Saturday 23 April 2011

More Egyptian than the Egyptians themselves

Next I ran a supervised run of North Africans. The poles were:

1) Masai
2) Yoruba
3) Basque
4) Egyptian

The population with about 50/50% Basque-Egyptian are Moroccan Jews.

Again populations from more agriculturally productive regions (Tunisia and N Morocco) lack significant Subsaharan segments as expected. Desert regions tend to present them in a chunky way which I ascribe not to slavery but to recent movement of desert tribe members anciently less affected by Neolithic migrations (Tuareg and others) into the coast and cities.

It's noteworthy how Tunisians have all 100% affinity to Egyptians versus other pole populations. If affected by Subsaharan Caravan Slave trade, we would expect to see West African segments. As it is, segments apparently Subsaharan African in some other runs are all attracted to the Egyptian pole.
As for North Moroccans, much of the same applies, except that here some Northern influence is visible as well.
South Moroccan heterogeneity may be regional, due to fertile versus more desertic areas.
W Saharan's low homogeneous West-African-like elements may be aboriginal or otherwise ancient.

Together with my previous run, it appears to me that an Early Neolithic wave from the Nile spread West even as Egypt itself continued to receive Northeastern influences. This wave would maybe carry Berber languages. Later a second Nile wave would spread not only West but all over the Near East and Mediterranean.

2 comments:

  1. Hello and thanks
    may I ask you, the source of your Libyan samples and the easterner/westerner and arab/berber grouping of them.
    Also do you know the amount (mean) of southwest asian component on those libyans?
    thanks for the attention

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  2. The Libyans are from the Henn et all public dataset. I don't believe there are major separated groups of Arab/Berber Libyans. There are Arabised Libyans and Libyans still speaking Berber tongues. The former may have some small amount of Arab ancestry, which may rise to a substantial amount in a minority, maybe some traditional elite groups. But in general Libyans are just Libyans and have been so (I'd risk saying >80% in total genomic content) since the Neolithic Revolutions. I have not seen convincing evidence pointing otherwise yet.

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