Genetic flow from Levant to Ethiopia c. 3000BC

[Mark]

Various articles on discoveries last week. From explorator.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47907675/ns/technology_and_science-science/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18526428
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/wtsi-gaa061912.php
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120621130645.htm
http://www.livescience.com/21093-queen-sheba-ethiopian-genetics.html

[Duncan Head]

That's an interesting mix of approaches to the story. At  least they haven't all just reprinted the same press release.

[Patrick Waterson]

Indeed.  They all centre on the same 'genetic flow' starting around 1,000 BC-ish which is roughly when Solomon was flourishing in Israel.  One would of course need a bit more contact that just the King of Israel and the Queen of the South to transmit genes to a population, and funnily enough the timing of this intermixture would be entirely consistent with placing Thutmose III and Egypt's 18th Dynasty Empire with its extensive conquests in Ethiopia and the Near East - and Egypt acting as a focus for population redistribution - in the 1,000-900 BC bracket (just to bring up a point Tim Myall made in Slingshot 281's Guardroom). 

Patrick

[Duncan Head]

"Extensive conquests in Ethiopia"? Surely not. "Aithiopia" in the Greek sense, yes, but the XVIII Dynasty never set foot in modern Ethiopia.

As most of the articles suggest, the genetic work confirms what was long believed on linguistic grounds (since Ge'ez and Amharic are both Semitic languages), namely that there were population movements between Arabia and Ethopia.

What would be intersting from the Q of S viewpoint would be to know if there is any trace of the story in Ethiopia before Christianization.

[Patrick Waterson]

Greek 'Aithiopia' perhaps; the northern conquests of Thutmose III are balanced (on his reliefs) by extensive southern conquests which Breasted rather conservatively limits to the Third Cataract; Herodotus somewhat more generously (II.110) refers to him as the king of both Egypt and Ethiopia and as the only Egyptian monarch who ever ruled Ethiopia, while also handing him control of Arabia (II.102).  This, if correct, puts him in a prime position for promoting, accidentally or otherwise, cultural and genetic cross-assimilation.

Intriguingly enough, in II Chronicles 14.9 we have Asa of Judah fighting Zerah the Ethiopian: a bit early by any count for the Ethiopian Dynasty proper (c.710-663), but viable if 'Zerah' was, say, the son of an Ethiopian princess.

The Queen of the South is a designation used both by Josephus and Jesus to designate 'herself'; whether this counts as pre-Christian I am not sure: the timing, one could argue, does not, but in order for the designation to be thus expressed at that time it would seem that the tradition had to precede the 1st century AD.

Pianhki and his fellow Ethiopian monarchs in the 7th century seem to use their fidelity to Amun rather than any imagined descent from a previous ruler as their claim to the Egyptian throne.  Menelik apologists would presumably consider that Shabaka etc. came from a different family (perhaps true).

Another potentially significant and possibly more far-reaching injection of Levantine genetic material into Ethiopia proper will be familiar to readers of Graham Hancock's The Sign and the Seal: the ancestors of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews, are supposed to have brought the Ark of the Covenant with them and to have retained a significant population and political force into mediaeval times.  As far as I know, anthropologists are still catching up on this one.

Patrick

[Duncan Head]

Intriguingly enough, in II Chronicles 14.9 we have Asa of Judah fighting Zerah the Ethiopian

No, we have Zerah the Kushite. "Kush" is Nubia, modern southern Egypt-northern Sudan. "Ethiopia" is a very poor translation.

The problem is that Greek "Aithiopia" does not mean the same as modern "Ethiopia". The Greek word means either sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, or else more specifically "Kush", "Nubia". Modern Ethiopia, AKA "Abyssinia", is a distant highland region where neither Pharaonic Egyptians nor Greeks penetrated. It did from early times have entirely independent connections via coastal Punt/Eritrea across the Red Sea with southern Arabia, which is what this genetic study seeks to illuminate. When you quote Herodotos talking about "Ethiopia", he quite simply isn't; his "Aithiopia" has another meaning entirely.

The Queen of the South is a designation used both by Josephus and Jesus to designate 'herself'; whether this counts as pre-Christian I am not sure: the timing, one could argue, does not, but in order for the designation to be thus expressed at that time it would seem that the tradition had to precede the 1st century AD.

What I meant was pre-Christianizing evidence from Ethiopia. It seems to me more likely that the whole idea of the Queen of Sheba in Ethiopia is a post-conversion borrowing.

Pianhki and his fellow Ethiopian monarchs in the 7th century seem to use their fidelity to Amun rather than any imagined descent from a previous ruler as their claim to the Egyptian throne.  Menelik apologists would presumably consider that Shabaka etc. came from a different family (perhaps true).

Piankhi and his fellows are not Ethiopian, except in sloppy modern usage; their Kushite homeland is in modern northern Sudan, hundreds of miles from the region in which this genetic study was conducted. They're not just from a different family, they're from a different country.

If the Falasha really are migrants rather than converts, most scholars would I think put their arrival a lot later than either the Queen of Sheba or the genetic changes identified in this study. If they really did turn up as early as the legendary Menelik then yes, several cats would be placed amongst the pigeons.

cheers,
Duncan

[Patrick Waterson]

Not to worry, I do appreciate the difference, even if contemporary sources and 19th century translators did not (even in the 18th century 'Ethiopia' was often used as synecdoche for 'Africa').  The mountain fastnesses of Abyssinia may or may not have felt the tread of Pharaoh's armies (although inscriptions that might confirm any such incursions have yet to be discovered) but the lands adjacent to Ethiopia proper certainly did, and if one could get one's 'genetic input' that far then with time and a bit of diffusion it could make its way further.

Pre-Christianising evidence from Ethiopia for Menelik et al is indeed hard to come by: one ultimately gets into a circular examination of the Kebra Nagast, but notes in passing that the name of the Queen is 'Makeda'.  Interestingly, Hatshepsut's throne name was Makare, and Biblical reference to 'the South' (cf. Daniel 11.40) appears to denote Egypt.  The Kebra Nagast account seems to me to be in the class of the Greek Alexander Romance - built around a real person and real events, but well mangled by storytellers.

The Falashas themselves can be approximately dated by the observations of German evangelist Martin Flad c.1855 in his Falshas of Abyssinia (1869) - I am cribbing this from Graham Hancock, and have not had a chance to check it myself - he dates them to the 7th or 6th century through the pertinent observation that they lacked any knowledge of the Babylonian or Jerusalem Talmud (composed during the Captivity beginning in 587 BC) and although celebrating the old traditional Jewish festivals did not celebrate Purim (developed after 500 BC) and Hanukkah (developed after 164 BC).  Apparently the Falashas used to maintain a written tradition, but unfortunately in AD 1624 Christian Ethiopians with Portuguese backing took the fortress stronghold in which the records were kept and the records were burned rather than let them fall into the hands of 'defilers'.

Hancock hypothesises that the Jews who became the Falashas (or at least their ancestors) left Egypt, and presumably reached Ethiopia, during the 7th century BC - interestingly enough, at about the time of a mass desertion of Egyptian soldiery according to Herodotus II.30.  If the one group left in company with the other and then the proto-Falashas pressed on while the 'Asmach' (deserters) largely stayed put in the location Herodotus ascribes to them, they could have penetrated into Ethiopia in a generation or two.

All of this, interesting though it be, is still a bit late (by at least a couple of centuries) for the genetic studies under discussion.  This suggests either there were additional movements of people in whole or in part during the 1,000-900 BC period or that the timing allowed to each generation in the study is excessive (did it allow for the very early breeding ages of some cultures?).  If the latter, then what seems to be a 10th-century introduction could be a 7th century introduction, which would incidentally diminish any role played by Solomon and the Queen of the South.  If the study's timing is accurate, then the Falasha episode would have been stage two of an already ongoing (or on-and-off-going) process of ethnic and cultural diffusion.

Patrick

[Duncan Head]

I think this is a different study than that referred to in previous posts in this thread, but coming to similar conclusions:

... the first prehistoric genome from Africa: that of Mota, a hunter-gatherer man who lived 4500 years ago in the highlands of Ethiopia. Named for the cave that held the remains, the Mota genome "is an impressive feat," says Hodgson, who was not involved in the work. It "gives our first glimpse into what an African genome looked like prior to many of the recent population movements." And when compared with the genomes of living Africans, it implies something startling. Africa is usually seen as a source of outward migrations, but the genomes suggest a major migration into Africa by farmers from the Middle East, possibly about 3500 years ago.

- from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6257/149.full.pdf

Also:
- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2015/10/07/science.aad2879.full the actual article
- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2015/10/07/science.aad2879.DC1 the supplementary info, methods etc
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34479905 the BBC version

The "possibly about 3500 years ago" date looks a bit vague to me; it can only really be "reaching the Ethiopian highlands after the date of the Mota find c.4500 years ago".

[Patrick Waterson]

The "possibly about 3500 years ago" date looks a bit vague to me; it can only really be "reaching the Ethiopian highlands after the date of the Mota find c.4500 years ago".

That would be a better way to express it.  Time-wise, this would put the influx into a period following the end of the Old Kingdom, though by how much remains open.

[Tim]

By how much also rather depends upon which chronology one is following, long or short...

[Duncan Head]

"Old Kingdom" may be a red herring (as may proximity to the Red Sea), regardless of date; despite the speculated ultimate Near Eastern origins of this DNA, "[t]his new DNA most closely matches that of modern Sardinians and a prehistoric farmer who lived in Germany". So my money's on a movement across the Straits of Gibraltar or via Sicily, and then into Africa by way of the Berber populations. It's only Wikipedia, but:

By 5000 B.C., the populations of North Africa are an amalgamation of Ibero-Maurisian and Capsian stock blended with a more recent intrusion associated with the Neolithic revolution. Out of these populations, the proto-Berber tribes form during the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age.

[Patrick Waterson]

"Old Kingdom" may be a red herring (as may proximity to the Red Sea), regardless of date; despite the speculated ultimate Near Eastern origins of this DNA, "[t]his new DNA most closely matches that of modern Sardinians and a prehistoric farmer who lived in Germany". So my money's on a movement across the Straits of Gibraltar or via Sicily, and then into Africa by way of the Berber populations.

Actually this may tie in with an earlier discussion about megalithic monuments in Western Europe and North Africa.  Hence it may be quite a shrewd bet.

[Patrick Waterson]

It looks as if the whole 'Out of Africa' thing may be hitting a new set of buffers: the case of the Chinese teeth.

[Duncan Head]

Well, it may just mean a change to the dating of the African emigration and to the routes taken. Or:

Liu even argues that the find supports the radical—and minority—view that our species was born in China, not Africa.

A commenter on that story is sceptical:

A Chinese scientist "finds" modern Chinese teeth in a cave, and he just happens to advocate the crackpot notion that modern humans evolved in China?

Have to wonder if Liu studied under Lysenko...

[Patrick Waterson]

It is also intriguing that the find consisted of 'teeth'.  So far, nobody has mentioned any other human parts found at the site.

Liu and the commentator who makes the crack about Lysenko both miss an important point: it may be that humans emerged at various different points on the planet as opposed to all in one continent and we are just beginning to find evidence of this.