Skin color in Eastern & Western/Northern Hamites

[Noah]

It is sometimes argued that if the Hamitic peoples in the Horn are essentially of West Eurasian biological affinities, then why are they not lighter skinned? Why, for example, do they not share the genes for fair skin like most Western/Northern Hamites in the Maghreb do?

The following quote from a 1993 craniometric study by the anthropologist Loring Brace is typically produced to further drive home this point:

"An earlier generation of anthropologists tried to explain face form in the Horn of Africa as the result of admixture from hypothetical “wandering Caucasoids,” (Adams, 1967, 1979; MacGaffey, 1966; Seligman, 1913, 1915, 19341, but that explanation founders on the paradox of why that supposedly potent “Caucasoid” people contributed a dominant quantity of genes for nose and face form but none for skin color or limb proportions. It makes far better sense to regard the adaptively significant features seen in the Horn of Africa as solely an in situ response on the part of separate adaptive traits to the selective forces present in the hot dry tropics of eastern Africa."

For a long time, the argument above was a difficult one to address adequately since there indeed appeared to be no independent study of Horn populations showing that they possessed at least a moderate incidence of the genes that have been implicated in fair skin amongst West Eurasian populations.

The typical explanation for this quandary was the one that Brace et al. themselves provide in the aforementioned classic paper, where they also craniofacially cluster the sampled Hamitic peoples with West Eurasian groups. Namely, that the typically dark skin in the Eastern Hamitic Horn populations, which differentiates them from the other predominantly Caucasoid populations included in the study, is due to long-term morphological adaptation to a sunnier, more tropical environment.

"The biological affinities of the ancient Egyptians were tested against their neighbors and selected prehistoric groups as well as against samples representing the major geographic population clusters of the world. Two dozen craniofacial measurements were taken on each individual used. The raw measurements were converted into C scores and used to produce Euclidean distance dendrograms. The measurements were principally of adaptively trivial traits that display patterns of regional similarities based solely on genetic relationships. The Predynastic of Upper Egypt and the Late Dynastic of Lower Egypt are more closely related to each other than to any other population. As a whole, they show ties with the European Neolithic, North Africa, modern Europe, and, more remotely, India, but not at all with sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Asia, Oceania, or the New World. Adjacent people in the Nile valley show similarities in [adaptively] trivial traits in an unbroken series from the delta in the north southward through Nubia and all the way to Somalia at the equator. At the same time, the gradient in skin color and body proportions suggests long-term adaptive response to selective forces appropriate to the latitude where they occur."

This argument served in relatively good stead until the publication in 2008 and 2010 of two ground-breaking studies indicating that the same variant of one of the main genes associated with light skin in many West Eurasian populations is indeed found at a moderate frequency range of 10%-30% in the Horn populations.

"Skin pigmentation is one of the most recognizable human phenotypes and tends to vary on a latitudinal cline, even within Europe. The derived alleles of missense SNPs in SLC24A5 (rs1426654) and SLC45A2 (rs16891982) have both been implicated in light skin pigmentation among Europeans. We have collected data for these markers from 4474 individuals in 107 population samples. The derived alleles of both SNPs were observed at high frequencies throughout Europe, though the derived allele of rs16891982 is found at lower frequencies in Southern Europe. The derived allele of rs1426654 was also found at moderate to high frequencies 2 to 100% in East Africa, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia, whereas the derived allele of rs16891982 was seen at frequencies of 0 to 58% in these populations. At SLC24A5 a single allele of a 13-SNP (including rs1426654) haplotype covering ~146 kb accounts for ~95% of the chromosomes in Europe. At SLC45A2, we saw no significant LD around rs16891982. Using the REHH test, we found strong evidence of selection for the derived allele of rs1426654 in Europe as well as East Africa, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia where it had not previously been seen and were able to confirm the evidence of selection in East Africa using nHS. We saw no or very weak evidence of selection for rs1689192 using REHH or nHS among European and nearby populations." -- Evidence of selection in the pigmentation genes SLC24A5 in Europeans, East Africans, and Southwest and Central Asians and SLC45A2 in East Asians and Native Americans; M. P. Donnelly, W. C. Speed, A. J. Pakstis, J. R. Kidd, K. K. Kidd.

racehist.blogspot.com/2010/09/ashg-2010-adaptation-and-natural.html

"Pigmentation is one of the more obvious forms of variation in humans, particularly in Europeans where one sees more within group variation in hair and eye pigmentation than in the rest of the world. We studied 4 genes (SLC24A5, SLC45A2, OCA2 and MC1R) that are believed to contribute to the pigment phenotypes in Europeans. SLC24A5 has a single functional variant that leads to lighter skin pigmentation. Data on 83 populations worldwide (including 55 from our lab) show the variant (at rs1426654) has almost reached fixation in Europe, Southwest Asia, and North Africa, has moderate to high frequencies (.2-.9) throughout Central Asia, and has frequencies of .1-.3 in East and South Africa. The variant is essentially absent elsewhere[...] Extended Haplotype Heterozygosity (EHH) and normalized Haplosimilarity (nHS) show evidence of selection at SLC24A5 in not only our European and Southwest Asian populations but also our East African populations." -- Frequency distribution and selection in 4 pigmentation genes in Europe; M. P. Donnelly, W. C. Speed, J. R. Kidd, A. J. Pakstis, K. K. Kidd Dept Genetics, Yale Univ Sch Med.

racehist.blogspot.com/2008/09/northern-euros-whiter-than-southern.html

Note that the material above is entirely consistent with an historic document by the Tang dynasty Chinese scholar Duan Chengshi asserting that the former Bilad al-Barbar, as the northern coast of the Horn region was referred to, was inhabited by Hamitic people whose "women are immaculately white" ("white" likely in the Middle Eastern sense of the term). As explained further in the Bilad al-Barbar... Land of the Berbers thread, this early testimony from Duan Chengshi illustrates that, as with the Western/Northern Hamites, fair skin also at the very least had a notable presence amongst the local Eastern Hamitic peoples as recently as the first few centuries of the Common Era. The genetic studies above only further confirm this historic observation.

In addition, this is supported by many oral traditions of neighboring Bantu and Nilotic populations recounting the local presence in historic times of peoples of Caucasoid appearance and foreign language and culture prior to the arrival in the area of their own ancestors. I shall try and devote a separate thread to this important topic soon.

[theleader9]

The reason why horn of africans are dark skin is because of the uv sun. Although I am not light skin for horner standards ( I am medium) I did get really dark while down south of the united states. Skin color is not a definition of race it can change within a group of people in relatively short amount of time depending on what their new found climate is.

[Noah]

"Skin color is not a definition of race it can change within a group of people in relatively short amount of time depending on what their new found climate is."

True, it can change within only a couple of generations without any admixture.

[amun]

I am personally of the opinion that the dark skin found in the Horn Africa despite the Caucasoid facial features found there is due to an indigenous North-East African component. Similarly, Indians often have Caucasoid facial features but still have dark skin, this is largely due to an indigenous South Asian component: www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/abs/nature08365.html

[Noah]

I'm not quite sure I follow, amun. Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by that? For instance, what do you make of the notable presence in the Horn of the West Eurasian-associated genetic allele for light skin?

[amun]

What I meant was that Horn Africans are a mixture of indigenous Northeast Africans and Ancient Arabians (who are in turn closely related to other West Asians) rather than being fully West Eurasian derived. The dark skin found in the Horn of Africa might come from those aforementioned indigenous ancestral sources.

Regarding SLC24A5 (rs1426654), as you mentioned it is indeed found in Northeast Africans. I am actually a carrier of the 'lighter' variant on that gene (I tested my genome a while ago).



I noticed that when people from the Horn of Africa mix with Europeans the offspring has much lighter skin than you would expect (sometimes even approaching the variation found in Southern Europeans). This could be due to the fact that Horn Africans are already heterozygous for many pigment controlling genes. However, the darker variants are dominant so that is what shows in the phenotype of most Horners, but when admixture occurs with groups who are mostly homozygous on lighter variants it could have significant effects on the phenotype of the mixed offspring. What do you think of this?

[Noah]

Very interesting graphic; thanks for sharing! It indeed seems to corroborate the studies above.

I broadly agree that modern Horn Africans are in the main a mixture of various West Eurasian elements with a separate component indigenous to East Africa. However, I think this observation deserves further qualification.

To start, the indigenous African component appears to be an intrusive element. This is suggested by the fact that, if one examines the paternal and maternal DNA profiles of the main Horn groups and compares them to those of North Africans (who, I think you'll agree, are essentially West Eurasian), like, say, Egyptians, one is struck by the global similarity in uniparental markers. That is, paternally-speaking, Egyptians mainly belong to the E1b1b haplogroup that most Horners also belong to. Their mtDNA profile is also quite similar, albeit with less Sub-Saharan-associated markers. Like in the study below where SAMOVA analysis clusters the Horn sample with the Egyptian sample, but with a slightly greater pull toward the Sub-Saharan groups:

"Africa was divided based on geography combined in a few cases with ethnicity (in the case of Pygmy hunter gatherers and Bantu speakers). SAMOVA was used to eliminate the following outlier groups: West Pygmy (Cameroon, C.A.R., and Gabon), Khoisan speakers (South Africa and Botswana), East Pygmy group Mbuti (D.R.C.), and Moroccan sample (mainly Berbers from North Africa). After removing outliers, the remaining states were divided using SAMOVA into 4 groups: WC/SW Bantu speakers from Angola, Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, E/SE sample from Kenya and Mozambique Bantu speakers, NE/E sample from Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, and W/WC countries after excluding Bantu speakers and Pygmy hunter-gatherers[...] MDS plot showing the mtDNA variation-based genetic distances between African populations after the outliers[...] were excluded from the calculations. This plot shows the general structure of the remaining regions (with highlighted W/WC clustering) and their relationship to the admixed African American populations, depicted using only the African portion of their ancestry."

Taken together, this suggests that a population in the Horn with a quite similar genetic makeup as Egyptians was gradually modified through interbreeding with indigenous Sub-Saharan females. But not too much, as the continued DNA and osteological affinities show.

The notion that it is the aforementioned Sub-Saharan component that is intrusive is supported by the observation (noted earlier) that the overwhelming majority of modern Afro-Asiatic speakers have pre-dominant Eurasian biological affinities. So the likelihood of an indigenous Sub-Saharan people assimilating foreign West Eurasian migrants and passing on to them the Cushitic and Ethio-Semitic languages is highly doubtful.

Indeed, as we also saw in the Bilad al Barbar... Land of the Berbers thread, historic documents attest to the presence in the first decade of the Common Era of a clearly non-Negroid people in the Horn. Only later, during the next decade, do we learn about the presence of a Black African people, after whom the East African coast is then dubbed by the medieval Arabs "Bilad al Zanj" or "Land of the Blacks":

"When the Indian Ocean coast of Africa was first described in writing, in the Greek sailors' guide of about A.D. 100 known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, this coast was called Azania, and no 'Ethiopians', dark-skinned people, were mentioned among its inhabitants. They first appear in the largely fourth-century Geography ascribed to Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, and then only towards the south, probably on the coast of what today is northern Mozambique, i.e. about the latitude of Guthrie's 'Bantu nucleus'. Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth century was to call this southern coast Zingium. After Cosmas, the surviving descriptions of the East African coast are not written in Greek, but in Arabic; Greek-speaking merchants had given way to sea-traders who spoke Arabic, and for them Zingium had become Zanj. Whether Zanj is to be understood as an ethnic or a geographical designation seems to vary with the context in which the name is used; nevertheless, for Mas'udi, a Baghdad geographer of the tenth century, Zanj encompassed the whole known East African coast south of what is now Somalia, i.e. from the present northern limit on the coast of Bantu-speaking Blacks. The inference from these references seems to be, first, that for the early Greek observers, the original 'Azanian' inhabitants of the Indian Coast were not to be distinguished from the peoples they knew on the African shore of the Red Sea, and that therefore they were speakers of Afroasiatic, and most probably Cushitic, languages; and, second, that southwards from Somalia, by the tenth century these Azanians had been replaced by Blacks coming from the south who were presumably ancestors of the modern Bantu-speaking peoples of East Africa."

books.google.ca/books?id=KR0oRd5GMGkC&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false

Based on such historical testimony, we can also conclude that that admixture is not particularly ancient either, but actually appears to be quite recent. This would seem logical given the predominant West Eurasian affinities of today's main Cushitic and Semitic-speaking Horn groups. Had that admixture event(s) taken place, say, several millenia ago, then we would at the very least expect a negligible, trace amount of Eurasian affinities by now, all of these centuries later. After all, it only takes one generation to create mixed offspring, nevermind hundreds. That has always been one of the weakest aspects of the now completely untenable idea that the Eurasian affinities in Horners is due to the hypothetical Out-of-Africa migration(s) of ca. 80,000 years ago.

Note that intrusive, secondary Sub-Saharan admixture has more often than not been part and parcel of the various theories explaining the essentially Hamitic/Mediterranean/Caucasoid origins of Horners. For instance, the biologist John Baker wrote the following in his classic book Race:

"The Aethiopids ('Eastern Hamites' or 'Erythriotes') of Ethiopia and Somaliland are an essentially Europid subrace with some Negrid admixture. Typically these are slender people of medium stature, dolico- or mesocranial; the face is more or less of the Europid form, with rather narrow, prominent nose, there is no prognathism[...] It is not possible to state with confidence which Europid subrace was chiefly responsible for the non-Negrid contribution to this hybrid taxon, and indeed this may well have varied in different local forms. Some authorities lay stress on the predominance of one Europid subrace, others on another. It is probable that there were both Orientalid ('Arab') and Mediterranid (or Proto-Mediterranid) ancestors, and the Orientalid ancestors may perhaps have been hybridized with Armenids, as in so many places they are."

As can be seen, Baker believed that Horners are essentially Caucasoids, but divergent in varying degrees as a consequence of interbreeding with (non-prognathous) Sub-Saharan females. And this is indeed what the genetic data shows, both in terms of general affinities and direction of admixture.

The anthropologist Jean Hiernaux hypothesized almost the exact same thing in his book The People of Africa; only he labeled his Sub-Saharan component "Elongated African" and suggested that that, by contrast, was the original rather than the intrusive population element. Of course, neither genetic nor historical nor linguistic nor archaeological data support that assumption today, almost forty years on. It's the Sub-Saharan component that's clearly intrusive. Hiernaux's work is still valuable in one respect, though, and that is through its identification of significant morphological sub-structure within Horn populations. Based on anthropometric measurements, Hiernaux suggested that, while the northern Somalis closely resembled the Southern Arabs and Moors (Sahrawi), the southern Somalis pulled more toward his "Elongated Africans" (whom he defines prototypically as the Tutsi). This of course is supported by both ethnological and anthropological data, like the dendrogram above or the following:

"Within the Ethiopic group, the Somali belong to the eastern division, and show very few Negroid characteristics as compared with the western division, which is quite notably Negroid. As a result of his very extensive examination of Somali physical types, Puccioni considers that the southern Sab confederacies show a higher degree of Negroid influence, corresponding to their part Negroid origin."

books.google.ca/books?id=h9ctAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Within+the+Ethiopic+group%22&dq=%22Within+the+Ethiopic+group%22&hl=en&ei=z0dgTuG7Icjz0gHq6d35Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA

Given the foregoing, I believe that the relative physical appearance of the mixed offspring of Horn and West Eurasian couples is largely dependent upon whether or not the Horner parent him/herself already pulls more toward West Eurasians (i.e. if he or she is of Hiernaux's "Moorish" variety, like most northern Somalis) or if the Horner parent pulls more toward Sub-Saharan groups (i.e. if he or she is of Hiernaux's "Elongated African" variety). In fact, many times, one can almost tell beforehand which morphological type of Horner the parent in question generally belongs to just by looking at his/her child or children.

The "Moorish" variety tends to produce the well-known generic European phenotype that you mention, like the Somali-Russian model Katja Schekina or the Somali-Danish boy and Eritrean-Serbian woman below:

On the other hand, the "Elongated African" variety tends to produce offspring rather similar to ordinary "Moorish" variety Horners, sometimes with even less refined features (since an intrusive Sub-Saharan element grafted on a Caucasoid base is what produced the unique "Moorish" phenotype to begin with). The Eritrean-White American model Ella Thomas and the Somali-Italian writer Cristina Ali Farah are both good examples of this second type of mixed Horner offspring:

[theleader9]

Noah
if he or she is of Hiernaux's "Moorish" variety, like most northern Somalis

Brother most Somalis all look alike northern or southern besides the minority. If you have 20 pictures you can't tell which geographic region or clan a somali person is from.

[amun]

Noah,

I agree with most of what you said except for the part about Northern Somalis being notably different from Southern Somalis. Many clans in the South such as the Marehan, Ogaden, Dir, and even the Hawiye as a whole have recent origins further North but were driven South by the Somali expansion. We are nothing like Sudan. It is really hard to tell where someone is exactly from in Somalia because there is a great deal of overlap. The Sab Somalis are the only main Southern group that seems to be native to that area. They might be slightly less 'West Eurasian' but that doesn't mean they are intermixed with Bantus (who are completely foreign to this area). It just means they are slightly more East African (in the indigenous sense). We should not distance ourselves from the Sab because they form a significant portion of the Somali population.

Notable Sab leaders:

[amun]

Sept 1, 2011 22:57:15 GMT -5 Noah said:

Indeed, as we also saw in the Bilad al Barbar... Land of the Berbers thread, historic documents attest to the presence in the first decade of the Common Era of a clearly non-Negroid people in the Horn. Only later, during the next decade, do we learn about the presence of a Black African people, after whom the East African coast is then dubbed by the medieval Arabs "Bilad al Zanj" or "Land of the Blacks":

"When the Indian Ocean coast of Africa was first described in writing, in the Greek sailors' guide of about A.D. 100 known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, this coast was called Azania, and no 'Ethiopians', dark-skinned people, were mentioned among its inhabitants. They first appear in the largely fourth-century Geography ascribed to Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, and then only towards the south, probably on the coast of what today is northern Mozambique, i.e. about the latitude of Guthrie's 'Bantu nucleus'. Cosmas Indicopleustes in the sixth century was to call this southern coast Zingium. After Cosmas, the surviving descriptions of the East African coast are not written in Greek, but in Arabic; Greek-speaking merchants had given way to sea-traders who spoke Arabic, and for them Zingium had become Zanj. Whether Zanj is to be understood as an ethnic or a geographical designation seems to vary with the context in which the name is used; nevertheless, for Mas'udi, a Baghdad geographer of the tenth century, Zanj encompassed the whole known East African coast south of what is now Somalia, i.e. from the present northern limit on the coast of Bantu-speaking Blacks. The inference from these references seems to be, first, that for the early Greek observers, the original 'Azanian' inhabitants of the Indian Coast were not to be distinguished from the peoples they knew on the African shore of the Red Sea, and that therefore they were speakers of Afroasiatic, and most probably Cushitic, languages; and, second, that southwards from Somalia, by the tenth century these Azanians had been replaced by Blacks coming from the south who were presumably ancestors of the modern Bantu-speaking peoples of East Africa."

books.google.ca/books?id=KR0oRd5GMGkC&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false

Based on such historical testimony, we can also conclude that that admixture is not particularly ancient either, but actually appears to be quite recent. This would seem logical given the predominant West Eurasian affinities of today's main Cushitic and Semitic-speaking Horn groups. Had that admixture event(s) taken place, say, several millenia ago, then we would at the very least expect a negligible, trace amount of Eurasian affinities by now, all of these centuries later. After all, it only takes one generation to create mixed offspring, nevermind hundreds. That has always been one of the weakest aspects of the now completely untenable idea that the Eurasian affinities in Horners is due to the hypothetical Out-of-Africa migration(s) of ca. 80,000 years ago.

Those historic documents are speaking of the regular Hamitic type Somalis [like the ones I showed above] being present in ancient times, while the intrusive Negroids they mention later on were clearly the Bantu new comers.

Bantu admixture in the Horn of Africa is pretty much absent/extremely negligible, attested by various genetic studies. The indigenous East African ancestry in the Horn comes from a much more ancient group, who was possibly distantly related to the Omotic type of Africans rather than Bantus.

[Noah]

Leader:

I think you have misunderstood what I and Hiernaux mean by "Southern Somalis". By that term, we aren't, for example, referring to the Marehan or the Hawiye clans. Both the Marehan and Hawiye are actually northern Somalis that migrated south pretty recently. In fact, the patriarch of one of the larger Hawiye clans, the Abgal, is buried in the north, as are most other Somali forefathers since that is where ethnic Somalis migrated down from and were initially based at the start of the Common Era (recall the Bilad al-Barbar).

"[Somalis] comprises two main subdivisions, the 'Soomaali' and the 'Sab'. The Sab tribes form an extensive wedge of cultivators between the rivers of Somalia and separate the nomads of northern Somaliland from those of the south. The 'Soomaali', who are numerically superior, despise the 'Sab' for their sedentary way of life, for their mixed origins (Oromo and Negroid admixture is pronounced), and for their mixed genealogies. Nevertheless, Sab are included in the designation 'Soomaali' by outsiders, in much the same way as the inhabitants of the British Isles are frequently indiscriminately referred to as 'English'. Within the Somali nation, Soomaali and Sab are differentiated although there is an increasing tendency for the Soomaali/Sab cleavage to be ignored in the rising tide of Somali nationalism. Urbanized and Westernized Somali maintain that discrimination is 'old-fashioned', that it is contrary to the injunctions of the Prophet, and that it undermines the unity of the Somali people. In practice and actual social relations, however, these ideals are often betrayed, which serves to indicate how deeply engrained the traditional Somali social order is."

books.google.ca/books?id=ra89AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA129#v=onepage&q&f=false

By "Southern Somalis", then, we are strictly referring to the Sab. Hiernaux likens the northern Somali sample to the Moors (dark Hamites of Mauritania) and Arabs, and by contrast likens the Sab to the Tutsi. Here's what he actually writes on the matter. Notice in particular the reference to the main population elements positioned in hierarchical castes, as found in Moorish society. For better or worse, this is a hallmark of Hamitic culture:

"The first case refers to a sample of Moors of southern Mauretania, who are anthropometrically close to the Warsingali Somali and, to a lesser degree, to the Beni Amer and Hadendoa. It is amazing to find such similar people on the west and east coasts of Africa at a latitude where the continent is at its widest. Moor society is highly composite; its ingredients are of Berber, Arab and sub-Saharan origins, variously represented in hierarchical castes. The resemblance of the measured Moors to the Somali probably reflects a similar mixture: an exotic element (from Arabs, Berbers, or both) added to a sub-Saharan one, like the one present in the Somali[...]

The two samples of Somali on which detailed anthropometric data are available show significant differences[...] The small sample of southern Somali soldiers, mostly of Sab descent, measured by Puccioni resemble the Tutsi rather closely. The larger sample of northern Somali belonging to various groups, the best represented being the Warsingali, are much shorter (169 cm) and have a relatively narrower face and nose; apparently they are strongly Arabicized."

[Noah]

Amun:

So you are Somali. For some reason, I thought that you were Ethiopian.

Those historic documents refer to Hamitic people of Egyptian type, the direct descendants of the peoples of Punt. The closest modern approximation to that physical type today is found in Egypt proper, where there hasn't been as much admixture with the indigenous Northeast African component.

In any event, I'm well aware that the Hawiye and most other non-Sab Somalis don't actually originate in southern Somalia (please see above). I have also not advocated alienating the Sab or spoken down on them. Please disabuse yourself of that notion.

Before proceeding further, I think it's important to first define just what exactly is meant by the term "Sab" or its equivalent "Rahanweyn". The term refers to a large clan in southern Somalia that occupies a kind of intermediate social position between the noble northern Somali clans and the southern Bantu groups. The clan itself is actually a motely crew consisting of a really old indigenous nucleus, with more recent Cushitic (Oromo, Somali) and Bantu accretions. This is where the term "Rahanweyn", meaning "Big Crowd", comes from. As such, the gentleman in that photo above, Sheikh Robow of the Al-Shabaab Islamist group, is not so much physically representative of the indigenous nucleus of the Sab (though I'm sure he has such relatives), but leans more toward the recent northern Somali and Oromo additions.

For example, notice the distant position of the Sab sample in the study below vis-a-vis the Somali-Oromo sample, the latter of which lies closest to the general Middle Eastern sample.

I'm well aware that the Sub-Saharan component in the Sab is not Bantu-related. As I wrote, the Sab have a higher proportion of the intrusive "Elongated African" component (Bantus aren't Elongated African). I did not state that the Sab are at their origin Sub-Saharan; I apologize if you got that impression.

The actual origin of the Sab is more complicated, and to tackle it one must delve into prehistory. From the looks of it, they appear to be descendants of the early Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Hamites (the makers of the pre-Bantu expansion Upper Paleolithic Kenya Capsian culture) that interbred with an indigenous Paleo-African population.

I believe it's precisely this now-stabilized admixed component that constitutes the "Elongated African" component that Hiernaux alluded to and which shows up as the misnamed "Cushitic cluster" in Tishkoff's genetic study from two years ago or as the "East African" cluster in Dienekes' Dodecad experiments. This is also why it appears in so many different modern East African groups as an ancestral component i.e. because of its age and the fact that it is a mixture of the first two major population divisions that inhabited the larger East Africa region. This is also why so many modern local, non-Bantu groups like the Maasai trace the bulk of their ancestry to the component since they are almost entirely a stabilized mixture of these two ancestral elements (Paleo-Hamites and Paleo-Africans).

Recall that the Sab are actually believed to have moved in historic times into southern Somalia from the southern Ethiopia/northern Kenya area, not the Horn per se. The former is roughly the location of the prehistoric Kenya Capsian culture (Gamble's Cave, Naivasha) and its derivatives (Mesolithic Elmenteita; Neolithic Nakuru, Makalia and Willey's Kopje). In other words, the Sab were part and parcel of the same group of Afro-Asiatic speakers that directly descended from the Kenya Capsians, by way of the succeeding Elmenteitans.

The latter modern descendant populations include the Cushitic-speaking El Molo of Kenya. Unlike the Sab, the El Molo have been genetically tested (the Sab haven't been tested separately since they are mistakenly assumed to belong to the Somali ethnic group i.e. to be descendants of the Later Proto-Hamitic pastoralists rather than the older Paleo-Hamitic hunter-gatherers). And sure enough, the El Molo carry a mixture of Sub-Saharan and Proto & Paleo-Eurasian maternal lineages. Their Sub-Saharan lineages outnumber the Eurasian ones. Their most common Eurasian lineage is haplogroup I, which about 22% of them possess -- the highest recorded frequency of the clade in any modern population. Haplogroup I is, in turn, associated with Upper Paleolithic Europe, an area that hosted biologically similar populations to the Paleo-Hamites of the contemporaneous Kenya Capsian culture. By contrast, the most common Eurasian lineages in the northern Horn groups (such as haplogroups M1 and R0a) are mostly associated with the Neolithic or even more recent periods. This points to later waves of West Eurasian-affiliated peoples, mainly the Later Proto-Hamites.

What I'm basically saying is that that is what, in all likelihood, the Sab's maternal DNA profile also looks like since they were still a part of the same population as the El Molo at the start of the Common Era or close to it. Their autosomal DNA profile, then, would almost entirely consist of the same indigenous East African component that makes up the overwhelming majority of the El Molo's ancestry.

As members of the Hamitic Union, I think it's important that we not shy away from delving into potentially sensitive areas if we are to make any headway at solving the riddle that is Hamitic ethnogenesis. We must be bold.

[amun]

Thanks for clarifying, Noah. Informative post as always, regarding the anthropometric data, one has to note that the Sab sample set is relatively small and thus could skew the overall difference.

I would also like to point out that many of those Elongated Africans in Central-East Africa are rather a mixture of the Sab-type Hamites and Sudanese-type Nilotes, a good example are the Maasai and Tutsi (although the Tutsi have a Bantu component as well). So I am not sure if they represent the African component of Horners either. I personally think that the non-West Eurasian element of Horners no longer exists in an unadmixed form, all we have are approximations.

[Noah]

Not a problem bro. I agree with you that no single modern population entirely belongs to the non-West Eurasian element in Horners, so it's difficult to pinpoint what particular tribe or tribes are reponsible for its introduction into the various Northeast African Hamitic populations.

The most we can do given the present data is to assert that that authocthonous component is ancient and widespread in the larger East Africa region because it is a stabilized mixture of two of the very first major local population divisions. Namely, Paleo-Hamites and Paleo-Africans.

[theleader9]

Brother Noah lol for some reason i thought that you meant the Hawiye and I completely forgot about the Sab Somali with whom I am quite aware of but yes I agree with everything you said about the elongated Africans.