilized eggs are discarded and only ZZ eggs are viable. I would then guess that something on the Z chromosome keeps the polar body together and makes it take on a form similar to sperm cells. This could be a recent development, or it could be a retention from the hermaphroditc ancestors, dormant for millions of generations until it occasionally reemerges in a species, e.g. as a reaction to population stress.

When I first heard about parthenogenesis in birds, it was suggested that the ova simply did not undergo meiosis II. However, I suspect that reabsorption of the polar body is probably more likely. The germ line cells just seem to “know” that they have to undergo the second phase of meiosis eventually. For instance, human ova undergo meiosis I in utero, then wait decades to finish meiosis Ii.

But really, meiosis is just weird by any measure. It doesn’t follow the simplest path for producing haploid gametes, which would be for a cell just to divide. Of course, the mechanics of evolution mean that new processes will often be appended onto older ones. (Famously, our sugar metabolism proceeds first through anaerobic glycolysis in the cytosol, before proceeding to aerobic catabolism in the mitochondria.) So it does not seem too surprising that the meiosis process is: duplicate the DNA once; then divide twice. Except that, as David Marjanović described above, the dispositions of chromosomes to the daughter cells are not the same in mitosis and meiosis I. They could be, but they aren’t!

Not sure which thread or comment to best add this to. It may perhaps be relevant here.

The donkey was domesticated around 5000 BCE in East Africa.

Science Daily:

The origins of donkey domestication

The donkey has shaped the history of humankind, both as a source of power for farm work, and of transportation in sometimes hard to reach areas.

To understand the history of the donkey’s domestication, teams at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse (CNRS/ Université Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier) and scientists1 from 37 laboratories around the world worked together to build and analyse the most complete panel of genomes ever studied for this animal. It contains the genomes of 207 contemporary donkeys living on all continents, as well as those of 31 early donkeys and 15 wild equids. In an article published on 9 September in Science, the researchers reveal that the donkey was first domesticated in Africa in 5,000 B.C.E, around the time when the Sahara became the desert region we know today.

It was only 2,500 years later that donkeys left their place of origin in Africa and reached Europe and Asia, where this species developed lineages that, in some cases, still exist today.

By analysing archaeological remains, scientists also uncovered evidence of a previously unknown genetic lineage of donkeys that lived in the Levant 2,000 years ago. Furthermore, the influence of this lineage is thought to extend far beyond the region, and still today, fragments of its genetic heritage can be found throughout Europe. These discoveries call for new archaeological digs to find the initial source of domestication in Africa, as well as the sequencing of other early donkey genomes on both shores of the Mediterranean sea, to better understand the role of this animal in the history of trade between Europe and North Africa.

The original article is not open access, so I’ll just quote the abstract:

Evelyn T. Todd et al: The genomic history and global expansion of domestic donkeys, Science (2022)

Donkeys’ African origins
Donkeys have been important to humans for thousands of years, being the primary source of work and transport for many cultures. Unlike horses, little was known about the origin and domestication of donkeys. Todd et al. sequenced the genomes of modern and ancient donkeys and found evidence of an eastern African origin over 7000 years ago, with subsequent isolation and divergence of lineages in Africa and Eurasia. They also reveal the imprint of desertification on divergence among groups and specifics about donkey breeding and husbandry, including selection for large size and the practice of inbreeding. —SNV

Abstract
Donkeys transformed human history as essential beasts of burden for long-distance movement, especially across semi-arid and upland environments. They remain insufficiently studied despite globally expanding and providing key support to low- to middle-income communities. To elucidate their domestication history, we constructed a comprehensive genome panel of 207 modern and 31 ancient donkeys, as well as 15 wild equids. We found a strong phylogeographic structure in modern donkeys that supports a single domestication in Africa ~5000 BCE, followed by further expansions in this continent and Eurasia and ultimately returning to Africa. We uncover a previously unknown genetic lineage in the Levant ~200 BCE, which contributed increasing ancestry toward Asia. Donkey management involved inbreeding and the production of giant bloodlines at a time when mules were essential to the Roman economy and military.

I don’t know what the domesticated donkey may have meant. It’s important that around 5000 BCE there was a society in East Africa that found it advantageous to have domesticated donkeys, but it’s not clear to me what the impact may have been.

In rough terrain it would have made marginal environments more accessible for economic development. As a means of transport, it ought to have led to increased overland trade and perhaps faster dispersion of agricultural technology in a larger region. Each effect would mean increased population, but perhaps not by much. But if the study is right and the domesticated donkey stayed local for 2500 years, until 2500 BCE or so, it might have had little use in long distance relations and more in the local economy in East Africa. This might point to local transport and trade along the mountain slopes and river gorges of the Ethiopian highland rather than the more arid regions in the north, west and south, where it would have spread widely if useful.

We could also speculate about some conveniently placed group specializing as traders between the remote highlands and the coast (of Punt?), establishing their language as a regional lingua franca and eventually the dominating language of the region, similar, perhaps, to the spread of Sami in the north.

But it’s too easy to extrapolate back in time the niche that the donkey has occupied in recent history.

Me: This might point to local transport and trade along the mountain slopes and river gorges of the Ethiopian highland rather than the more arid regions in the north, west and south, where it would have spread widely if useful.

I’ll add that since the donkey is well adapted to a desert habitat, I think the constraint would have been on human activity rather than the animal.

That’s fascinating. Thanks for the find, Trond. “More than 7,000 years ago” in an area that I suspect has been less searched than Eurasia. That places this in the ballpark with cattle and pigs, and after only dogs and sheep among the earliest domestications.

At some point I’m going to find time to re-read this whole threat to digest the various aspects and nuances I missed the first time through.

Dmitry kindly sent me the full paper and a warning that he thinks the evidence for a single origin in Africa may be overplayed. I see what he means (but not as clearly):

As I read it, there’s still lots of loose ends, important unsampled periods and regions, and timelines that don’t quite add up.

One of the loose ends is the clear division of the donkey population into two distinct clades, (inconsistently named A and B or I and II). Clade A/I is the African donkey, again falling into two branches, in East and West Africa, Clade B/II is the Eurasian donkey, with the main division between Europe and Asia. Clade B donkeys have ehtered Africa north of Sahara. There’s some evidence that the maternal genomes of the two clades may have different origins, but I guess this may also be due to different drift during the domestication bottleneck. There are no ancient samples from the proposed homeland.

Another loose end is the “Levantine” lineage, based on a single specimen from Hellenist Era Israel. It’s clearly clade B, but also with genetics that places it near the root of the tree. It seems to be some sort of back-crossing with African wild ass, but how did it end up there? Was there a viable wild population of African wild asses in Arabia, or perhaps a now lost Arabian domestic clade, even more basal than A and B? Ancient Arabian genomes are lacking in the set.

A third loose end is the genetic bridge between West and East African donkeys. We still don’t know how the West African donkey got there, where it stayed along the route, and for how long. Also ancient Sahel and North African genomes are lacking.

Thus the conclusions must be treated as preliminary and are likely to be improved by future studies. The paper acknowledges as much, making the clear statement about the origin and timeline all the more puzzling.

Dmitry also sent me another paper. from earlier this year, about the affinity of the first “royal equids” in Mesopotamia. This one is open access.

Bennett et al: The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia, Science Advances (2022).

Abstract
Before the introduction of domestic horses in Mesopotamia in the late third millennium BCE, contemporary cuneiform tablets and seals document intentional breeding of highly valued equids called kungas for use in diplomacy, ceremony, and warfare. Their precise zoological classification, however, has never been conclusively determined. Morphometric analysis of equids uncovered in rich Early Bronze Age burials at Umm el-Marra, Syria, placed them beyond the ranges reported for other known equid species. We sequenced the genomes of one of these ~4500-year-old equids, together with an ~11,000-year-old Syrian wild ass (hemippe) from Göbekli Tepe and two of the last surviving hemippes. We conclude that kungas were F1 hybrids between female domestic donkeys and male hemippes, thus documenting the earliest evidence of hybrid animal breeding.

They convincingly show that the ceremonially buried kungas of Tell Umm el-Marra near Aleppo, dated to around 2500 BCE, were purpose-bred offspring of E. africanus asinus (donkey) mothers* and E. hemionus hemippus (Syrian wild ass/hemippe) fathers. This also tells us that the domestic donkey was well established in the region by then.

* The maternal genome is closely related to modern donkeys, indicating that it had gone through the domestication bottleneck.

A quote from the Nubian paper:

>Moreover, we could show that this individual [more or less from Dongola, from 4000BP] is genetically indistinguishable from early Pastoral Neolithic individuals dated to 4000BP living over 2500 km away in Kenya and Tanzania, even when correcting for relatively large standard errors in population genetic estimates due to the low coverage. This close relatedness to early pastoral populations in eastern Africa is consistent with archaeological evidence for the dispersal of herding populations southwards along the Nile River Valley following their establishment in the Kadruka region from the early 7th millennium BP29,30, although we caution that inference from a single sample can at best be tentative.

That single sample issue is a big one. The authors suggest that their success extracting aDNA from hair may be more important than the single sample they generated.

But they continue:

> It would imply that the southward dispersal of pastoralists from the Middle Nile Valley did not involve genetic exchange with pre-existing human groups along the migration route, particularly local foragers, and may therefore have been relatively rapid. Indeed, archaeological research suggests that dispersals were likely driven in part by increasing population pressure and regional aridification, with a marked period of aridity in Upper Nubia preceding the first appearance of pastoral groups in the Turkana Basin of eastern Africa at 5000 BP

I was about to write something, but Ryan did it better (and with more critical thought).

But I’ll add something that struck me after reading the Hmong-Mien papers: If there was a rapid one-directional expansion with no genetic exchange with the locals, we’d expect a very strong founder effect. The Nile Valley is a very long bottleneck. Short snippets of single-stranded DNA from hair may be bad for measuring homozygosity, but the Nubian genome wasn’t even halfway through the bottleneck anyway, and the final result ought to be visible at the other end.

WP, helpfully, has entries for “Luo People” and for “Luo Peoples”.

In the chart for Luo languages, the language spoken by the Luo (proper) is called Dholuo, the one spoken by the Luwo is called Jur. They are in different branches of the Luo subgroup of Western Nilotic. EZ-PZ.

Kusaal and Mampruli match on 97 out of 100 items on the Swadesh 100 list (though the mismatches are “who”, “you” and “many”, a hint that things may not be so simple); however, the languages are not mutually comprehensible, as I have seen first-hand.

Only one of the Kusaal and Mampruli words for sibling relationships is cognate (bier/beeri “elder sibling of the same sex”); even the way the systems are organised is different. (The only “sibling” word that seems reconstructable to Proto-Oti-Volta is “sibling of the opposite sex”, Kusaal taʋn /tãw/, but many individual languages, including Mampruli, have lost it.)

Razib Khan wrote:
>i know. but the R1b-V88 is found among chadic language groups. i only linked to that paper as it confirms there was autosomal admixture and put a specific date on it.

I hadn’t paid enough attention previously, perhaps not having all the terms and groupings internalized well enough to provide a critique of Khan’s reasoning above.

He’s correct in pointing to R1b-V88 in some Chadic-speaking peoples, but the weird thing is how extraordinarily localized it is — it’s not really “Chadic.” It’s a specific tiny subset of Chadic in northern Cameroon. Other than that, the only Chadic line in the chart is one sample of Hausa speakers. And given the size, importance and accessibility of Hausa people, I would expect that many other samples exist, but don’t appear here because there’s no R1b-V88. Among some 50 million Hausa speakers, the known V88 carriers are 2 individuals. If there are Semitic, Cushitic or Omotic people in sub-Saharan Africa with V88, they don’t show up in the chart Khan pointed to.

There several samples from Nilo-Saharan speakers, but again, the ones with V88 are from Cameroon or nearby.

Khan seemed to be suggesting this radiation of V88 as evidence for his assertion of expansions originating in Natufian pulsing out into the continent. But there’s nothing here that suggests Chadic (let alone Afroasiatic) or Nilo-Saharan radiated and expanded jointly with V88. Far from it. It looks more like there might have been a tiny line of V88 meandering through Africa for a few centuries or millennia, that finally found purchase among some Chadic-speaking peoples in Cameroon, and had a small starburst expanding out from that population.

It’s not inconsistent with the possibility of a Natufian wave, but it offers as much evidence as pointing to the ripples made by skipping stones and suggesting they’re the aftermath of a tsunami.

In short, treating the Hausa as a genetic unity is about as sensible as treating “Americans” as a genetic unity.

I should also mention that in Nigeria, the descendants of the Fulɓe jihadists who set up the Caliphate of Sokoto are now mostly Hausa-speaking, to the degree that ethnic maps of the country often lump them all together:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#/media/File:Nigeria_linguistical_map_1979.svg

(Fulfulde is, of course, not related to Hausa at all.) This is not what you might call a fine-grained map …