Carl Zimmer (brother of lexicographer Ben Zimmer, as J.W. Brewer points out in a comment on the Log post about this) has a story in the NY Times (archived) that starts with a potted history of Indo-European and then continues:
Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.
The linked study is “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans” by Iosif Lazaridis et al., and the abstract reads:
The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 ʙᴄ across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 ʙᴄ it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines. A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river. Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk. The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 ʙᴄ and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 ʙᴄ. The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite. We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 ʙᴄ and 4000 ʙᴄ.
There are more details at both the Times article and the Log post linked at the start of this one; I suppose I could have added this to one of the earlier Yamnaya-related LH posts, but those threads are getting long and people have been sending this to me, so I thought I’d give it its own post. Thanks, Eric and Jack!
we first started discussing these twin original papers last April on the son-of-Yamnaya thread, BTW. But the retrospective views of the 15 years of Yamnaya-related research are still nice
From the Brit point of view, the remarkable thing about this is to see an article on this topic in a mainstream daily newspaper at all.
Interesting — are there really no mainstream newspapers that cover scientific topics beyond “animal thought extinct discovered” or “asteroid on collision course with Earth” or other such clickbait? I hadn’t realized.
The New York Times used to have a special section every Tuesday (?) called the Science Times, filled with articles like this on a variety of research topics.
Now, “Animal thought extinct on collision course with Earth” would even make the tabloids.
are there really no mainstream newspapers that cover scientific topics beyond “animal thought extinct discovered” or “asteroid on collision course with Earth” or other such clickbait?
Science coverage in mainstream journalism in the UK is of low quality, often ludicrously so, if present at all; the main exception is the excellent Economist.
This also applies (with, naturally, the same major exception, but also a few others) to economics. Media commentary on economics, as with science, overwhelmingly comes from writers with no relevant specialist expertise.
The New York Times used to have a special section every Tuesday (?) called the Science Times, filled with articles like this on a variety of research topics.
Right, but at least they still cover them, even if not as systematically; DE seems to be saying that the UK papers don’t do it at all.
EDIT TO ADD: As he just said more comprehensively while I was posting the comment.
Yep. I was just pointing it out. The section made more sense when people bought the paper on individual days.
“The New York Times used to have a special section every Tuesday (?) called the Science Times, filled with articles like this on a variety of research topics.”
It is still published but is now smaller: https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/science-times
The NYT has always done well with science, at least since the days of Walter Sullivan. The NYT has had a ‘cosmic affairs’ correspondent, Dennis Overbye, who recently retired after a career covering astrophysics, so there does seem to be a continuing institutional commitment there to covering technical matters.
The Washington Post tries to cover technical topics, with a weekly ‘Health and Science’ section but isn’t as good or as accurate.
In the LLog comments, someone has linked to several fascinating videos from the Transformation of Europe in the 3rd MIllennium conference (Oct. ’23). It’s possible we’ve discussed them before, but I hadn’t seen them. I remember someone linking material which was in the form of undifferentiated 7-hour conference videos, which was too intimidating for me.
In half-hour bites, I’m enthusiastic about digesting several of them. This is a playlist with the entire set of videos from the conference:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO4IEQZa_8XPb3tCuTKbtWuvPStV_5VAJ
“southern Russia”.. It’s in Ukraine even when occupied (see what Snyder says about the disappearance of the name Ukraine)
“southern Russia”.. It’s in Ukraine even when occupied
I was also confused by this! Yamnaya is centered in Ukraine and is described as such in the article; it’s their “CLV” ancestors who lived in (approximately) what is now the Southern Federal District of Russia.
(Note that Maikop, Remontnoye, and Khvalynsk are all Russian locations, in Adygea, Rostov Oblast, and Saratov Oblast respectively. Serednii Stih, meanwhile, is firmly in Ukraine, and consequently gets a Ukrainian name, though Wikipedia calls it “Sredny Stog”.)
Jan1M: Yeah, I agree that in context “southern Russia” is meant by Carl Z. to refer to the location of the CLV folks before they had moved westward, which per the map was a safe distance east of the current “official” pre-conflict international border, but you have the read the whole article kind of carefully before that’s perfectly clear and given understandable touchiness on the topic that suggests it could have been better edited to avoid some predictable confusion from less-than-perfectly-careful reading.
In his talk linked in my comment above, David Anthony presents evidence I hadn’t previously heard of riding-related pathologies in several Yamnaya graves c. 3,100 BCE, and also from a much earlier grave from Crongrad. Not clear where that is, but he links it to the CLV cline.
A year ago, I feel like I was still reading that riding might have started as much as a millennium later.
Anthony dismisses the early military use of horses, saying they were much too skittish. He believes that genetic change around 2,200 bce related to both skittishness and to load-bearing in the lumbar region, more or less completing the modern horse genome and creating a package that rapidly replaced previous equine lineages.
I reviewed the fall-from-a-horse injuries paper a while ago, probably in one of the long Yamnaya threads. I found the palaeo-pathology part convincing, but it just didn’t look like they rode horses for war or for regular transportation – or even had many of them. Maybe they rode horses for rodeo-like rituals or something. Maybe even bulls. Genetically, the horses didn’t yet acquire genes for more docile behavior or stronger spines for almost another millennium.
Is this the same paper?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451
Only one of the 6 traits is traumatic, fall from a horse-related. The others are interpreted as adaptive or degenerative responses to chronic riding.
Yes, it looks like the same story which I may have misunderstood because I was citing Natl Geo rater than the source publication, and focused on a few acute traumas rather than potentially chronic conditions
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/who-were-the-first-people-to-ride-horses-ancient-skeletons-reveal-new-clues
https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.pruss/posts/pfbid0388sEJzXEv4byJkzya6gHiJq2fGXLas4AkBPxUD8KY5PQdUHNpTMdLU17Nc4emvFbl
I think that it’s pretty much a consensus now that the Danube expansion of the Yamnaya didn’t depend on horses…
Perhaps. As of that lecture last April, David Anthony was very much outside that consensus. He believes Yamnaya herders rode, allowing them to tend to much larger herds.
In your comments on FB, I take to heart that only about 2% of the skeletons examined in that study had such chronic deformations. I can’t really understand the dramatic scale of the Yamnaya expansion, not just up the Danube but simultaneously to the east*, without some dramatic new advantage. But if riding was that advantage, I would expect it wouldn’t be confined to 4 or 5 individuals in every 200. At best, this offers evidence that riding was one of the tools, as yet unperfected, that the Yamnaya were developing as they created the new mobility economy of pastoralism uprooted from geography.
* The Anna Scecsenyi-Nagy lecture presents IBD evidence of connections between Carpathian Basin Yamnaya and Afanasievo.
Svend Hansen is also not part of that consensus, based on his lecture at that conference. While he argues that the expansion of dairying from sheep’s milk to goat and cow was perhaps the largest factor, he still stresses “the domestication of horses to control larger herds” as the second* in a “combination of four innovative new techniques” that created the new economy. The cattle-drawn cart for transport and sheep for wool are his other factors.
Hansen’s other, larger point is to put the Caucasus at the center of the developments of the 4th millennium, rather than the Fertile Crescent.
*Second in his list, not necessarily temporally.
Conference presenters include David Reich, David Anthony, Volker Heid, Sabine Reinhold. I admittedly don’t know the field well, but these seem like some of the luminaries, and I’m surprised that there could be a consensus when it is contradicted so blithely at a conference where these are the organizers and key speakers. I haven’t listened to Heid or Reinhold yet but I’m looking forward to it.
Sabine Reinhold doesn’t go quite as far — in her words, “the late 4th millennium Steppe Maikop and the first Yamnaya groups establish the exploitation of the steppe habitat by introducing this combination of dairy, wheel transport, probably the breeding of wool sheeps and the first steps of horse domestication.”
Clearly given the number of equine bones in Yamnaya sites, horses were culturally important. What would the practical impact be if not riding or traction? Their ability to scrape snow away making them more able to survive the winter, or to open grazing for other parts of the flock?
I want to update my previous assessment of the FB post. While the study of the osteological signs of horseback riding did look at more than 200 skeletons from Yamnaya sites, many are not considered Yamnaya remains. The 5 highest scoring were among just 150 Yamnaya. (In two of them, the only feature they do not display is signs of traumatic injury). So the ratio is more like 1 in 30 with 4 or more osteological signs. Adding in those with 3 or more osteological signs, the ratio is stronger, and notably, not all skeletons had sufficient preservation to assess all 6 traits.
All the sites looked at were in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. The question of riding was not the initial focus of the research, just a surprising revelation as they considered the remains. I wonder whether anyone is doing similar research now on steppe Yamnaya and other Yamna-diaspora sites.
Yamnaya herded horses, and used them for meat and dairy, just like Botai before them. Generally, their invention of a mobile pastoralist lifestyle gave them all the necessary means for their swift thousand-kilometer treks, even when solely relying on bulls for traction, while the tradition of the youth initiation rites in wild raids against neighbors gave the the reason to keep on spreading.
Anthony correctly surmised back in the 1990s that horses were extremely important for the early Indo-European migrations, but he wasn’t quite right about the phase of migrations when it happened. Back in those days, the state of archaeology and paleogenetics then didn’t yet allow one to conclude that at the *earliest* phases of migrations (of the Yamnaya towards Danube and Altai around 3000 BCE), horse-riding and horse-carriages didn’t yet start to play a rule. That happened several centuries later during the post-Corded Ware migrations back into the Steppe. But Anthony doubled back and rejected the new evidence.
One good summary of contra-Trautmann et al. evidence can be found in
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aleksandr-Bukalov/publication/378902416_About_ancient_horse_riders_-_imaginary_and_real_Commentary_to_the_article_First_bioanthropological_evidence_for_Yamnaya_horsemanship_by_Martin_Trautmann_et_al/links/6662faafa54c5f0b9452cd26/About-ancient-horse-riders-imaginary-and-real-Commentary-to-the-article-First-bioanthropological-evidence-for-Yamnaya-horsemanship-by-Martin-Trautmann-et-al.pdf
Specifically oxen – a word that can, with its -n even, be reconstructed all the way to Proto-Indo-Tocharian.
Interesting. I’ll read that. Thanks.
That is pretty convincing right from its cattle-riding opening.
Also, I knew next to nothing about Equus hydruntinus, in particular not how late it died out.
I do wonder how old the Hungarian steppe really is, though. It’s usually depicted as natural in part, but I’ve also encountered the idea that the whole thing is due to overgrazing and was forest before, like the rest of Europe west of the Carpathians. Presumably it all depends on minor swings in the local climate? Or did the Neolithic farmers slash-and/or-burn enough trees there to create a steppe anyway, or at least a continuous agricultural landscape that turned into steppe, rather than back into forest, whenever the plague struck?
Studies of plant diversity / genetics suggest that the Pannonian Steppe remained a grassland from the times even before LGM. It is more moist than typical for the Steppes but still considerably dryer and more continental in climate than the mountains which surround out, probably owing to a rain shadow effect. Soils might have played a role too but at a quick glance I didn’t find anything about such geological effects…
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jbi.14269
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0367253020300190
Back in the heyday of Nihonjin-ron (popular theories about the uniqueness of the Japanese), one favourite trope was contrasting the animal-centred nature of the West with the agrarian culture of Japan — the dynamic Westerners riding their horses and herding their animals as contrasted with the more placid, settled culture of Japan — as an explanation for fundamental differences that Japanese felt distinguished them from Western countries and cultures. As with many excesses of Nihonjin-ron I was not impressed at the time. Looking back, whoever started that particular trope might have had something — and it all started with those aggressive Yamnaya!
Horses are very closely associated with chieftaincy in the Mossi-Dagomba cultural realm; indeed, if you see a horse tethered outside a compound, it’s a chief’s compound.
This doesn’t seem like any big mystery; the chiefly clans all proclaim their descent from foreign conquerors who arrived about eight hundred years ago, and it’s certain that the conquerees were arable farmers.
The clan name of the Mossi royal family is actually “Ouédraogo” wèd-ráoogo “stallion” (though like many Roman noble gentilics, the surname spread well beyond its upper-crust origins.)
The whole motif of cattle-raising migrants conquering settled cultivators bulked large in the deeply racist nineteenth and twentieth century European analyses of African prehistory – and comparative linguistics. That’s not to say that it never actually happened, though – there are several actual real examples, though (as always) the truth was much more complex – and interesting – in those cases than the prefabricated boxes could accommodate.
(Cattle-raising actually wasn’t part of the Mossi-Dagomba conquerors’ thing, though it is the local Mossi, along with some nomadic Fulɓe, that do most of the cattle-raising in the predominently Kusaasi region nowadays.)
@Ryan: Thanks, I hope there’ll be time to watch it some time soon.
David E.: (Cattle-raising actually wasn’t part of the Mossi-Dagomba conquerors’ thing, though it is the local Mossi, along with some nomadic Fulɓe, that do most of the cattle-raising in the predominently Kusaasi region nowadays.)
Perhaps interesting (and by way of Dmitry), a new paper is out on the genetics of the Fulbe people(s).
Fortes-Lima et al: Population history and admixture of the Fulani people from the Sahel, The American Journal of Human Genetics, 2025:
… and from the discussion:
So they identify a North African or West Eurasian ancestry component that can be dated to about 7000 years, coinciding with the spread of cattle herding across North Africa during the Green Sahara period. It seems likely (to me) that these nomadic ancestors were speakers of an early offshoot of Afro-Asiatic. When drought pushed them south, they mixed with the local population, and if uni-parental DNA from previous studies is anything to go by, it was nomad women who married settled men — a different gender dynamics than in the IE expansions! The result was culturally “Saharan” and linguistically Atlantic.
Their much later eastward expansion may have happened after the introduction of Zebu cattle to the Sahel.
What is the distinction being made between these two dates? Is the fact they’re multiples a coincidence or a product of methodology?
> the oldest admixture dates in the Fulani (from Niger) around 14.8 kya (Table S10), possibly reflecting ancient contact between sub-Saharan and North African groups. The average dates of 254 generations (7.4 kya) inferred among the Fulani on the basis of these two sources
The later eastward expansion of the Fulɓe is hardly startling news to anyone familiar with West African history (and I mean history, nof prehistory.) Their own traditions claim a northern origin, though as ever it is fatally easy to misinterpret what are actually genealogical traditions of ruling groups as if they were modern (well, nineteenth-century) European Romantic ideas about Völkerwanderungen. Rattray (good man!) owns up to having fallen into this very trap in his Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland.
There are, unsurprisingly, North African traits in many Sahelian peoples, not just Fulɓe. I have encountered blue-eyed Kusaasi. (“Unsurprising” because the Sahara was not the barrier that some Europeans imagine. Lack of understanding of this is one of the many egregious historical errors in How Nations Fail, apparent pretty much whenever it pontificates about Africa.)
Linguistically, Fulfulde is without question related – fairly closely – to Serer, and there is nothing North African about it. That, of course, tells us nothing about the genetics of the Fulɓe at all.
The Fulɓe are in fact a culture rather than a “race”, and physical differences are apparent between different Fulɓe groups, particularly between the cattle nomads and the settled groups. Treating them as a “race” is part of the long shadow of colonial racism, aligning with the classification of Fulfulde as “Hamitic” by the Nazi Meinhof.
Incidentally, Fulfulde is a dialect continuum. Its current enormous extension across pretty much the whole breadth of West Africa cannot conceivably reflect migrations dating back for thousands of years. Supposed contacts of that vintage in Niger must long antedate the arrival of Fulfulde speakers – of actual Fulɓe.
The time-depth thing is something that has perplexed me in the case of one particular etymon, in fact.
“Cow” in Fulfulde is nagge (where the stem is nag-); compare proto-Oti-Volta *nâg-wʊ́, Kassem nāa, Miyobe ì-náà, Samba Leko nà, Kulango naà, proto-Eastern Grassfelds *nàkˊ and even Jamsay Dogon nàà.
It is hardly possible that these words are not all connected; but the difficulty is that Fulfulde and Dogon are much less closely related – if at all – to the other languages than those other languages are to each other – we’re talking Altaic, not Indoeuropean here.
The nomadic Fulɓe really are the cattle-herders par excellence of West Africa, so an obvious suggestion would be that the word originated in Fulfulde and has been borrowed. But the likely time-depth of the protoforms is much greater than seems consistent with the likely timsecale of Fulɓe migration.
Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and accept it as proto-Niger-Congo. But why would the word for “cow” be preserved when “eat”, “drink”, “man”, “woman”. “sheep”, “goat”, “tree”, “mouth”, “head”, “ear” “eye”, “bone” etc etc weren’t?
(The etymon is absent in Bantu, but that’s just a twig of a branch in the great scheme of Volta-Congo, and is therefore allowed to have lost it by the sheer accident of a cosmic ray striking proto-Bantu.)
Apologies if I came through as implying anything about “race” here. The paper makes it very clear that the Fulbe, like all other peoples, are the product of a complex and interesting history, both before and after their fairly recent eastward expansion. One of those strands of history seems to be that Saharan cattle herders of northern and/or eastern origin ended up in the western Sahel. Many millennia later, that strand accounts for about 20% of their DNA – about half of their mitochondria and none of their Y chromosomes. The other strands are the Atlantic speakers that took them in and accepted their culture, the settled neighbors they later interacted with (some of whom may have become Fulbe themselves), and the settled and nomadic peoples they encountered on their eastward expansion (some of whom may also have become Fulbe).
Other peoples may have similar histories. Some of those could be Chadic speakers.
I don’t think it’s true about mtDNA and Y-chromosomes. From what I recall it’s close to 20% in mtDNA and quite high in Y. But no time to check the details now. Later.
You didn’t imply any such thing, Trond. Apologies right back at you.
On the “cow” word, I wonder if one could concoct any kind of plausible scenario for the ur-Fulɓe (by which I mean, speakers of proto-Fulfulde, rather than supposed North African incomers) actually having adopted the word from Volta-Congo* (it does look to me like they borrowed some numeral words.)
Difficult to imagine why cattle nomads – of all people – would do that, though. Unless the cattle-nomad lifestyle is actually not as ancient as all that … which would fit the linguistic – and historical – evidence, I reckon. Geneticists often seem to underestimate the rate of change of cultures, not just languages, and even if the paper is sound on the human genetics, it does not follow that this justifies much in the way of conclusions about the culture(s) of the bearers of the genes.
Roger Blench must surely have written something about cattle genetics in Africa. Right up his street …
* It wouldn’t be surprising at all if the Dogon languages had borrowed “cow” from Fulfulde, though. Far from it.
Unless the cattle-nomad lifestyle is actually not as ancient as all that
Yeah, compare the virtually instantaneous development of a horse culture among the Southwestern Indians of the US.
@Dmitry: I may have misunderstood. I’ll reread too.
@David E.: I think the assumption is that cattle nomadism (re?-)developed with the Zebu-admixed breeds. I have no idea why that would matter.
Could *nàg- have spread as the name of the new type of cattle? Alternatively, could the Volta-Congo word have been borrowed for the old-fashioned cattle of the settled peoples and spread as a dysphemism?
The various Oti-Volta words for “horse” might be some sort of parallel, Most of Oti-Volta has words which, with a bit of creative accounting. can probably be ascribed to a stem *cǎm-, shared with Miyobe at least, and presumably representing proto-Oti-Volta, whereas Western Oti-Volta, which is more or less the Mossi-Dagomba Empire Language Family, has the clearly unrelated *wɪ̀t-. It’s tempting to speculate that this represented some sort of “horse fit for a conqueror, steed” word, but I can’t see any way of making this anything more than a just-so story at present.
There aren’t actually all that many words beginning with POV *w (most initial /w/ in the modern languages is from *ŋm) which I suppose might point to a loan from the (completely unknown) language of the Mossi-Dagomba Empire founders/conquerors, but that’s probably progressing from wild speculation to outright fantasy.
that’s probably progressing from wild speculation to outright fantasy.
Just keep chanting “sal ber yon rosh!” and you’ll be all right.
Ommmm …
I definitely misread the paper. I read and summarized in unusual haste. That
shouldwon’tmight teach me a lesson.Anyway, Dmitry is right. Both autosomal and mitochondrial DNA is about 80% West African, while Y-DNA is more diverse.
I see that I also managed to give the wrong link to the paper. The correct one is this.
It’s tempting to speculate that this represented some sort of “horse fit for a conqueror, steed” word, but I can’t see any way of making this anything more than a just-so story at present.
But then: horse, ech, hestur, cheval, Pferd, άλογο, kůň …
(And of course лошадь, though at least that one is almost certainly a borrowing.)
Well, quite. It’s just not a highly conserved etymon, which is not really all that surprising in West Africa. “Cow”, though, you’d think might fare better – as indeed it seems to. (“Dog” and “goat” do better yet, though: reconstructable to proto-Volta-Congo. Also “tortoise.” Go figure …)
Thanks for the correct link, Trond.
Interesting bit near the end where it says that the Senegal river valley culture became more pastoral about 1300. That really does go nicely with the linguistic side: seven centuries is quite plausible as a time depth for Fulfulde dialect diversity. (It’s also far too short for the *nag- “cow” etymon realistically to have been borrowed from Fulfulde in all the languages I mentioned, however many epicycles one can dream up. I don’t think it could be made to work even in Oti-Volta alone.)
I don’t think Pulaar vs Fulfulde is actually a major dialect division, as the article implies. They’re just different regional names for the language. But on Fulfulde dialects I think a lot more research is needed. So to speak.
The linguistics in the article is generally pretty sensible, though. No Cavalli-Sforza nonsense.
Having slept on it for a couple of days, and taking my misreading into account, I’m not sure what to think. Since it’s a study of contemporary DNA, all historical conclusions are inferences – projections back in time from a narrow window, and it leans heavily on earlier work to be able to say anything about that at all. But what it says isn’t uninteresting. That all pastoralist populations in the Sahel show ancient North African Neolithic admixture in significantly higher proportions than their settled neighbours. and that there’s no significant difference in the North African Neolithic admixture between the different nomadic peoples tell a tale of a long history of different subsistence strategies.
Apart from that, it’s more interesting in what it hints at than what it actually says. Here are a few untold stories that it made me think of:
1. About the relation between farmer and pastoralist Fulbe populations and between recently fulanicized and aboriginal Fulbe. The figure reveals the complexity — with clear tendencies, but also with pastoralists being genetically farmers, and vice versa — but doesn”t do much to solve it.
2. About the ethnogenesis of the Fulbe in (I guess) the Senegal valley. Unfortunately there’s no comparison of Senegal Fulbe with other local populations, neither the linguistically closely related Wolof and Serer speakers or the linguistically different peoples north of the Senegal river.
3: That of the apparently closely related ancient pastoralist populations in the Sahel belt, how they all interacted with eachother for a long time and how they influenced and (eventually?) mixed with local settled populations. I don’t think it’s a wild guess that one such event was the formation of the Mossi-Dagomba Empire.
4. About the arrival of Arabs to the Sahel and of the interaction of arabicized peoples with the Fulbe. The arabisation processed in Mauretania and Chad are probably quite different but could both be important for the Fulbe migrations.
5. Maybe even a story about the development of the West African caste system.
There’s no “West African caste system”, though several of West Africa’s many different cultures have their own various caste systems. But I expect you know that. Where they exist, they do follow the familiar descendants-of-the-conquerors-on-top pattern. Same as Europe …
A lot of the stuff in the paper seems much too early for Arabs to have been involved, even indirectly.
The Mossi-Dagomba tradition is that the invaders who set up the empire were from the east, specifically from the Lake Chad area, and that they were “red” (i.e. brown-skinned rather than black.) It’s hard to know what to make of that, though; lots of West African groups have traditions about having originally come from the northeast, and some of this may reflect a desire of Muslims to claim a suitably exalted Arab origin (this is quite often actually made explicit.)
Even groups that are not themselves predominantly Muslim have probably picked up a good many similar Islamic memes, and age-old “traditional African” ways are really dynamic things perfectly capable of assimilating and domesticating outside influences and rendering them “indigenous.” As indeed, they now are …
I suspect that more recent age-old traditions regarding Egyptian origins may owe something to American influence supplanting Muslim traditions …
Regarding the lack of work on neighbouring groups: this was actually the point of my diatribe about “race” (though I got a bit carried away, as this is a hot-button issue for me – for which I make no apology): in taking the (actually quite questionable) position a priori that the Fulɓe are in some sense an identifiable actual genetic group, one is in danger of begging the question by limiting the sampling to groups you have already decided might be possible contributors to this supposed genetic group. The authors may be aware of this and may have taken sufficient steps to avoid circularity. I’m just rausing questions (as the fascists say.)
(I seem to recall reading that Alaskan Eskimos’ closest genetic links are in fact with their Athabaskan neighbours.)
David E.: There’s no “West African caste system”, though several of West Africa’s many different cultures have their own various caste systems. But I expect you know that.
Yes and no. I should have picked a more precise term than “West African” when I was thinking specifically of the westernmost Sahel. Even there I suspect there’s variation, but that the cultures will have influenced eachother enough that the cultural manifestations are similar.
Where they exist, they do follow the familiar descendents-of-the-conquerors-on-top pattern. Same as Europe …
Except where they don’t. Another path is slavery. One path could even be division of the economy by descent.
What I mean in this case is that it might be interesting to see differences between related peoples, and if those differences might have contributed to ethno-political splits – or if it’s the other way around. I am perhaps in a Graeber-Wenslow territory where peoples define themselves in opposition to their neighbours
Interesting stuff! I’ll have to take a closer look.
Linguistically, Fulfulde is without question related – fairly closely – to Serer, and there is nothing North African about it.
To be fair, there are definitely a few Berber loanwords in Fulfulde. “Hundred” is the most obvious, but I remember noticing a couple of others.
Sure: there are Berber loans in Kusaal, too …
In that sense, there’s a good deal that’s North African about … West Africa.
I get the critiques but the data is now all available for falsification. I also wondered at the lack of comparison to neighboring West African populations, but my guess is they’re unsampled, and I can see why these authors focused on what they did. I do hope someone is planning a new effort that will allow some of those comparisons.
I would be (moderately) interested in a genetic study comparing speakers of Western Oti-Volta languages with, on the one hand, speakers of other Oti-Volta languages, and on the other, with neighbouring groups speaking non-Oti-Volta languages.
The current extension of WOV over at least half of the total Oti-Volta area must be quite recent, on linguistic grounds, and such a study might help with deciding how far this was due to expansion of actual WOV-speaking populations and how far it was something more interesting and cultural.
It would also be interesting to compare chiefly clans with commoners. If there were anything genetically distinctive about the former, you’d expect it to be on the male side: clan membership goes by the father everywhere, and clan exogamy is usual.
I don’t imagine that this is likely to happen any time soon, though. And even if there were any actual interest in the project, I suspect that the politics would be very fraught.
@Ryan: Yes, I think the main value is in providing data and (further) opening a field of research. That’s what I mean by what it hints at rather than what it says.
@David E.: That’s exactly what historical genetics is good for, especially when it can be compared with history, archaeology and linguistics. The politics could be fraught, very much depending on the local political situation, but the results are usually too complicated (and interesting) to uphold a chauvinist fantasy.
I can actually think of some very specific ways that the politics could turn very nasty indeed in that particular situation; so much so, that I don’t really want even to go into any detail.
Chauvinist fantasists are pretty good at weaponising complicated results by “simplifying” them to make them appear to support their agenda. They get lots of practice at it – it’s a core part of the psychopathology.
@David E.: The simple position is that ignorance will always be to the advantage of the chauvinist. The warlords of Mali and Burkina Faso and Nigeria would hardly be any more (or less) brutal armed with an ideological interpretation of genetic results. But I realize that that’s beside your point and also a view from distance. Challenging official history may challenge the institutions of society and thus a fragile and carefully negotiated balance of powers. I may respond that a peace depending on selective ignorance is inherently unstable and inevitably favoring a ruling class, but the long-term good may still not be worth the short term mayhem — and it’s certainly not for an outsider to decide.
But – another but: As you’ve said yourself in other contexts, cultures are also capable of adapting to new understanding and impulses through their own means. The question, then, is how to ensure that local cultures own their own history to such a degree that knowledge is good.
(I really want to understand the population dynamics and the economy and politics of the Sahel belt. It’s as important for Africa-north-of-the-Equator as the Eurasian steppe is for Eurasia.)
As you’ve said yourself in other contexts, cultures are also capable of adapting to new understanding and impulses through their own means.
Yes. This is a heartening example of the progress that can be made by working from the ground up and encouraging local people to take the initiative.
Are there any historically-attested instances of stable societies where absolutely everyone was fully aware of all the empirical evidence tending to contradict whatever mythological narratives gave the regime of the day its legitimacy?
@Lameen: I gather your interest in the Sahel contact zone extends all the way from Senegal to Sudan. Do you have a view on the history of the Toubou, a non-Afro-Asiatic speaking people who are arguably ancient in the Saharan desert, and who seem to have a similar genetic make-up as the Fulbe? Or on the linguistic background of the Touareg substrate population(s)?
@Trond:
As I said, I really don’t want to particularise; but the instances I have in mind relate to places I have actually lived in, and I have heard of the sometimes lethal effects of propaganda based on claims about ultimate ethnic origins from eye-witnesses to the killings. It is not the case that such claims do not affect the potential for violence: they are used to justify it and motivate it.
But let’s talk about happier things.
Me: it leans heavily on earlier work to be able to say anything about that at all
Maybe chiefly this:
D’Atanasio et al: The genomic echoes of the last Green Sahara on the Fulani and Sahelian people. Current Biology, Volume 33, Issue 24 (2023)
So it appears that the non-Sub-Saharan element in the Fulbe is more ancient than the migration into North Africa of Caucasus-admixed peoples, but also young enough to contain European Neolithic Farmer ancestry that crossed the Mediterranean.
@David E.: I understood as much, and I’m really not trying to make you go into specifics.
Do you have a view on the history of the Toubou, a non-Afro-Asiatic speaking people who are arguably ancient in the Saharan desert, and who seem to have a similar genetic make-up as the Fulbe? Or on the linguistic background of the Touareg substrate population(s)?
I think the Tubu have been living continuously in the central Sahara for longer than just about anyone else, but why they should be genetically close to the Fulbe is not obvious to me, except insofar as it’s a similarly liminal position on a (porous) barrier. As for the Tuareg substrate, I think there’s fairly good evidence that one of them was Songhay – but that would be the one I’d notice, wouldn’t it?
No sorry, I don’t know that they’re particularly close to the Fulbe, just that the origin and percentage of their northern admixtures seem to be similar. I’m (of course) toying with the idea that after the Sahara dried up, the peoples who had lived on the grasslands retracted to the oases and the southern grasslands, and now they make up the non-Afroasiatic northern genetic component in the populations – some of which may still speak the languages they brought. The Tubu/Toubou look to me as a prime candidate for that. So does the Songhay.
Me: maybe chiefly this
No. Even more important:
Fortes-Lima et al: Demographic and Selection Histories of Populations Across the Sahel/Savannah Belt, Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2022:
The real revelation in this paper is the PCA charts and the admixture graphs (supplementary figures).
The PCA charts, both the simple ones in the paper and the more detailed PC1/PC2 chart in the supplementary pdf, show one cline from West African to Central African, and another cline from Central African through East African and Arab to European. That Fulbe genetic cline is unlike anything else, taking off from West African and meeting Moroccan Berber populations, which spread across the PCA space meeting the “Fulbe Cline” from the other end.
The admixture chart in the supplementary pdf is also interesting. For some reason they have chosen to show K=4 and K=15 in the main paper. For me interesting things happen between those two. At K=7, the Toubou take the light blue color as their own — almost. It’s present in smaller portions in their neighbors, especially the Zaghawa and Kanembu, and also shows up as a minority component in all Fulbe and all Moroccan Berber populations. At K=11 Moroccan Berber becomes all beige. This ancestry is shared in minor portions all over North Africa – and with the Fulbe.
I think this means that the Toubou are the closest you get to an ancient Saharan population, which also contributed (by a slightly different source) to Moroccan Berbers and the Fulbe.
Unfortunately the paper has no data on e.g. Songhai and Tuaregs, who one would expect to share this ancestry.
I also found a paper on Chad. It’s a few years old and could benefit from reanalysis with newer methods, but it’s interesting for what it says (and doesn’t) on the arrival and origin of Arabic and Chadic speaking peoples.
Shriner, Rotimi: Genetic History of Chad, Am J Phys Anthropol., 2018.
A snippet from the introduction:
And the final paragraphs of the actual discussion:
Another interesting fact from the paper is that almost half the Daza (subgroup of Toubou) have the rare Y-haplotype T-M70, one of the highest proportions in the world.
West-Central African ancestry with Niger-Congo, Bantu and non-Bantu combined
“Niger-Congo” is at level of “Altaic”, not of properly established language families. If it correlates with some putative “West Central African Ancestry” I would think that that is an artefact of their method and their sampling decisions.
But I also suspect some circularity of argument here. How many Gur language speakers did they sample? The Gur languages are quite certainly related to Bantu, as are the Kwa languages, like Twi. Now, even I can generally tell (mostly Gur-speaking) northern Ghanaians from (mostly Kwa-speaking) southerners just by looking at them, and actual Ghanaians are naturally even better at it. But the paper implies that these are all part of a “West-Central African Ancestry”, contrasting with e.g. Hausa (yet another culture-not-“race”, incidentally.)
Do they mean that speakers of Adamawa languages in Chad are genetically closer to Bantu speakers than Chadic speakers? Which Bantu speakers? Most “pygmies” speak Bantu languages … do they mean Zulu? Swahili? Or speakers of Bantu languages just across the border in Cameroon, perhaps? Their neighbours? Certainly it would be remarkable if neighbouring peoples tended to be genetically similar …
Do the (Mande-speaking) Bisa differ significantly genetically from their Kusaasi neighbours? Can’t say that I remember anything very distinctive about the physical appearance of my Bisa colleages compared with the Kusaasi.
Fulfulde itself is, of course, supposed to be “Niger-Congo.” Even those who recognise that Mande is unrelated to Volta-Congo (and I’m happy to see that this news has now reached even geneticists) generally assume that the various bits of “Atlantic” have been shown to be related to Volta-Congo. Wrongly, in my view, but my advanced views on this point are not yet mainstream.
The entire point of the Fulɓe paper is to make out that the speakers of Fulfulde are genetically unusual, while the Chad paper assumes that “Niger-Congo” language speakers all belong together genetically.
I have no actual difficulty with the idea that the speakers of Fulfulde are genetically diverse with contributions from all over, including the north: it’s just what you’d expect from the contemporary internal diversity of Fulfulde speakers and their known history and traditions.
What is now needed is for the authors to build on this, and demonstrate that just the same is true of “Niger-Congo” as a whole, especially those who live in the Sahel and the West African savanna … the Fulɓe are just the low-hanging fruit here …
Then they can move on to Chadic (I take it there’s no need to labour this point with regard to the whole of Afroasiatic.)
The happy outcome would be a huge cautionary tale about the folly of assuming that language boundaries correlate with genetic differences.
The trap would be to start with the (supposed) language families and to go shopping around in the DNA until you can find some markers to correlate with whatever divisions you started out with, and then proclaiming that this tells you where the languages all originated. Or anything much at all. The fewer language groups you include in your study, and the more genes, the more likely you are to end up with this Bad Ending.
All of the above. But in fairness to the Chad paper: They are not studying the details of population history elsewhere, but trying to discern old ancestry streams into the population of Chad, and they do the approximations they need to in order to get results with the data they have. They don’t identify geographic groupings with linguistic phylum, but say that they correlate, which is evidently true — in a circular way, since the geographic regions are probably partly based on linguistics. When more data becomes available, we see that the approximation to five ancestries may miss some important factors, and one such is definitely the Fulbe expansion. (I don’t know why it isn’t detected by the West African element. Maybe it’s masked by the West-Central and North African admixtures. Or maybe it’s a result of incomplete sampling in Chad.)
I get the limitations they worked under, as well as the fact that Chadic is not primarily found in Chad. It still seems unusual to generalize this much about both Chadic and Chad with only two samples from Chadic speakers, neither of whom were from Chad. One of them, being Hausa, seems particularly unlikely to shed light on the question of the older population bases of Chadic.
The Chad paper is really odd. God bless em for their very preliminary attempt but I don’t think they had samples to say anything. Unlike most papers that draw out different insights from their dataset, the various 3.1, 3.2 etc sections here each involve an insight from a different tiny subset of the overall data. That was probably what you could accomplish in 2018 with African genetic data but by today’s standards it’s pretty weak
One of them, being Hausa, seems particularly unlikely to shed light on the question of the older population bases of Chadic
Absolutely. It’s like picking a random American to represent “English genetics.” (Hausa shows less internal variation over its whole wide geographical range than Kusaal, spoken in one small corner of Ghana. It has evidently spread so widely quite recently, and is actually known to be the L1 of large groups of people who formerly spoke – Fulfulde.)
Ryan: It still seems unusual to generalize this much about both Chadic and Chad with only two samples from Chadic speakers, neither of whom were from Chad.
I noticed that, but forgot to comment. It’s a typo in the discussion. From chapter 3 in the paper:
From the percentages I surmise that the number of samples was a multiple of 17 for Mada and a multiple of 5 for Hausa.
133 generations is ~3700 years.
I remember looking at that Chadic paper a while back and realising that it was entirely mistaken in concluding that “Y DNA haplogroup R1b entered the Chadian gene pool during Baggarization.” Other work has found that R1b is present at near-100% levels across multiple Biu-Mandara speaking populations, none of which have had anything like the level of intensive intermarriage necessary to account for that. (And what is R1b doing in the Baggara anyway? It’s not exactly prominent in the Arab world.)
Fortes-Lima et al looks very interesting – still trying to process it.
“High bottleneck intensity values were estimated in the Songhai population (If = 4.7%; 95% CI = 3.2–6.3%)” – if I understand the supplementary figure correctly, the bottleneck would be 180 generations ago? That’s like 2500 BC or so, right?
The suggestion in the paper is that R1-b came to Egypt with the Mamluks and then to Sudan with soldiers involved in the campaign after the baqt broke down. An alternative might be with the reported Turkish mercenary troops in 16 C. Kanem-Bornu. Either way, it would presume that the military units were selected on ethnic or geographic criteria (which may be reasonable) somewhere around the Caucasus (which may also be reasonable). It would presumably be a founder effect in the Baggara.
The high proportions in parts of Chadic seem to tell a different story. One single group like the Mada* could be explained by recent admixture and drift, but if it’s the whole Biu-Mandara/Central Chadic, very improbable. That means that R1-b may have arrived with Chadic.
It doesn’t explain how R1-b came into Chadic, though, but this paper does:
d’Atanasio et al: The peopling of the last Green Sahara revealed by high-coverage resequencing of trans-Saharan patrilineages, Genome Biology, volume 19 (2018):
…and:
What if Chadic languages were the surviving descendants of the language of the European Neolithic Farmers!**
* I can’t find them or their language on Wikipedia.
** And Basque is Nilo-Saharan.
@Lameen: 180 generations would be ~5000 years (9 generations per 250 years is easier than 28 years per generation for simple heads like me). It seems that a lot was going on in the Sahel then.
Me: At K=7, the Toubou take the light blue color as their own — almost. It’s present in smaller portions in their neighbors, especially the Zaghawa and Kanembu, and also shows up as a minority component in all Fulbe and all Moroccan Berber populations. At K=11 Moroccan Berber becomes all beige.
(K=8 and K=12, respectively. I can’t count.)
What seems to be happening at K=8 is that a former “Saharan” ancestry is split in two. One is maximized in the Toubou, the other in Chadic and its neighbours. At K=10 what I think must be “Anatolian Farmer” ancestry is wedged in between “European” and “Middle Eastern”, showing up with about 50% in North Africans, Southern Europeans and Arabs. At K=12 the “Moroccan Berber” ancestry appears, made from “Anatolian Farmer”, “Middle East” and “Toubou Saharan”. (At higher numbers it’s often hard to say what the components mean, and if they are real at all, but this component is well-defined geographically, so fairly certain.) It’s this component that also shows up in the Fulbe, together with thin stripes of “Toubou Saharan” – so perhaps reflecting a “Western Saharan” rather than a direct “Moroccan Berber” origin.
I should perhaps say something about what these K-numbered “ancestries” are. Essentially you ask your computer: “If the sampled population were derived from K distinct ancestries, what would each person’s share of each ancestry be?” You don’t ask that question for K=1, but you may for K=2. That doesn’t mean that the result must be a basal split on the human family tree, but that the gene pool was split such that those two parts blended more internally than across the divide. In this case the main divide is between Africa and Eurasia.
As the number increases, more separate ancestries are inferred. Some of those may be old, discernible within or beyond the bigger lumps of the lower K-numbers, other may be rather new, formed by amalgamation in relative isolation. The former will typically be widespread when it appears, the latter geographically confined. When I dubbed the ancestry appearing at K=10 “Anatolian”, I supposed that it is of the former type. The “Moroccan Berber” element at K=12 is obviously of the latter.
But as the K-number increases, the more the results will also be affected by sampling bias and random noise. Not that the general image will be completely wrong, but small changes in the sampling might move the borders between the groupings or move other commonalities to prominence. Another way to say it is that more and more will be edge cases. But in the case of the Fulbe, that combined Saharan, European and Middle Eastern ancestry would still be there, whether it shows up as one or two or three idealized sources in the plots. Future studies may tell if this really is unique to the Fulbe or if similar admixtures can be found in other peoples along the southern rim of Sahara, and if the Moroccan Berber ancestry can be found along the whole northern rim, filling in the contemporary gaps between the Fulbe, the Berbers, and the Toubou,
I’ve been trying to get an idea of what we know of the Saharan ancestors of the Fulbe, the Songhai, the Toubou, et al. That’s not much.
In Western Sahel, you can’t get around the Tichitt culture from 2000 BCE until, well, the Ghana Empire. Its pastoral ancestors in the Green Sahara would be a good candidate group for the West Saharan ancestry I postulate above.
Almost at the other end of the Sahel, it’s a reasonable guess from geography that the main ancestors of the Toubou people were (or were among) the Garamantes, but that doesn’t take us beyond the fifth century BCE. (The Wikipedia article refers some surprisingly old-fashioned physical anthropology. It may be what you get when there’s no DNA preserved, but it’s still disturbing, at least in terminology.)
East of the TIchitt and long before the Garamantes, we find the Tenerean culture (It’s also on Wikipedia, but read this article from National Geographic). It’s interesting that there were people living entirely from fishing and harvesting even in small lakes, and we might speculate whether the people of the smaller lakes shared culture and language with other lakedwellers, or with the nomadic pastoralists who traveled the open grasslands.
Thanks for that; I knew nothing about the Tichitt culture.
Does anybody know what this “Dhar” is?
Also, thanks for the National Geographic article. I notice you and they write “Tenerean,” but Wikipedia has the apparently unmotivated “Tenerian.”
Tenere means “desert” in Tamasheq.
Hat: Thanks for that; I knew nothing about the Tichitt culture.
Neither did I. I knew nothing of any of this.
I notice you and they write “Tenerean,” but Wikipedia has the apparently unmotivated “Tenerian.”
I think I saw a placename with Tenere, but it could also have been sheer luck.
Yes, it’s Ténéré, which is why “Tenerian” makes no sense.
Does anybody know what this “Dhar” is?
Hassaniya form of Arabic ظهر ẓahr ‘back; escarpment’? For the semantic typology, perhaps cf. English hogback, Irish droim ‘back, ridge’.
This paper is 50 years old, and suffers from the terminological issues Trond mentions, but Munson here is arguing against the tradition of “civilization from the north” and for in situ development of the Ghana empire out of the Tichitt tradition, so maybe it’s worth overlooking the weird terminology. But most important, he gives a really good chronological summary and a useful map in the first few pages.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/182004
It’s beyond me to judge his argument about the origins of the Ghana empire. Wiki offers the competing theory that Ghana arose from Niger bend civilizations.
The Tichit culture is probably ancestral to the Soninké, the founders of the Ghana Empire, whose language was spoken in those oases until a few generations ago; Vydrine has argued that it’s ancestral to Mande in general, in fact.
The Garamantes were almost certainly Berber-speaking. The agricultural toolkit they pioneered (notably including foggaras) is fundamental to daily life in most northern Saharan oases, and barely exists among the Teda.
I have a chapter on the linguistic history of the Sahara in a handbook that’s taking ages to come out; I’d be happy to send you a copy if you drop me an email.
Dhar: Xerîb got it right.
@Ryan: Thanks! Will read,
@Lameen: I was trolling for you! That handbook sounds important. I’ve sent you an e-mail, but please tell us when it appears in print.
I’d very much like to see it too.
Me too!
I sent a request too!
I got Lameen’s chapter, and I recommend it to all and sundry. Here’s the last paragraph, just to whet your appetites:
It is indeed very interesting, as you’d expect.
Particularly interesting to read about probable old Songhay loans in Tuareg.
Looking at Table 2 (Berber-Chadic isoglosses), it occurred to me that the (clearly unrelated) Hausa kùnāmā̀ “scorpion” looks tantalisingly like the virtually pan-“Gur” *nam- “scorpion”, if only the ku- element could be magically explained away … the awesome power of sheer coincidence strikes again.
[I suppose one might propose that it came from a cognate in some branch of Volta-Congo which has class prefixes instead of class suffixes, but unfortunately I can currently find exactly zero cognates outside “Gur.”]
people living entirely from fishing and harvesting even in small lakes
predictably, this makes me think about james scott z”l, and his emphasis in Against the Grain on the mesopotamian estuary as a space of importantly varied natural resources.
Yes, thorough and interesting. I’m wiser but no less curious about all the peoples of the Sahara and the Sahel, Most or all have been in contact with Berber for a long time, either recently or in a dim past. The reconstruction of Proto-Berber will be key to everything.
That and archaeology. There’s little archaeology from the African shore of the Mediterranean compared with the European shore and the islands, so there’s probably lots and lots to be discovered. And then there’s the Sahel side of Sahara …
This looks relevant:
Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage
“The majority of Takarkori individuals’ ancestry stems from a previously unknown North African genetic lineage that diverged from sub-Saharan African lineages around the same time as present-day humans outside Africa and remained isolated throughout most of its existence. Both Takarkori individuals are closely related to ancestry first documented in 15,000-year-old foragers from Taforalt Cave, Morocco², associated with the Iberomaurusian lithic industry and predating the AHP. [O]ur findings suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural diffusion into a deeply divergent, isolated North African lineage that had probably been widespread in Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene epoch.”
It sure does! (Hope you don’t mind — I added a footnote link just to see if it would work.)
Oh, yes! This is definitely the “Saharan” population we discuss upthread. It’s what shows up in the admixture graphs in Fortes-Lima et al that I wax lyrical about upthread.
Or it’s one variety of it. Still reading Fortes-Lima et al, I see that the “Saharan” population had some deep splits that show up as we move left in the graphs: At least the different ancestries that max out in the Toubou of northern Chad, the Gurmuz of western Ethiopia, and the Koalib Nuba of southwestern Sudan seem to be ancient. The two latter are more related to eachother than to the Toubou. The “Saharan” element in East African pastoralists is related to both, but I can’t tell if it’s an ancient blend of the two, derived from a point between them on a cline, or a separate line from their common ancestor.
I would be surprised if the Takakori people weren’t close to one or both of the Toubou ancestral element and the projected endpoint of the Fulani cline, but unfortunately the PC charts in the two papers are so different that I can’t guess how one would map onto the other. Maybe Dmitry will come and explain it all.
Prior to the African Humid Period, was the Sahara a barrier to human dispersal for tens of thousands of years? That’s seems to be the implication of a North African population that diverged from sub-Sahran Africans about the time modern humans entered Eurasia.
Or is there a chance that this lineage is Eurasian, but had back-migrated at Gibraltar at some point shortly before the African Humid Period? Or some other possibility I’m missing?
The introduction to Jeffrey Heath’s Tamasheq grammar says that fifteen centuries ago “significant portions of the Sahara were sufficiently moist and temperate to accommodate permanent human settlement, while the Middle Niger River area was swampy and too infested with disease-bearing flies to permit year-round habitation.”
Perhaps something similar was true in this much earlier period: the obstacles to migration were south of the Sahara rather than the Sahara itself.
That’s an interesting possibility. I’m not clear why the Middle Niger would have been different from other mid-latitude rivers or wetlands, including the kind of wetlands and lakes surmised for the Green Sahara for that matter. Is the terrain so flat that a wet period would create a vast swamp rather than flowing water?
But the heart of the matter is that I was surprised that a North African population could have remained diverged for tens of thousands of years, and your response suggests the desert may not have been the only barrier.
I don’t think the paper denies that the most basic division of all is that between Khoi*-San and not Khoi-San. It’s just so basic that it’s not even mentioned in the paper. That divide is entirely south of the Sahara. I believe this was originally a split between South and East Africa on one side and North and West Africa (including Eurasia) on the other. What this paper is saying, then, is that the non-Khoi-San population is split in three deep lines, South-of-Sahara, Sahara, and Eurasia.
Since Fortes-Lima et al primarily look for contributions to the Sahelian populations, they too disregard Khoi-San. The divisions of ancestry they detect south of the Sahara reflect some degree of isolation between different populations in West-( and Central-)Africa, or at least between the groups that eventually contributed to the Sahel. The first split they get is between a “Westernmost” ancestry maximized in Gambia and a “Central-Western” maximized in some populations in Nigeria. The next, IIRC, divides the “Nigerian” from the “Central African”.
Thinking about it now, these divides may well reflect regions (e.g. wetlands) that couldn’t be crossed without unbearable hardship or risk — or that had little value until the introduction of herding.
* Khoi came south with the first wave of herders, who did carry some Northern ancestry.
It was, in any case, a desert very much like today, only shifted a bit to the south.
Then there’d be more Neandertal in it.
That was much closer to the present situation (which, BTW, isn’t going to last much longer) than to the AHP (which, as it happens, began close to fifteen millennia ago).
Compare the Eurasian steppe, which seems to have been pretty much uninhabited except along the rivers until then.
David M.: That was much closer to the present situation [in the Sahara] (which, BTW, isn’t going to last much longer)
That’s likely, but I continue to receive conflicting signals on the direction of the turn. Have you seen something authoritative and recent?
No, actually. On one hand, we’re reaching the temperature of the time, if we haven’t already surpassed it. More heat, more evaporation around the equator, more precipitation everywhere. On the other, part of what made the Sahara green may have been the extra evaporation from the West African rainforest, which is currently down to ice-age levels…
Thanks, DM,
I should have asked my question more clearly. I believe there were cyclical African Humid Periods. Were there no others in the time between dispersal Out of Africa 70,000-50,000 years ago and the most recent?
I think you’re saying there were no others, but thought I’d frame it clearly to be sure. I did later read much of the paper, and found the Neanderthal answer to my question about possible back-migration.
Another interesting finding of the paper is that these early pastoralists had about 10% Levantine ancestry. (1/10th as much Neanderthal genetics, which to me implies 10% ancestry.) They conclude that pastoralism arrived primarily by cultural diffusion.
Compare the Saharan herders with the Khoi. The Khoi carry a small proportion of northern ancestry*. That doesn’t mean that their arrival in Southern Africa is cultural diffusion. It’s rather the result of an initial phase or a founder event when herding made the jump to East Africa. Without a variety of Saharan hunter-gatherer (Saharan fisher!) genomes for comparison, we don’t know if the 90% Ancient Saharan ancestry in Takakori is ancient specifically in Soutwest Libya or primarily from when the first Natufians ventured into Africa.
* And now I expect to see the Northern ancestry in the Khoi connected to a particular subset of North African**.
** We really need ancient Ethiopians. I have no idea where they’d fit into this. Maybe they’ll turn everything around once again.
That doesn’t seem analogous, since the Khoi didn’t adopt herding. We know pastoralism arrived in North African from somewhere, and the question was whether/how much population replacement was involved. We now know that relatively little of the Eurasian genome came (or at least survived) with the new lifestyle. I can think of other mathematically possible solutions, but cultural diffusion does seem the most likely answer to how a new lifestyle arrived while relatively little of the genome changed. What is the alternative – that a small herding group came in, established itself, maintained its coherence as a distinct population, but over eons the occasional exchange of brides led to its being genetically swamped by the much larger hunter gatherer population in surrounding lands?
Or are you saying that you think the Takakori population may not be representative of ancient North African herders? That’s seems a different argument, to which the Khoi are still not relevant. I guess it’s possible. Or that Natufians themselves were of the divergent ancient North African stock with only a little Eurasian admixture?
Are there any comparative genetic studies of Khoekhoe cattle?
Am I even more than my usual level of confused? I don’t think so, but we’ll see.
1. Long before the Bantu expansion, there was an influx to Southern Africa of new people with a small but distinct element of Northern (“Nilo-Saharan” vel. sim.) ancestry. These came with nomadic pastoralism based on goats and cattle, and their closest descendants today are traditional nomadic pastoralists like the Khoekhoe of South Africa.
2, It’s very likely that their “Nilo-Saharan” ancestry stems from the people who first brought nomadic pastoralism to the broad region of Southern and Eastern Africa. From here we can imagine several scenarios:
A. They kept marrying locals to expand into new territorries, eventually watering down the Founder ancestry to the percentage they had when they enter the archaeogenetic record in South Africa.
B. They initially expanded quickly by intermarriage before consolidating by endogamy, and eventually spreading by migration. In this case the percentage of northern ancestry would have stabilized when the mode of operation changed from expansion by marriage to expansion by number (of goats).
C. They did a little bit of both, meaning that the eventual percentage of Founder ancestry would be steadily decreasing as they moved south, but still be higher than if they married their way south.
3. More interestingly, also the Pre-“Nilo-Saharan” ancestry in the Khoi would be more different from that of their indigenous neighbours, but the result wouldn’t be the same in the three scenarios. Without any idea of the geographical variation of this Khoi-San ancestry, we can’t tell which is true. We can only say that the original “Nilo-Saharan” element is small, and that might lead us to suggest that nomadic pastoralism spread more by cultural diffusion than by movement of peoples.
4. This could be parallel to how the Natufians entered Africa or the Green Sahara even earlier. Or not. With ancient DNA showing the variation before the arrival of herding we might be able to tell.
“Nilo-Saharan” is an unfortunate term to use in this context, it seems to me, “Nilo-Saharan” from a linguistic point of view is one of Greenberg’s most methodologically dubious constructs* (much more so than his “Niger-Congo” that I like to fulminate against: at least the Volta-Congo part of that is definitely a valid genetic grouping – in the comparative linguistic sense of “genetic.” And that’s most of the “Niger-Congo” languages numerically.)
“Nilo-Saharan” is very much more like “Amerind.” Using it in the context of genetic studies gives a wholly spurious impression that the linguistics supports their conclusions.
* Perhaps sigificantly, the only one of his four megagroups that he himself came up with. With “Niger-Congo” and Afroasiatic he was to a great extent building on prior work by actual comparativists; and at that time too little was known about “Khoisan” languages for scholars to have realised (as they now do) that “Khoisan” is not a valid genetic group linguistically either, so his error in that case is venial.
My mistake, Trond. I had missed the era when as wiki says “the harsh environment forced them to give up Pastoralism and return to being Hunter-gatherers.” I thought they were ancestrally and always hunter-gatherers.
@ David E.: I can’t disagree, but what can one do? I landed on it it in lack of a better term after discarding “Nilotic” because I didn’t want to imply that we know the exact linguistic affiliation or precise origin of these ancient populations, and then I put it in scarequotes to boot. But still. We can say the same about my use of “Khoi-San”. And “Khoi” is probably even worse.
Definitely not in that timeframe. I guess they happen whenever the climate is warm enough and maybe at the end of every ice age; but the last time it was that warm was over 100,000 years ago (110,000 or so, IIRC).
comparative genetic studies of Khoekhoe cattle?
Very few, especially with respect to the ancient bones. Mostly limited to mtDNA (haplogroup T1b which is consistent with spread of cattle through Egypt).
You can read Horsburgh 2016 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Revisiting+the+Kalahari+Debate+in+the+Highlands%3A+Ancient+DNA+Provides+New+Faunal+Identifications+at+Sehonghong%2C+Lesotho&btnG=
or a 2020 review of all efforts (both on Academia) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C45&q=Genetics+and+Domestic+Fauna+in+Southern+Africa&btnG=
It’s also discussed in the context of human DNA studies of the spread of pastoralism from East to South Africa
Vicente 2021 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12915-021-01193-z.pdf
I too now use google scholar for this, and find it a good practice to link artciles this way.
It has a link to the file itslef. No logging in to download:)
Just looking at a paper on mtDNA (“Molecular genetics relationships of Chadic populations in northern Cameroon in peri-Saharan area”, Černý et al, in “Sprachbund in the West African Sahel”, eds Bernard Caron and Petr Zima.*)
Basically, it says that “more than half of the Chadic mtDNA sequences of Northern Cameroon can be traced to the region around the Upper and Middle Nile valley and Eastern Africa.”
However, they explicitly say that their results show geographic clustering rather than a correlation with linguistic classification.
In fact, what really caught my eye about the paper was that they found that “except Mandenka, all populations living west of the inland delta of the Niger as well as in North Africa show an important [EFL for “significant”] genetic differentiation from the Central and Eastern African groups.”
What struck me is that the Serer and Wolof (no Fulɓe in the study) went with the North Africans. And they say “this part of Africa could constitute in early Holocene period starting about 12,000 years ago hardly penetrable swampland environment which can be considered as barrier of gene flow.” (They also point to possible Saharan or Berber influence over the past millennium as a confounding factor.)
At least according to current notions of “Niger-Congo”, of course, Serer and Wolof speakers aligning with North Africa is also a strikingly poor correlation with the linguistics, though this scarcely bothers me, as a confirmed scoffer at the notion of such linkages anyway. Interesting, though. It’s not just the Fulɓe who may be genetically a bit different.
* It’s an interesting collection of papers. Mostly about Mande, Songhay and Chadic, with a bit of Atlantic; nothing about “Gur” (admittedly mostly a bit south of their chosen area), which is a pity, because quite a few of their Sprachbund features turn up in Oti-Volta too. Maybe not so specifically “Sahelian” as they think.
Might Northern Atlantic have itself originated north of the Great Holocene Niger Swamp? After all, people must have spoken something in those parts before the Berbers arrived.
It’s not actually straightforward to demonstrate that Northern Atlantic is related to the rest of Atlantic at all: in fact, John Merrill suggests that even traditional Northern Atlantic itself may be too internally diverse for conclusive demonstration of its genetic unity by rigorous comparative methods.
(I approve of Merrill: he’s done much more in the way of proper comparative study of these languages than anybody else. He does it right. Though he’s not progressed to what I would regard as the logical corollary: if “Northern Atlantic” is beyond rigorous validation, any demonstration that Northern Atlantic itself is related to Volta-Congo would also not be possible by proper comparative methods.)
I must admit that I don’t really believe this scenario. I think Northern Atlantic probably is related to Volta-Congo, though I do think that the time-depth is probably too great for any actual proof of this ever to be feasible.
And I have no trouble believing in wholesale language shifts of entire populations. People have done that throughout recorded history, and I see no reason to think that they only started doing it once someone got round to inventing writing.
I think Northern Atlantic probably is related to Volta-Congo, though I do think that the time-depth is probably too great for any actual proof of this ever to be feasible.
See, I have no problem with this formulation (and similarly for Kartvelian/Indo-European or whatever); what bothers me is when people glom onto suggestive similarities and decide “This proves relationship!” and start building castles in the sky.
To be fair, the similarities between Northern Atlantic and Volta-Congo really are pretty suggestive, though much of the similarity is simply typological, when you get down to it. Not all, though.
I think the trouble is that jumping to premature conclusions has led to people feeling that proper demonstration of the genetic relationship is no longer really needed: somebody must have done it already. It’s only when you start looking that you discover that, no, they haven’t; and most of what has been done is riddled with major methodological errors.
Similar jumping-to-conclusions happens even with languages which actually are related. I was just looking through Rennison’s grammar of Koromfe again; a language always taken to be not only “Gur”, but “Central Gur”, along with Grusi and Oti-Volta. I was struck again by the fact that, apart from having noun class suffixes rather than prefixes, there is almost nothing to substantiate a closer relationship between Koromfe and Oti-Volta than between Oti-Volta and (say) Bantu. The very few probable lexical cognates between Koromfe and Oti-Volta are also shared with Bantu – they’re not evidence that both groups are “Gur”, but just that both groups belong to Volta-Congo. (And several items shared by Oti-Volta and Bantu are absent in Koromfe.) The morphology doesn’t support closer contacts either, apart from the suffix-versus-prefix thing: that’s a lot of weight to place on just one morphological criterion, and at that, a criterion known to vary between demonstrably closely related “Niger-Congo” languages.
Gabriel Manessy, whose classification of “Gur” is still basically what you find in the literature, seems to have had a real blind spot over this issue: just because two languages are evidently related, that doesn’t prove that they form a subgroup together. You just can’t tell whether they do, without looking farther afield among the related languages – in this case, outside what Manessy classified as Gur.
David E.: Just looking at a paper on mtDNA (“Molecular genetics relationships of Chadic populations in northern Cameroon in peri-Saharan area”, Černý et al, in “Sprachbund in the West African Sahel”, eds Bernard Caron and Petr Zima.*)
This is a pretty old study, I think, which I also haven’t read, so with all due precautions: The proportion of Nile Valley mt-DNA seems to support that the languages came from northeast with whole population movements. The proportion of local DNA tells of how it got established locally and of the interaction with its neighbours ever since. Differences between populations may hint at different histories of language retention or language shift both inside and outside Chadic.
Generally speaking, mt-DNA is more resistant to demographic changes than Y-DNA, meaning that men are more mobile than women on a large scale and that more women than men have children (but among those who have children, men have more children than women). It’s also generally more similar between neighboring populations, meaning either (or both) that women are more mobile than men on a small scale (patrilocality is more common than matrilocality) or (and) that mt-DNA reflects the local demographic substrate.
Also, it’s no coincidence that Southern Chad is the Caucasus of Africa. Every population that ever roamed the grasslands to its north was eventually pushed south and left a remnant here — except, curiously, the Berbers.
What struck me is that the Serer and Wolof (no Fulɓe in the study) went with the North Africans. And they say “this part of Africa could constitute in early Holocene period starting about 12,000 years ago hardly penetrable swampland environment which can be considered as barrier of gene flow.” (They also point to possible Saharan or Berber influence over the past millennium as a confounding factor.)
… and in the next comment: Might Northern Atlantic have itself originated north of the Great Holocene Niger Swamp? After all, people must have spoken something in those parts before the Berbers arrived.
I have wondered if all of Niger-Congo originated in the western Sahel and was pushed west and south by the advancing herders.
Case in point: Hokan. It’s nowhere near as hokey as the splitters would have you believe, but the history of historical-comparative research on it, detailed in the article, is horrifying.
Very interesting paper: thanks!
How to spoil your own case for genetic relatedness by bad methodology …
Distressing to find Mary Haas on the list of highly competent major linguists with a lack of understanding of the basics of valid historical comparative linguistics. Mind you, she’s in good company. Alas.
Also sobering to be reminded that some proponents of non relatedness also have no grasp of the fundamentals either:
Pee is inherently gender fluid, so when you take non-binary into account there should be more than just two words for it.
I have wondered if all of Niger-Congo originated in the western Sahel and was pushed west and south by the advancing herders.
Did you mean “eastern Sahel”? I could see that (and perhaps even invent some linguistic reasons in support.)
But it rather depends on what one makes of the relationship (or lack of one) between “Atlantic” and Volta-Congo.
If Atlantic really is related to Volta-Congo, the argument from internal diversity would actually suggest that Atlantic-Congo originated in the west of West Africa, with Volta-Congo representing a comparatively internally-homogeneous eastward expansion.
I meant Atlantic-Congo. And yes, western Sahel because of the subsequent branchings-off to the east.
So the herder-pushers would have descended onto the western end of West Africa? That would go with this supposed ancestry of North Atlantic speakers.
North-African-related types rather than Chadics from the Nile, in other words.
I suppose the Saharan-refugee cattle-herders could have sparked the Drang nach Osten and the Afroasiatics the much later Bantu push to the south. Not sure if the timescales would work out right for that, though.
I don’t claim that herders caused all these movements. The Bantu expansion might have more to do with having put together a useful toolkit for woodland gardening. I don’t think the expanding Bantu got cattle before they met the descendants of Saharan herders in Uganda or thereabouts.
Bantu hasn’t got the very widespread West African *nag- “cow” etymon, even though the Grassfields languages do (which are about as close to Bantu as you can get without actually being Bantu.)
Mind you, the form *nag- itself has surely spread by borrowing, albeit sometimes pretty ancient borrowing. It’s one of those words that’s often too similar, even between languages with very little else in the way of cognate vocabulary.
Fulfulde, Dogon and the language isolate Bangime all have it, for example. And Kusaal, though that goes without saying. The Kusaal word has to be reconstructed to proto-Oti-Volta, so the borrowing must be pretty old. Well over two thousand years, at the very least.
And Bantu has also lost the even-more-widepread *bi- “child”, but it seems likely that the speakers of proto-Bantu did in fact have children, nevertheless. There’s a limit to this Wörter und Sachen stuff …
I think the solution to the Atlantic-Congo homeland question will be found in the archaeology of West African agriculture. Per my hypothesis above, it would have started earlier and further north than we’ve been able to see and was pulled/pushed south when the climate got drier. The standard account has agriculture being invented in Nigeria/Cameroon and spreading along the forest/savanna border, but I can’t square that with Atlantic-Congo from the west. I could perhaps compromise on somewhere near the upper Niger* and spreading east and west before south.
Anyway, the Bantu forest toolkit was completed with the addition of ironworking, which – now that I think of it – may well have been learned from incoming Chadic speakers in Cameroon.
* Which is the core region of Mandé today. Hm.
Me: ironworking, which – now that I think of it – may well have been learned from incoming Chadic speakers in Cameroon.
… though I do find articles citing evidence of ironworking south of Sahara as early as the third millennium BCE. If that holds out, the population dynamics of West Africa could be quite different – and also the economy of trans-Saharan nomadism.
“Work iron” and “smith” are both reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta (and not both from the same root, at that.) Dating the period when that was spoken is basically heroic guesswork, but something like 3000 ybp is probably as resaonable a guess as any.
Neither word resembles anything Chadic, but on the other hand, that’s a relatively late date as far as W African metallurgy is concerned.
At any rate, the words are not cognate with anything in Bantu.
I just dug a little ways into the rabbit hole of 3rd millennium iron. There are some big time gaps, which is normal in an emerging archaeological field. It was also surprising to me that the earliest finds would be slag and chimneys rather than metal implements. And then a very long gap, then implements. I’d expect stray tools to be more noticeable than slag, but that’s just my instinct.
Mine was a quick survey, so I may have missed things. Has anyone dug a bit further?
The WP page on iron metallurgy in Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_metallurgy_in_Africa
contains the following frustrating passage
Quite why the writer thought the Yoruba toponym “Ilorin” (the place was founded in the 18th century) could be evidence for “proto-Bantu” is unclear … (my eye was caught by “Okuta”, which looks uncannily like proto-Oti-Volta *kút- “work iron”, but then I realised that the writer actually means “Ilorin.”)
“Okuta” is just òkúta “stone”, referring to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilorin#Arts_and_tourism
“Iron, metal ” itself in Yoruba is irin: an old enough word:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/irin#Yoruba
but I doubt that it gets you any further back in time than proto-Oti-Volta (and it’s clearly unrelated to the POV words.)
As far as I can see, there is no citation given for the claim about West African place names. (“Akudugu”, “Iron” is a common Kusaasi personal name …)
Given that few placenames in West Africa seem to be very old (they mostly still have transparent meanings in the local languages), the idea that they might provide evidence for ancient (as opposed to contemporary) words for “iron” strikes me as misguided in principle.
@Ryan: I think it’s similar with early copper and bronze. It takes some time for a new material to become common enough to be visible to us – or to be thrown about carelessly.
I haven’t dug deeper than the Wikipedia references. Apart from the link above, I’ve read Pamela Uzomaka: Iron and its Influence on the Prehistoric Site of Lejja. The earliest carbon dates from Lejja are so much older than anything else that I’d like to see them corroborated by other evidence.
@David E.: Can we learn something from the distribution of different words for iron, ironworking, and smith?
I read the Uzomaka paper too. When she started citing recent ethnography as support for the ways metal would have been used 2-4 thousand years ago, I lost a lot of confidence. Started to comment that way here, then tried to give more benefit of the doubt. She seems to be the archaeologist who published those early dates in Lejja, but I couldn’t find or at least get access to the original papers.
A more recent Augustin Holl paper suggests other early dates, but it can be hard to disambiguate. Initially I thought I was reading about different sites in southern Nigeria before realizing I was seeing a district name and a site name for the same location. And there is a lot of collapsing of millennia of possible dates into an argument that traditional Western deprecation of African metallurgy was wrong (which I can fully believe), in a way that waves the flag of the 3rd millennium bce, without focusing much attention on whether or not those dates are well supported.
It may make a certain amount of sense that smelting sites would offer the easiest to find early evidence. But I was also wondering about whether carbon dating of the remains of a smelting procedure might have complexities.
That issue may be thoroughly addressed, but I was trying to pursue that and instead got ethnography on how early iron uses would have all been for villagers to defend themselves from wild animals.
Noting that the early dates aren’t limited to Lejja (also referred to as Nsukka). Oboui in the Central African Republic is another potential site. I didn’t pursue the citations on that one.
Yeah, right, I saw the Oboui dates but couldn’t find the complete article(s).
There is what I felt was a really good summary of the arguments starting around page 20 of this book by Shadreck Chirikure, Metals in Past Societies:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303522764_Metals_in_Past_Societies
The book is 10 years old, though.
Can we learn something from the distribution of different words for iron, ironworking, and smith?
[Niggli’s Toende Kusaal dictionary says kut “iron” is a loan from Hausa, but this is definitely wrong.]
“Iron”:
Agolle Kusaal kudug (except in personal names, now replaced by pl-as-sg kut);
Farefare kúrgó;
Konni chàkùttú ‘blacksmith’ (chà- < POV *cǎ̰d- "blacksmith"; kùttú agent noun of kur- ‘work iron’;
Nawdm kud- ‘work iron, forge’;
Gulmancema kúgu;
Moba kúd;̀
Akaselem kúkūlūū;
Ncam kʋ́lúʋ̄.
The etymon must go back to POV *kút-: all the major Oti-Volta branches are represented except Waama.
It might be connected in some way with Songhay gúrú “metal, iron”, but I don’t think the POV can be borrowed from the Songhay: the timescales don’t work.
When verbs and nouns share a stem, as here, the verb is normally primary in Oti-Volta; that would suggest that POV *kút- was basically “work iron”, and the use of the stem for “iron” itself is secondary. Verbs aren’t usually derived from nouns without any derivational suffix being added.
The Hausa word is in fact ƙarfe which itself looks pretty loanword-y; no idea where from, if so, though,
“blacksmith”:
(1)
Nõotre cḛ̀yá; Kusaal saen; Mooré sá̰ya; Buli chòa-bīik (“forge-child”);
Konkomba uchaa; Ncam ūcāā;
Waama cáárō (cf cárí verb “forge.”)
These represent all the major branches of Oti-Volta except “Core Eastern Oti-Volta”; the etymon must go back to POV, either *cǎ̰d- or *cǎ̰-. The WOV forms are notably unusual morphologically, but in a way suggesting an old formation, not some recent borrowing. I don’t know of any similar forms to these outside Oti-Volta.
(2)
Yom māārā; [Nawdm kúdtá is the agent noun from “work iron”]
Gulmancema máánō; Moba máál;
Byali mámáárāū; Ditammari ōmáátà;
Nateni mádō; Mbelime máánɔ̀.
These are agent nouns from a POV *máɦ- “forge”, itself probably just a specialised use of the homophonous “build, make.” They look to me like replacements for a lost POV original: the only common distributional pattern is that the four “Core EOV” all agree here.
Hausa for “smith” is maƙeri, transparently derived from ƙera “forge, smithy.”
The Hombori Senni Songhay is gargasu, which Heath says is a loan from Fulfulde gargasaajo.
The Grusi languages share a different etymon for “iron”
Chakali lʊ̀gɪ
Kasem luu
etc. But Kabye ñɩɣtʋ.
I think the conclusion from the language evidence is that metlaworking probably doesn’t go back much farther than the time depth of POV. Whatever that is …
Even Miyobe, which I think is probably the closest relation of Oti-Volta, has neither of the Oti-Volta etyma: kúyùlè, plural áyùlè “forge”; úyù, plural píyù “blacksmith.” (No word for “iron” in my meagre sources.)
Baatonum has sèko “blacksmith”, seku “work iron”, sii “iron.”
Koromfe has kɔ̃sʋ “iron”, arɩɔ “blacksmith.”
What might it mean that there are so many independent etymons? Borrowed technology often comes with loanwords. There is a theory that iron bloomery was developed independently in several African sites.
Another possibility is that some of these words were calques, although these are short etymons. Is calque still the right term for, say, translated extension of meaning, for instance, if everyone developed their iron word from their word from red stone, or ochre?
Iron in Nigeria and Central Africa a thousand years before the Great King of the Hittites first sat on an iron throne…
Interesting book. Ryan.
I wasn’t really aware of the controversy over African ironworking preceding the first millennium BCE. For what it’s worth, I’d say the fact that metallurgy words seem not to be reconstructable to protolanguages which plausibly antedate this goes with the more tentative assessments quite well.
Mind you, you wonder how well you’d expect such words to be conserved in any case. Our “smith” seems to be just Germanic, and even “iron” seems to have been borrowed from Celtic. So just the same kind of time-depths as proto-Oti-Volta, probably. Maybe even a bit less.
If ever the African issue is definitively resolved, it would actually at least give a neat terminus post quem for proto-Oti-Volta, which could be interesting. Especially if it turned out to be late first-millennium.
I’ve wondered about the calqueing idea myself. At least as far as Oti-Volta is concerned, there don’t seem to be any obvious candidates for the “original” senses, though. And you’re right that these stems are underived/monomorphemic.
How do you create a new word for “iron”? Unless the word is morphologically complex (which they’re not) borrowing or metaphorical extension of the sense of an existing word (not necessarily on the model of a foreign language) seems to exhaust the likely possibilities.
And yes, it is a puzzle that all these language families seem to have quite unrelated words. Odd that the word wasn’t borrowed with the technology: though various scenarios come to mind that might account for it. Maybe three thousand years is long enough that it’s not really all that surprising, really.
The “iron” words are typically used for “metal” in general, though: the default meaning “iron” has evidently come about just because iron is the actual real-life default metal, traditionally.
>the fact that metallurgy words seem not to be reconstructable to protolanguages which plausibly antedate this goes with the more tentative assessments quite well.
I actually thought your estimate of 3000 ybp for proto-Oti-Volta, give or take a millennium, would fit fairly well with either of the scenarios.
Up above, I had written:
>there is a lot of collapsing of millennia of possible dates into an argument that traditional Western deprecation of African metallurgy was wrong (which I can fully believe), in a way that waves the flag of the 3rd millennium bce, without focusing much attention on whether or not those dates are well supported.
I should give an example of that. Here is Augustin Holl:
>This new wave of fieldwork confirmed the trends that emerged from the first growth spur. Iron metallurgy appears to date between 2000 and 600 BCE in all these four study areas
That’s a mighty big range, especially when the non-straw man version of the scholarship he’s arguing against puts the origin at 800-400 BCE, overlapping with some of the dates he says contradict it.
What are the iron/smith/forge words for proto-languages from the Eurasian metal-working tradition plausibly in contact with sub-Saharan Africa – say proto-Berber, some phase of Egyptian/Coptic or some Nubia/Horn of Africa language? (Although I do think the argument for iron coming from outside Africa is weak; to me, the question is when, not whether, ironworking developed within Africa.) I assume someone has looked into that and discarded the idea of an etymological relationship or it would be in the literature, but I’m still curious.
Dyula has nìgɛ́ “iron”, fàgá “work iron”, nùmú “blacksmith” …
Samba Leko has bāʔ “iron”, là “work iron”, lām “blacksmith” …
There are so many unrelated words for these things in West Africa that I’m sure you could match pretty much any potential Egyptian or Nubian word somewhere, with a bit of effort.
I think one would have to actually begin with hypothesising a donor pathway; for example, if ironworking really got to West Africa from Carthage (which seems improbable, but still) then it would be surprising if there were no Berber words that looked like potential candidates for transmission of the relevant vocabulary.
If it was via Chadic speakers, then you’d need to find plausible Chadic intermediate forms; though this would be a much more difficult project, as Chadic is vastly more diverse than Berber, and the protolanguage is far from having been reconstructed. And given that most of the Chadic languages are endangered and many have surely become extinct, the relevant historical forms of Chadic may now be completely unretrievable. (No reason to think that they were much like the far-Western, and not especially conservative, Hausa.)
As the owner of a wood-burning stove, it’s easy for me to understand why a cold-climate culture might develop high-heat technologies. I’m less clear what the interim uses of extremely hot fire would have been in West Africa that might lead people along the steps to metallurgy.
I’m asking, not saying. Does anyone have knowledge or educated guesses?
Pottery? And are traditional stoves much hotter than cooking fires? You want to heat, not to burn the house down…
I was just reading about people in California burning certain rocks to produce pigments.
Modern wood-burning stoves try to achieve high temps in order to burn the smoke to maximize heat capture and minimize sooty emissions. Mine has certainly been in the very high 3-figures, and I think I recall readings over 1,000 degrees F. It’s been a few years since I monitored it closely.
@Ryan: What I asked about was traditional stoves, like a Celt or Hittite discovering iron smelting would have known.
Yes, interesting book. Thanks for finding it. It’s one of several references in Bandama & Babalola (linked above) that I tried to follow, only getting the abstracts.
As he says, the main problem with dates from charcoal is the ancient wood problem, i.e. that firewood may come from very old trees. But I agree that even the younger and less controversial dates leave very little time for transfer of metallurgy and innovation of furnace design.
I see some research suggesting 500 C was a ‘low firing’ temp for ancient ceramics, which is already pretty high as the controlled temp of a specific spot in an open fire.
In one article Holl explains the time gaps and surprisingly different furnace technologies by suggesting that late stone age groups were discovering and experimenting with things like ceramics and ore that didn’t always turn out to be useful or practical in their cultural context. That early metal work might have been mostly about decorative uses which might have been evanescent.
Some Native Americans (and probably many others) heated stones for use in cooking in various ways. In places where iron ore is at the surface, chunks of ore might have been heated in fires for reasons like cooking, in ways that raised local temps very high. If this sometimes generated a phenomenon of leakage of slag or the production of purer iron, people may have thought it interesting and worth playing with, leading to experiments to create hotter fire.
My main problem with the the independent inventions of iron metallurgy in Eurasia and Africa is actually the coincidence in time. Why, after tens of thousands of years of Modern Human culture spreading across thw world, would two spots in the Old World, from very different technological starting points, hit on iron within a few centuries of eachother? Could it be pottery? Maybe it was a recurring byproduct of ceramics that had been experimented with for a long time when we start seeing production of scale in the archaeological record?
Back to Niger-Congo from the Sahel, here’s the Kintampo Culture of mid-late 2nd millennium BCE.
Looks to me like Kusaal is spoken in the Kintampo region. Just sayin’.
Kintampo
I can see no justification at all for WP’s “may have been Niger-Congo or Nilo-Saharan speakers.”
3500 ybp is recent enough that it would be surprising if the languages of that whole region were not already “Niger-Congo”, but archaeology can tell as nothing about it.
“Nilo-Saharan speakers” is a dead giveway that the writer knows nothing at all about African linguistics. Even if you accept the highly dubious proposition that “Nilo-Saharan” is even an actual thing, the only language in those parts that has been labelled as such (and probably with the least evidence, at that) is Songhay. Proto-Songhay has a very shallow time depth (probably not much greater than proto-Western Oti-Volta), and there is nothing to support the idea that languages related to Songhay were anywhere near this area 3500 years ago. This is pure blether.
Why do archaeologists (and geneticists) feel this need to fling about names of language families in this completely uninformed way?
It is likely that the forest cultures were originally brought in from the savanna zone, though. (The Ashanti actually have traditions that their forebears – or at least, the forebears of the people who really mattered – came from the north originally, though, as ever, it’s hard to know what to make of that.)
But the (present-day) savanna must have been the most salubrious bit of West Africa in the days when the Niger area was effectively uninhabitable, quite different from the contemporary situation. One can readily imagine waves of southerly migration resulting from the knock-on effects of increasing Saharan dessication, with the savanna the key link in it all.
[I chiefly remember Kintampo as the place where I had to remember to take an unmarked sharp right turn on my drive home from Accra to Bawku. Or end up in Côte d’Ivoire.]
Trond,
And also, why iron before metals with lower melting points? It makes more sense to see iron’s early adoption being the result of learning from other cultures that iron could have a greater practical impact than other metals.
The proponents of early ironwork in Africa say that approach is too focused on the idea that technologies are adopted pragmatically because they show themselves more useful. Yet if the theory is that iron was used decoratively and for status, it’s all the more surprising to see it adopted before metals with lower melting points.
As a separate issue, mobile hunter-gatherers generally cook largely in skins with stones. Pottery becomes practical with more sedentary settlement. If higher heat pottery firing is the basis for experimentation with fire, leading to metallurgy, then you’re really talking about a coincidence across a few thousand years rather than tens of thousands.
Like the joke about directions in the desert? “Go straight ahead, and in two weeks turn left.”
Agriculture is probably around 4000-5000 years old in West Africa.
(“Millstone” can be reconstructed to proto-Central Gur, which roughly fits that timescale, too.)
Like the joke about directions in the desert?
I’m not great on maps …
I had a simple heuristic: leave Accra on the road to Kumasi and just keep straight on until you get to Kintampo, then turn right and just keep going. (You have to turn right in Bolgatanga too, but I could cope with that. Familiar territory.)
The professional drivers routinely did it in a (very long) day, but I generally wasn’t up to that. Fortunately, there are decent places to stay in Tamale. (In those days, Tamale-Bawku could take as long as Accra-Tamale. Better roads now.)
@Ryan: I know, that’s why I suggested the introduction of pottery as a the starting point on the path to metallurgy.
@David E.: This time I meant Volta-Congo. Sigh.
(To my defense, Niger-Congo sounds more geographically restricted and thus less adventurous than Volta-Congo – to say nothing of Atlantic-Congo.)
3500 ybp is recent enough that it would be surprising if the languages of that whole region were not already “Niger-Congo”, but archaeology can tell as nothing about it.
I think this statement contradicts itself. It contains a theory of language dispersal that set predictions for archaeology and archaeo-genetics. Not precise predictions, but predictions that vectors for the dispersal shall be found. And as with everything in science, when the predictions fail (as they tend to do) in interesting ways (as they tend to do), you discard or amend the theory.
Agriculture is probably around 4000-5000 years old in West Africa.
That’s archaeology too.
(“Millstone” can be reconstructed to proto-Central Gur, which roughly fits that timescale, too.)
And that’s historical linguistics making predictions for archaeology.
“Goat” is reconstructable to proto-Volta-Congo, but I suppose you can keep goats without being a farmer.
(“Tortoise” is also readily reconstructable, It seems to be an extraordinarily well-conserved etymon in Volta-Congo. No idea why … tortoise-herding very slow nomads?)
And that’s historical linguistics making predictions for archaeology.
Nah, it’s just me saying “look at this shiny correlation.”
But I concede that if a reconstructed protolanguage has a word that means “hoe”, and the reflexes in the daughter languages all mean “hoe” with no sign of this being some sort of secondary sense, it’s reasonable to think that the speakers did in fact use hoes. In itself, it doesn’t tell you where they actually lived, though, so that you can start looking for fossilized hoes … (and “hoe” is actually not reconstructable to proto-Gur, though presumably if the speakers had millstones, they’ll have had hoes too …)
Turtle traction may predate the larger domesticates.
You may ask how Eurasian ox and horse traction could have developed without first going through a phase with animals that were slower and easier to handle.
Looking up words for “hoe” in various Grusi languages, I notice that they each seem to have several quite distinct words, each referring to a particular kind of hoe, probably indistinguishable to those of us who aren’t savanna-dwelling subsistence farmers. (So, in fact do Oti-Volta languages: in setting up a proto-Oti-Volta form I was actually kinda-cheating by picking just the “words for hoe” from each that were obviously cognates.)
Maybe that explains why a “word for hoe” is not reconstructable in Gur: in the relevant cultures, “hoe” is actually too general to count as core vocabulary: it would be like expecting to reconstruct a proto-Germanic word for “musical instrument.” Whereas a millstone is just a millstone.
Perhaps the surprising persistence of “tortoise” in Volta-Congo is explicable by the tortoise being a familiar creature but not too familiar: not liable to be displaced by various different words that originally meant “stripy tortoise”, “bright green tortoise”, “sweet little tortoise” or whatever.
Perhaps some words are just too commonly used for their own good when it comes to long-term survival.
Family relationship words, for example, are very much not stable in Oti-Volta. Probably they’re just too prone to being ousted by originally hypocoristic or honorific forms. (This can’t be a new thought: such words don’t figure in the Swadesh lists, after all.)
But “tortoise” hits the sweet spot … familiar, yet boring.
Whereas a millstone is just a millstone.
Not so fast there. In England alone there are two basic types for milling. They have various other uses.
In the past, people had to spend a lot of time milling around, so millstones must have been more important than today. Now you can get bread straight from a test tube in many flavors: Dinkel, Kümmel, Erdbeer.
True. I had no intention of offending the mylophile community by my comment, which I unhesitatingly repudiate. It doesn’t reflect who I am.
If I interpret the article on the Kintampo Culture correctly, it introduced a settled, agricultural economy to the region, which previously had been inhabited by hunter-gatherers. The culture was based on a variety of crops and also goats and cattle. Iron metallurgy was introduced in the first (= last) millennium BCE.
We now have three options for the voltacongification of Ghana:
1. It was always thus. Or at least the hunter-gatherers were VC speaking when the farmers came. Through some unusual process, the newcomers took up the language of the indigenes.
2. The farmers brought Volta-Congo from the north.
3. Volta-Congo came later, e.g. with metallurgy.
In all three scenarios the further linguistic relationship needs to be explained.
In England alone there are two basic types for milling.
Good lord, I thought that looked familiar — MMcM linked to the same webpage in 2010. Is that sheer coincidence, or did you bookmark that page back then?
(That thread is your go-to resource for millstones at LH.)
David E.: (“Tortoise” is also readily reconstructable, It seems to be an extraordinarily well-conserved etymon in Volta-Congo. No idea why … tortoise-herding very slow nomads?)
Ryan: Turtle traction may predate the larger domesticates.
Speaking of predating, would tortoises have been the biggest meat available without getting wet or actually hunting?
Through some unusual process, the newcomers took up the language of the indigenes.
Like the Normans in England. Or the founders of the Mossi-Dagomba states. Or the Gonja conquerors of much of the middle of Ghana. Or the Fulɓe conquerors in Nigeria. Not so unusual …
I don’t see any way of resolving this question linguistically. But there are no “remnant” non-Volta-Congo languages in southern Ghana, and no evidence for non-Volta-Congo substrates. Nor are there any non-Volta-Congo languages to the east, or any to the west until you get beyond Côte d’Ivoire to Atlantic. Going north, you get to Mande (Bisa), Dogon, Songhay etc, but that of course doesn’t help the hypothesis of a southern movement of Volta-Congo displacing previous languages of what is now southern Ghana.
John McWhorter, of course, thinks that all these “Kwa” languages arose from creolisation, but there is zero actual evidence for this, beyond McW’s feeling that whatever looks creoly to him must have been produced by creolisation.
Moreover, Akan is by no means as stripped-down phonologically as (say) Yoruba or Igbo, and its close relative Ebrié was thought by John Stewart to retain many systematic consonant contrasts lost practically everywhere else in Volta-Congo. So even less likely to be of creole origin than Yoruba etc.
I think a big difficulty is that three-four thousand years before the present is just too late for this scenario. I think it’s not unlikely that Volta-Congo originated north of its current extension (or most of it) but I would envisage that as a substantially earlier thing. Bear in mind that Volta-Congo is more internally diverse than Indo-European, and proto-Volta-Congo accordingly is likely to date from more like six thousand years before the present (even making all due allowances for the fact that rates of language change are not constant. Kusaal is really a lot less like Swahili than Welsh is like Urdu. Even. And these are languages from phonologically conservative V-C branches …)
(That thread is your go-to resource for millstones at LH.)
I see that MMcM linked there to the same article as I did above ! After running so hard merely to stay in the same place, I may have moved an inch forward.
David E.: Not so unusual …
Unusual with hunter-gatherers as the local substrate and incoming settlers. But I didn’t say impossible.
But there are no “remnant” non-Volta-Congo languages in southern Ghana, and no evidence for non-Volta-Congo substrates. Nor are there any non-Volta-Congo languages to the east, or any to the west until you get beyond Côte d’Ivoire to Atlantic.
How do you see Kru in this picture? (Honest question to a proud and unrelenting splitter.)
Looking up baranda in WAry, I find that it (or rather bàrànda) is the Bambara word for ‘plantain’. All roads lead there.
It occurs to me that my theory regarding ths mysterious perseverance of the tortoise might perhaps help with another thing that has puzzled me in Oti-Volta comparative work.
Viz: it’s notably easier to find noun cognates than verb cognates.
But verbs (especially common verbs, of the kind you might hope would be good candidates for comparison) often have notably broad semantic ranges, whereas nouns tend to be more pin-down-able.
Thus e.g.
di “eat” (food); “experience” (shame); “assume” (office); “marry” (a wife)
kul “go home”; “marry” (a husband)
So a lot of scope for another verb with an overlapping semantic range to get imperialistic and take over more semantic provinces from its victim, and confine it to a mere remnant sense or supplant it altogether.
I actually thought this had happened to Kusaal ɛl “marry” (a husband) relegating it to the mere derived form pu’a’ɛliŋ “fiancée”, but I found that the verb itself does turn up in some texts.
Kusaal ɛl was surely the original word: it’s got plenty of cognates elsewhere. But it looks doomed … my own language consultants always used kul, as does the Bible translation.
Dunno if this relative difficulty of finding cognate verbs over nouns appears with other language groups. Not Indo-European or Semitic, anyhow. But then, practically everything is either a verb or derived from a verb there …
@Y: Did you mean this thread? Well, all threads are won.
Banana is supposed to have come to Portuguese on loan from a West African language, but languages in the region may also have borrowed it from Portuguese, blurring the picture. Bambara bàrànda looks just too close for comfort. Could anyone regularly have turned one into the other?
(We’ve discussed the etymology of banana before, and I think we found the West African origin iffy. This may help.)
> mysterious perseverance of the tortoise
The other thing you’ve failed to take into account is how languages evolve generation by generation. Tortoises are extremely long-lived and haven’t had nearly as many generations as cattle or goats in which to change their name.
How do you see Kru in this picture?
Dunno. Very difficult to get good information on. Usually supposed to be Volta-Congo, but then so are a lot of things that aren’t. Güldemann thinks it’s a isolate, and I tend to trust his judgment on such things.
The comparative tables on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kru_languages
do in fact look pretty Volta-Congo for “tooth”, “mouth”, “bone”, “water” and “eat” (where Atlantic doesn’t) but there has obviously been a lot of phonoscrunching if so and the forms are all very short. Maybe “tree” too.
“Three” is obviously related, but that is neither here nor there. Even lower numbers get borrowed in W Africa. Bangime, that even Roger Blench thinks is a isolate*, has forms obviously connected with those of Volta-Congo for “three, four, five.”
I vaguely recall an attempt to show that Kru has signs of frozen noun class suffixes, but I can’t track it down at present. (Domestic redecorating …)
Ceding that Kru may be an isolate, still a comfortable way from the Ghana border, though. (Epicycle, go!)
* I think so too, but I think the evidence for Bangime being related to Volta-Congo is not actually any weaker than the evidence that Dogon is …
@Ryan:
Excellent point.
Talking of Mande northern neighbours, the collection of papers on a Sprachbund in the W African Sahel, that I found the Chadic mtDNA paper in, has a paper on the Bisa, immediate northern neighbours of the Kusaasi.
It’s all very vague and aporetic, but it references another paper by one K Dittmer from 1975 suggesting that the Bisa are actually Mande-ised Kusaasi. Unfortunately, well-disposed though I am to Kusaasi imperialism, this seems a pretty silly idea, and they don’t cite any of the purported evidence.
Bisa has a lot of obvious Mooré loans, as is hardly surprising, but doesn’t show any sign of specifically Kusaal influence, except in Ghana where the Bisa use Kusaal as the local lingua franca.
It’s also pretty close to Samo, spoken on the far side of Mooré, up on the Mali border.
Bisa is divided into two surprisingly different dialects by the White Volta, like Kusaal, but that is surely irrelevant.
In fact, the only point of similarity I can think of is that Bisa and Kusaal have created three-tone systems out of an inherited two, but even that has happened by quite different mechanisms; there’s a nice paper on the Bisa case:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313868245_Tone_in_the_pronominal_system_in_Bissa_Barka
Ah: this is the K Dittmer (an anthropologist):
http://www.germananthropology.com/short-portrait/kunz-dittmer/212
In 1934 Dittmer took up a position at the Ethnological Museum (formerly: Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde) in Berlin. There he first worked at the Department for Oceania but continued his work at the Department for Africa. In 1939 he became head of the newly founded Department for Eurasia.
Hmm.
Yes.
In that context, it seems particularly salient to wonder which sense of Eurasia was meant.
Still, even Nazis have contributed valuable stuff to African studies.
And most of his real African work was evidently postwar.
He’s referenced a few times in Ernst Haaf’s Die Kusase, from the Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1967, which is really very good. (Haaf was a doctor, at the same hospital I used to work at. He was evidently fascinated by Kusaasi culture, cites quite a lot of actual Kusaal well enough for it to be readily comprehensible, and was still remembered with affection thirty years later.)
I don’t know much at all about Bisa culture, beyond the fact that they were traditionally chiefless, like the Kusaasi. How far their culture resembles Kusaasi culture otherwise. I don’t really know, but given that the Kusaasi themselves share much of their culture with other speakers of Western Oti-Volta languages, including the Mossi, and with other neghbours, like the Bulsa, I’d have thought that any such similarities would be due to shared participation in an areal cultural zone rather than evidence for original Kusaasihood.
It’s generally accepted that the Bisa once occupied a much larger area, from which they were displaced by the expansion of the Mossi kingdom.
which sense of Eurasia was meant
dare we assume, the one we’ve always been at war with?
Obvious Eastasian Double Reverse Quadruple Agent.
Given that Western Oti-Volta alone occupies half of the total Oti-Volta language area, and that WOV is a pretty close-knit group, it seems much more likely that a good many previously non-Oti-Volta-speakers have got Oti-Voltaicised relatively recently (i.e.over the past eight centuries), rather than that significant groups of WOV speakers have been Mande-ised. In fact, it’s still happening: the Bisa paper I was referring to says that some 40% of the Bisa now speak Mooré, not Bisa, though apparently without giving up their Bisa ethnic identity.
(I suppose this actually is an instance of Volta-Congo spreading south to replace a non-VC language, though possibly not quite what Trond had in mind.)
@David Marjanović: One of my favorite thing about (explaining to people) The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is that Alec Leamas thinks that he’s a triple agent, but his situation is actually way more complicated than that. Nonetheless, le Carré manages to pile on layer after layer of betrayal and misdirection by the characters without it ever really becoming confusing for the reader.
On Kru and Volta-Congo:
From Parlons bété, Raymond Gnoléba, L’Harmattan, 2004:
“kʋla “tortue”
It’s that bloody tortoise again!
Proto-Oti-Volta *kùd-dɪ́ (e.g. Mooré kùrí);
Pana (Grusi) kùrùbé;
Miyobe a-kulɛ (pl);
Samba Leko (Adamawa) kìlə́;
Mbembe (Jukunoid) ŋwā-ŋkwērē;
proto-Bantu *-kʊ́dù.
Mind you, even Hausa has kunkuru too.
The question we need to ask ourselves is:
are tortoises phonaesthetic?
Am I wrong in believing that no matter what word, if you list how it’s said in a sufficient number of African languages, at least one will use ŋwā-ŋkwērē?
Or maybe it’s just DE messing with us, throwing it in at random.
If you’re not careful, I’ll explain it.
Nyingwom (Adamawa) àkùr “tortoise” …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyingwom_language
> If you’re not careful, I’ll explain it.
I did wonder whether the ŋkwērē segment was cognate.
I’m also curious how they all say turtle.
> “kʋla “tortue”
Wait, French doesn’t even have a separate word for turtle? I’m beginning to realize there’s a subtext to this song.
But also Zarma ánkú:rá, Dendi háŋkùrá (both Songhay) …
Kanuri kudo according to GT, though it’s not the from given in my dictionary, which has kúdúkareá.
What is it with this word? It seems that /kul/~/kur/ just “sounds like tortoise” to people …
“Wheel-like/round animal”? The various manifestations of “wheel” in Indo-European have been accused of a phonaesthetic origin IIRC:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/k%CA%B7%C3%A9k%CA%B7los
There’s a number of these sorts of words in West Africa. Another is /lab/ “hide behind something”, which has this or a very similar form in a number of unrelated language families. I mean, it doesn’t immediately suggest “hide” to me …
Words for “round” in Oti-Volta are mostly kpi-/gbil-/gil-, but the variants can’t all be derived from just one protoform (I jettisoned the word from my Swadesh list for blatant phonaestheticism.)
“Roll” is something like bilim all over Oti-Volta, including in languages where the regular correspondence for the non-initial *l in the Outer Oti-Volta languages is *n.
If this is a phonaesthetic tortoise, it’s often the protoforms that fit the sound pattern rather than the actual forms in the modern languages: Mbelime hūdìkɛ̀.
I suppose it’s like Japanese 蝶々 chōchō “butterfly”: it is … unobvious … that this goes back ultimately to an Old Chinese form more or less like leplep.
I did wonder whether the ŋkwērē segment was cognate.
Yeah. The word is a compound, formally: the ŋwā- element is “child” etymologically, but has got permanently fused as part of some animal names, where the second element, the original word, no longer appears independently.
It’s rather like how “bird”, from Old English bridd “chick”, has displaced “fowl” in English.
I’m also curious how they all say turtle
Kusaal mɛɛŋ; Mampruli meeŋŋa; Bimoba miaŋ; Konkomba umeen; Ncam umiin.
Enough to justify a proto-Oti-Volta *mèm-wʊ́, but only just. No cognates outside Oti-Volta AFAIK.
“Turtle” is a good candidate for a hunter-gatherer substrate word, but one substrate from Kru to Hausa seems unlikely.
Turtle shells were traded goods. Words for goods may spread in both directions in a supply chain, but apparently most easily from the buyer to the provider.
–
I have more than one scenario here, all vaguely defined, and not mutually exclusive. VC (and AC) initially diversifying in an agricultural savanna belt north of its current location is one. Another is a trade language, a lingua franca used along the east-west travel zone north of the forests. A third may involve several waves, maybe from different locations, as local groups developed new technology, or access to trade systems, or ideology.
Linguistics can’t solve this, but it can contribute to the solutions. A rough west-to-east spread of language is apparent from the (outline of a) linguistic tree. A subset moved and diversified. A new subset moved on and diversified again. But since this was not a linear movement following a plan, some movements went backwards, replacing or interspersing between related languages.
Wait, French doesn’t even have a separate word for turtle?
German hasn’t either; the basic word for both is Schildkröte, literally “shield-toad”. The English word I learned first was “turtle”, and it took me some time to learn that tortoises aren’t turtles.
Norw./Da. skil(d)padde is probably another calque from German.
learn that tortoises aren’t turtles
I know it, but I still don’t understand it. For a long time I thought that tortoises live on land and turtles in water, but that’s not it, because there’s also land turtles. I now imagine that the distinction is semi-imaginary in origin and became important when it was enforced by schoolteacher prescriptivism.
I don’t know what the difference between tortoises and turtles is, and I just asked my wife and she doesn’t either. So it’s one of those distinctions known only to specialists.
Whatever it is, it’s the same relation as porpoise to purple.
(Sorry, I shouldn’t make bad puns on porpoise.)
Easy! “Tortoise” means kpakur, whereas “turtle” means mɛɛŋ.
(For what it’s worth, French sources translate the Kusaal names respectively as “tortue terrestre” and “tortue aquatique.”)
Just noticed that mɛɛŋ is not in Naden’s dictionary. Shocking omission. Bad as the OED.
Just noticed that Classical Greek χέλυς “tortoise” actually fits my proposed phonaesthetic template for tortoise-words, with a bit of squinting.
If Wiktionary is to be believed, there is no convincing PIE etymology for the Greek. It must be from a pre-Volta-Congo West African substrate population. We can conclude that this mysterious people must have been great seafarers (reaching even deep into the Mediterranean), which is consistent with their maritime location. One suspects that these skills have survived in their Kru descendants …
Assorted responses from the thread parts I missed…
Gabriel Manessy, whose classification of “Gur” is still basically what you find in the literature, seems to have had a real blind spot over this issue: just because two languages are evidently related, that doesn’t prove that they form a subgroup together. You just can’t tell whether they do, without looking farther afield among the related languages – in this case, outside what Manessy classified as Gur.
This kind of thing had plagued the classification of Trans-Himalayan languages (a.k.a. “Sino-Tibetan”, a.k.a. “Tibeto-Burman”; the recent rename was popularized by a reclassification that put all of Sinitic, Tibetic, and Burmic in a single subgroup far down the tree), though there it seems that the main problems are that 1) many of the languages involved are rather poorly studied, 2) many of the languages involved tend to have rather short words, and 3) everything is obscured by many layers of borrowing from both within and outside the family.
I chiefly remember Kintampo as the place where I had to remember to take an unmarked sharp right turn on my drive home from Accra to Bawku. Or end up in Côte d’Ivoire.
Like the joke about directions in the desert? “Go straight ahead, and in two weeks turn left.”
A bit… but I’m guessing it’s more like the Ghanese* equivalent of the left toin at Albakoikee.
(I can’t make any sense of the specific description, but I guess maybe the roads were set up slightly differently in these days. AFAICT now the N10 highway goes all the way from Kumasi to Bolgatanga and passes Kintampo without any obvious direction changes.)
Maybe that explains why a “word for hoe” is not reconstructable in Gur: in the relevant cultures, “hoe” is actually too general to count as core vocabulary: it would be like expecting to reconstruct a proto-Germanic word for “musical instrument.” Whereas a millstone is just a millstone.
“But then: horse, ech, hestur, cheval, Pferd, άλογο, kůň…”
(I wonder what things look like for this on the Indo-Iranian side of the family. Hadn’t looked it up.)
*) …the usual “Ghanaian” sounds wrong to me, but I don’t know the actual etymology so I have no idea whether the final -a is in fact part of the root. I guess it survived because the alternative “Ghananian” would have been even sillier.
Do they say “ghanaisch” in German? [Wikt says: apparently yes.]
(This would have been a LH citation about a discussion of German words such as “togoisch” and “panamaisch”, but Google fails to find anything relevant even though I distinctly remember the thread.)
Norw./Da. skil(d)padde is probably another calque from German.
Wiktionary points out that English used to have shellpad, which the OED (entry from 1914) thinks was also a calque from German. It wasn’t very old, though; OED has it only from 1553 to 1790, MED doesn’t have it at all. DSL only has Schell padocke in the “Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue” section, not in the modern Scots section.
From the two relevant WP articles:
—-
The word turtle is borrowed from the French word tortue or tortre ‘turtle, tortoise’.[3] It is a common name and may be used without knowledge of taxonomic distinctions. In North America, it may denote the order as a whole. In Britain, the name is used for sea turtles as opposed to freshwater terrapins and land-dwelling tortoises. In Australia, which lacks true tortoises (family Testudinidae), non-marine turtles were traditionally called tortoises, but more recently turtle has been used for the entire group.[4]
—-
The American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists uses “turtle” to describe all species of the order Testudines, regardless of whether they are land-dwelling or sea-dwelling, and uses “tortoise” as a more specific term for slow-moving terrestrial species.[3] General American usage agrees; turtle is often a general term; tortoise is used only in reference to terrestrial turtles or, more narrowly, only those members of Testudinidae, the family of modern land tortoises; and terrapin may refer to turtles that are small and live in fresh and brackish water, in particular the diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin).[5][6][7][8] In America, for example, the members of the genus Terrapene dwell on land, yet are referred to as box turtles rather than tortoises.[4]
British usage, by contrast, tends not to use “turtle” as a generic term for all members of the order, and also applies the term “tortoises” broadly to all land-dwelling members of the order Testudines, regardless of whether they are actually members of the family Testudinidae.[8] In Britain, terrapin is used to refer to a larger group of semiaquatic turtles than the restricted meaning in America.[6][9]
Australian usage is different from both American and British usage.[8] Land tortoises are not native to Australia, and traditionally freshwater turtles have been called “tortoises” in Australia.[10] Some Australian experts disapprove of this usage—believing that the term tortoises is “better confined to purely terrestrial animals with very different habits and needs, none of which are found in this country”—and promote the use of the term “freshwater turtle” to describe Australia’s primarily aquatic members of the order Testudines because it avoids misleading use of the word “tortoise” and also is a useful distinction from marine turtles.[10]
Something that might support Trond’s idea is that I’ve found that within Volta-Congo, the groups where I’ve been least successful in finding likely cognates for Oti-Volta lexemes are in the parts of Greenberg’s “Kwa” before you get to the east side of the Niger.
I’m not impressed by McWhorter’s notion that the isolating tendencies of these languages are the outcome of creolisation, but even so, this makes you wonder about substrates. And there actually is at least one non-VC group alongside that: Ijoid (there is really nothing at all to support Ijoid being related to Volta-Congo.)
Points against: there aren’t competent comparative studies of many of these languages, and they have often undergone profound phonological changes liable to make recognition of cognates difficult, Also, I don’t myself know any of these languages more than superficially, and am certainly not in a position to spot potential cognates as readily as I can in “Gur.” But there may be more going on than can be accounted for by these factors.
Also I have found it easier to find potential Oti-Volta cognates in Potou-Akanic and Gbe than in the more easterly groups, like Defoid. Again, this is likely to be at least partly due to greater familiarity, but I don’t think it’s just that: some Potou-Akanic languages are a good bit more conservative phonologically than Akan (like Gonja) and the Togo Mountain group often throws up etyma looking familiar from an Oti-Volta angle. Akan also agrees with “Gur” in having possessor-possessum order in NPs, unlike the languages to the east.
This might all fit with a pattern where a savanna-originating VC, already spread quite far along the east-west axis geographically, and already with significant internal differentiation, has been moving south along its whole southern border over the past three millennia or so. (This would sidestep my objection about 3000-4000 ybp being too late to square with the likely time-depth of proto-VC, and account for the specific north-south agreements, contrasting with their respective eastern neighbours, seen between e.g. Oti-Volta and Akan.)
The eastern push of VC right down to the coast (on the far side of Ijoid) might be part of the same movement that continued with the great Bantu migrations.
I think this is all coherent, but I must say it’s all very speculative, and moreover probably places rather too much weight on my failure to find much in the way of OV cognates in languages I don’t know much about anyway. Other potential explanations for this failure do suggest themselves …
the usual “Ghanaian” sounds wrong to me, but I don’t know the actual etymology so I have no idea whether the final -a is in fact part of the root
It’s part of the root. Nkrumah cheekily stole the name from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana_Empire
(no relation.) I think this was mainly to do with his pan-Africanist ideology, but was perhaps also a nod to Akan traditions that they originally came from the north.
The Ijoid languages are spoken in the Niger Delta. As we just learned in the case of the Rhine-Maas, living and making an outcome in a river delta is a specialized skill, and this makes it possible for indigenous harvesters to survive and adapt to incoming farmers on their own conditions and schedule. We could posit the same for the Dogon and the Bangime in the inland Delta.
Parallel to Schildkröte, Hungarian has teknősbéka, which seems like another calque, although if so I don’t know why they would use béka ‘frog’ instead of varangy ‘toad’. Wiktionary notes: “This word, though common, is often denounced[1][2] on the grounds that this reptile has nothing to do with béka (‘frog’), an amphibian; the correct term being simply teknős (coinciding with the informal, elliptic form of the above).” (Origin of béka previously at Language Hat (2004, with followup comments in 2018).)
@Trond: Thanks, I hadn’t realized that about porpoises.
The Dogon are prototypically mountain-people rather than river-people (the Jamsay seem to have colonised the plains relatively recently.) But still well-placed to be holdouts. (Bangande even more so, geographically.)
They all claim not to be indigenous, interestingly, but to have come from the south, displacing the aboriginal “Tellem”, who are supposed to have been pygmies (though this may be a retrofit based on interpreting the local stone ruins as houses, too small for regular people.) In Songhay, they’re called “Kurum”, which may or may not have anything to do with the Koromba (speakers of the Volta-Congo language Koromfe.) I now realise that they must in fact have been Tortoise People.
Dogon Country
This seems pretty well supported by archaeology:
Toloy:
Tellem:
* Citation needed.
Also, if there’s a museum collection of bones from Toloy and Tellem graves in caves or rock shelters, there should be a good chance to find readable ancient DNA, which is not plenty in Africa.
Parallel to Schildkröte, Hungarian has teknősbéka, which seems like another calque, although if so I don’t know why they would use béka ‘frog’ instead of varangy ‘toad’.
The parallel is only limited, as teknős means turtle on its own, so it’s “turtle-frog” (a formation similar to German Walfisch “whale fish” as variant of simple Wal).
As LH pointed out in the other thread, béka goes back to Turkic baqa “frog”. It’s maybe interesting that this word also shows up in the Kazakh word for “turtle”, tasbaqa = tas “rock, stone” + baqa “frog, toad”.
Why are there no Google hits for Tasbaq(i)stan?
Google does helpfully inform that BBC coined Tazbekistan for Ambassadors. A missed opportunity.
Fleeing Islamization seems to have been quite popular in the early Islamic centuries. Dogon, Serer, Guanches, Yakuts….
I read somewhere that even the Bafut of Cameroon came from somewhere further north (CAR?), fleeing Islam or slavery. I wonder how many other Grassfields populations have a similar history.
There must have been a lot of migrations into and out of the early trade & raid empires of the Sahel. Surely some of those who fled would establish kingdoms of their own. Fleeing forced islamization and/or slave raiders at one time doesn’t mean that you won’t let yourself be islamized and/or engage in slave raiding later if you are in a position to benefit from the transaction.
I was rather stunned by Great A’Tuin being a sea turtle. What a creative solution to the “turtles all the way down” problem! But not only is space an ocean; it also dawned on me that sea turtles occur in the sea around Britain, while no other testudines do. Conversely, the only testudines in all-but-the-Lowest-German-speaking places are European swamp turtles that go up the Danube all the way into what is now the city of Vienna and no farther (so far), and what we think of first when we hear Schildkröte is a proper Mediterranean Testudo species that walks on land.
The strictly aquatic Australian freshwater “tortoises” are as distantly related to tortoises, terrapins and sea turtles as it’s possible to be nowadays and still have a proper shell… they’re close to matamatá, which, BTW, is Chelus fimbriatus.
In German, Schildpatt is the material, the horny layer of the shell of certain sea turtles that combs and the rims of glasses were sometimes made from; -patt is a cran morpheme because the whole thing is borrowed from Dutch, where pad means “toad”. No direct relation to any pads.
I should read it, then.
The phonologically less awkward ghanesisch, togolesisch, panamanisch, panamesisch do exist. Likewise tibetanisch, taiwanesisch and zypriotisch as opposed to tibetisch (with /eː/), taiwanisch and zyprisch.
…and the two great big phylogenetic studies that have been done on the family did find Sinitic as the sister-group of all the rest put together, but the method made an unrooted tree and then placed the root in the middle of the longest branch, so if Sinitic simply had a higher rate of lexical replacement – massive early contact with Austronesian-or-so has been suggested – then that means nothing.
I could imagine a Slavic intermediary; toads, not frogs, are the default anurans in Polish and Russian at least, so maybe “toad” got translated as “frog”…
Fleeing slavers, for the most part, I think, rather than Islamisation, even if said slavers were, in point of fact, Muslims. Certainly so with the Dogon.
In West Africa, the position of Islam is complex and nuanced and basically, all generalisations about it are false. But one of the things to bear in mind is that Islam has been there a lot longer than Christianity and is much more acclimatised; it’s also closely associated with empire and political centralisation generally. And, of course, with literacy and all that flows from that. I think, too, Islam has had a major influence on the worldview of groups (like the Kusaasi) who are not Muslim at all: it’s been the vehicle of whole rafts of what both locals and outsiders naively assume to be pure Ancient African Philosophy.
(I have previously mentioned a Kusaasi folktale I know, which evidently was transmitted via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kal%C4%ABla_wa-Dimna.)
It actually wasn’t a sound economic proposition for your canny Emir to try Islamising all his subjects, and in northern Nigeria most Hausa outside the cities (i.e. most Hausa) were “pagan” well into colonial times. The rulers were OK with that, to the degree of getting their scholars to concoct plausible reasons why they didn’t have to try to convert their subjects (leading to such subjects being labelled as Maguzawa “Zoroastrians.”)
It was the Pax Britannica that led to the great spread of Islam in northern Nigeria; this took place as a result of trade to a great extent (Islam is still strongly associated with trade in West Africa, especially in the savanna and Sahel) and peaceful proselytisation. The Brits actively assisted, by (for example) forbidding Christian missionary activity in the north.
The way to get targeted by a military Jihad was not to be pagan but to be Muslim, but not Muslim enough (or in the approved way.) It’s a bit like the old observation that you were safe from Soviet Russian invasion so long as your state was not communist. Westerners tend not to appreciate that the main motive of military Jihad is often a perfectly genuine desire for reform (and it’s often not hard to see plenty of things that really cry out to be reformed.) Not to claim that other motives never come into play … (see also “crusades.”)
The Touareg warrior clans historically took little interest in Islam, which they left to specialist castes (respected, but demilitarised, and hence inferior.)
The Kusaasi have remained largely untouched by Islam since, well, forever, despite the fact that their Mamprussi would-be (and sometimes actual) overlords have been nominally Muslim for centuries, as far as the chiefly clans go. And Mamprussi peasant farmers carry on the Old Ways for the most part, with about the degree of involvement in Islam that the modern English have in the Church of England.
The Mossi king has sometimes been Muslim. Never any question of trying to impose Islam in their subjects, though. (You also need to be careful to keep you fingers a bit crossed as a Muslim – or Christian – traditional chief in those parts. It mustn’t interfere with some of your most basic cultural duties as a chief. I had a very illuminating discussion once with a Catholic Mossi chief about all this once.)
although if so I don’t know why they would use béka ‘frog’ instead of varangy ‘toad’.
I could imagine a Slavic intermediary; toads, not frogs, are the default anurans in Polish and Russian at least, so maybe “toad” got translated as “frog”…
Another explanation could be that béka originally meant both “frog” and “toad”, like in Turkic, and varangy was introduced only later, when teknősbéka had already been formed. That should be testable for someone with access to a Hungarian etymological or historical dictionary…
teknős means turtle on its own: yes, I was just wondering if Schildkröte had anything to do with people wanting to tack béka onto it. Or that could have happened independently, for all I know.
teknős includes turtles and tortoises. English seems to be unusual in having two different (though etymologically related) words; at least, many of the links to other languages from Wikipedia’s page on Tortoises go to pages titled either “Land turtles” or with the scientific name Testudinidae.
And speaking of Walfisch, Y said in 2014: “some California Indian languages have the same word for turtles and toads/frogs—not much stranger than calling a whale a fish.” More comments there on the frog/toad distinction, as well as dolphin/porpoise.
And some North American lizards of arid regions (Phrynosoma) are called horned or horny toads or even horned or horny frogs. I guess they look more like toads than most lizards do, but still.
I poked around a bit – while the Turkic languages on GT all*) have compounds of something (“stone, hard, covered”) plus “frog” for turtle, Slavic has various formations, none of which contain “frog” or “toad”, so I think we can exclude them as intermediaries. Interestingly, though, Romanian has broasca testoasa “frog turtle”, so a compound similar to Hungarian, only in a different order. My current interpretation of this is that maybe it was (Ottonan) Turkish influence that made both languages add “frog” to existing words for “turtle”.
*) Except Yakut, which has loaned Russian čerepakha; I guess Yakutia is too far North for turtles.
toad-on-a-heart or chest toad (грудная жаба)
If you don’t want to suck toads, can you snort them with a toad spoon?
Oh yeah, tortoiseshell!
Also Haifisch ~ Hai “shark”.
Literally “toad body”.
By far.
Dutch schildpad has been discussed here before, as a probable source of skillpot, in US dialect (Maryland, Virginia, DC, West Virginia, says DARE). Comments brought up Shellpot Creek in northern Delaware, apparently from Swedish.
>although if so I don’t know why they would use béka ‘frog’ instead of varangy ‘toad’.
Dunno, but this has forever changed my mental image of the Varangian Guard.
The stuff about the Dogon moving to their current location because of Muslim persecution is attributed to Marcel Griaule, perpetrator of all those popular fantasies about traditional Dogon religion and paragon of how not to do anthropological fieldwork; the passage in WP then segues to modern conflects with the Fulɓe and presents these as all part of this persection by Muslims on account of their beliefs. Dogon are in fact mainly themselves Muslim now. Such conflicts accordingly have nothing to do with Dogon religion.
In fact, it is not known where exactly the Dogon came from or why they migrated. This is all traditional history stuff, like the Akan belief that their ancestors came from the north or the Mossi-Dagomba traditions about their chiefly clans being descended from immigrants from the Lake Chad region. Presenting this as historical episodes of Islamic persecution is tendentious to say the least.
[Passage not linked to, because it’s propaganda, not fact.]
Jeffrey Heath (in his Jamsay grammar) says the Dogon inhabited the inselbergs to escape “marauding Tuaregs, Fulbe and slave-traders.”
Dunno, but this has forever changed my mental image of the Varangian Guard.
This may be the first time I’ve wanted to ask AI to create an image.
Their favourite military tactic would be the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation
I don’t believe Islam was a decisive factor either, but it would have been obvious that wealth, power and scholarship were found in the same places, and the closer you were to the slave trade, the better access you had to all of them. It’s not difficult to see how a community under threat might have seen “marauding Tuaregs, Fulbe and slave-traders” and the religion as two sides of the same coin, at least until it came in a position to adjust and adapt on its own terms.
But what this made me think of is horses. The Saharan trade brought slaves and gold to the north, horses and luxury goods like textiles to the south. Horses became a mark of kingship because it told clearly who controlled the access to the trade networks and the profit from export of gold and slaves.
all those popular fantasies about traditional Dogon religion
The only ones whose popularity brought them to my attention were about the aliens from Sirius.
OTOH, I also think both kingship and scholarship would have been seen as improvements. The marauding and slave-taking were ugly facts of the world, while political systems and moral codes to control them were brittle and had to be carefully maintained.
about the aliens from Sirius
The Sirius thing was Griaule.
Islamic law in fact prohibits having either Muslims or ḏimmī as slaves, so if you’re a Muslim slaver, you either have to buy from elsewhere, raiser your own, or go raiding your non-Muslim neighbours. You then don’t want your victims to convert, and you don’t want to set up an actual neighbouring Islamic state, either of which would damage your commercial interests severely. What you want is handy non-Muslim militarily weak neighbours with a substantial population.
In other words, your interests are antithetical to actually spreading Islam.
I do understand that. I’m just saying that from the viewpoint of a handy non-Muslim militarily weak neighbour with a substantial population, having to choose between seeking conversion (and perhaps partaking in the operations of the kingdom) and being legal prey might also be worth fleeing.
True. And I’m sure it often happened in just that way.
But I don’t think the distortions evident in that WP passage about persecutions of the Dogon by Muslims qua Muslims are an isolated thing. I doubt whether (in WP at any rate) much of that is really deliberate anti-Muslim propaganda, but I think a lot of it represents an unhistorical and Eurocentric projection of modern (and sometimes not-so-modern) Western preconceptions onto situations where the real dynamic was quite different.
I’m not an apologist for Islam. In fact, I regard all religions other than my own as false. I am an entirely unrepentant ex-missionary to an overwhelmingly Muslim area; I have worshipped in a church recently rebuilt after being burnt down by a mob in the name of Islam. I have personally known Christians who have been persecuted by Muslims. I know (and care) much more about such issues than the blaspheming US “Christian” Nationalist heretics currently stoking hatred of Muslims to further their own grubby power-grabbing.
But none of that stops me getting angry at deliberate (or even merely careless) grotesque misrepresentation of Islam and of particularly of Muslims. Especially now.
(I’m not preaching at you, Trond. I’ve no doubt you agree. I’m just spouting off in exasperation.)
@DE, I don’t understand which words in WP you’re disagreeing with (even though I re-read your exchange with Trond several times..) ;-(
“the real dynamic” – oh that horrible English. Linguistics, but dynamic:((((
“I poked around a bit”
@Hans, I use Wiktionary for this (lists of translations, above the “references”).
They’re from the WP page on religious persecution. (As I said, I won’t link to it.) I don’t at all think the passage is delberately skewed (WP is good at self-correcting against things like that, by and large, and the page as a whole is mostly admirably comprehensive and fair in its treatment of the grim subject material.)
It’s just that that with trying to tackle “persecution of traditional African religions” they are carrying over the biases and presuppositions of largely European sources, who among other things were all too prone to force African cultural practices into the shape of what they thought “religion” is. (Griaule was a splendid example of this tendency run amok, by the way.) This leads to extremely distorted accounts of Islamic interaction with pre-Islamic African cultures.
A much more sophisticated and illuminating survey can be found in a book I’ve recommended before: Spencer Trimingham’s Islam in West Africa. It’s old (1959) and in places very much of its time, and it’s by no means perfect, but it is genuinely insightful. Trimingham really knew his stuff, and the book is interesting even just for the ethnographic and historic material. Where it treats things I encountered first-hand, it well matches what I can vouch for myself. It’s a very valuable corrective to some of the more lame-brained culture-war stuff: I have lived among US missionaries, and, believe me, I know from lame-brained culture war stuff. (Many of them were truly admirable people, I must say, and they were by no means all like that.)
Ordered it from Blackwell’s, who write:
#
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
#
What means as we know “it” ? As we know “the knowledge base”, or “civilization” ?? Both ??
This is self-deprecation run amok. And/or post-pre-modern pronoun trouble. At any rate ambiguity with no sting in its tail. Oh well, if you can’t beat ’em, enjoin ’em.
Inspired me to see what Trimingham says about the Dogon:
This is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seku_Amadu
in the nineteenth century, so nothing to do with the original Dogon migration.
The context of the passage is that S-T is discussing various efforts at Islamic empire-building, some indeed involving coerced conversion, [so I don’t want to overstate the case here] and pointing out various examples where this “conversion” was rapidly thrown off when the political power waned: the exceptions were where the ground had actually been properly prepared by preaching and peaceful proselytisation.
Shehu Hamadu was actually better at this than most: he’s basically the reason why the Fulɓe are now overwhelmingly Muslim. The empire he created only lasted until 1862, though.
The nineteenth century was not a great time for the peoples of the West African savanna and Sahel.
Fulɓe
Is that “ɓ” needed, whatever it is ? It is falling out of favor, sez here:
#
There are many names (and spellings of the names) used in other languages to refer to the Fulɓe. Fulani in English is borrowed from the Hausa term.[37] Fula, from the Manding languages, is also used in English, and sometimes spelled Fulah or Fullah. Fula and Fulani are commonly used in English, including within Africa. The French borrowed the Wolof term Pël, which is variously spelled: Peul, Peulh, and even Peuhl. More recently the Fulfulde / Pulaar term Fulɓe, which is a plural noun (singular, Pullo) has been Anglicised as Fulbe,[38] which is gaining popularity in use.
#
Popular people phonetics !
@Stu:
Sounds like the guff those cheap photocopy reprint guys put out. Go for a secondhand copy with the cool foldout map!
(It even has the Kusaasi on it. How cool is that?)
Is that “ɓ” needed, whatever it is ?
How will people know to fear my awesome knowledge base unless I use Heāvy Metāl
ümlautsimplosives?Anyhow, it’s used all the time in Hausa. You’ll be objecting to cedillas next.
Sounds like the guff those cheap photocopy reprint guys put out.
Thanks for the reminder. After ordering, I saw that and had qualms, but I have now (apparently successfully) cancelled. I’ve had really bad experiences with those “reprints”. One was around A5 in size, with large print for old people: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation ffs.
They used to persecute us with Viagra ads, now it’s 20-point fonts.
I like cool foldout maps !
ETA: Ordered a used hardback edition (1961) at ZVAB for only 10 eurons !
You’ll be objecting to cedillas next.
Done !