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 …