In the recent paper on the genetics of Philistines they had good quality DNA from 10 individuals. Some archaeologists have criticized over-generalizing from such a small dataset. Naively I think this is a good caution. But we have many many ancient DNA results from humans now, and I think this naive objection needs to be tamped down some. Additionally, 10 samples in a genomic sense have a lot more information than that “10” might imply.
Genome-wide data is such that you can take one individual, and infer their ancestral lineage and so capture the history of many upstream in the genealogy. Additionally, when it comes to f-4 statistics and what not they used 20,000 markers.
Also, we’ve got some experience now with the “first” individual from given populations, and how representative and informative they were as more data came in. The Loschbour sample was the first of what we later called “Western Hunter-Gatherers” (WHG). Later WHG are all pretty similar to this individual, with only minor differences (the late Pleistocene “Villabruna cluster” prefigured it). The reason that the Loschbour sample worked so well is that human metapopulation dynamics seem to be characterized by rapid range expansions and population turnovers, especially in some regions of northern Eurasia. The genetics of “Cheddar Man” was surprising to no one within the field (actually it would have been a bigger publication if he was not so WHG).
Think of what Ma’lta and the first Neolithic farmers in Europe have taught us, and how little further samples from these cultures told us.
One of the things biologists like to say about humans is that we’re a young species that went through a bottleneck. In fact, there have been serial bottlenecks. That means there’s a lot of homogeneity in many groups across geographies. This doesn’t even take into account endogamy. Representativeness still matters…but the reality is that humans across a huge region don’t vary that much.
The main exceptions seem to be due to cultural barriers. Endogmany in South Asia, religious differences in the Near East, and variance in mode-of-production in Africa can mean that who you sample matters a great deal. The last was clearly operative early in the Holocene (early farmers often did not intermarry with hunter-gatherers), but I doubt the first two were particularly important until very complex literate polities emerged.
A week ago I connected the origins of Islam to genetics. By coincidence, an ancient DNA paper came out yesterday which speaks to particular historical points in the Hebrew Bible.
The ancient Mediterranean port city of Ashkelon, identified as “Philistine” during the Iron Age, underwent a marked cultural change between the Late Bronze and the early Iron Age. It has been long debated whether this change was driven by a substantial movement of people, possibly linked to a larger migration of the so-called “Sea Peoples.” Here, we report genome-wide data of 10 Bronze and Iron Age individuals from Ashkelon. We find that the early Iron Age population was genetically distinct due to a European-related admixture. This genetic signal is no longer detectible in the later Iron Age population. Our results support that a migration event occurred during the Bronze to Iron Age transition in Ashkelon but did not leave a long-lasting genetic signature.
The most likely scenario has long been that the Biblical Philistines were a composition population, made of Aegean folk who mixed with the local Canaanite substrate. These results confirm that.
That might seem revolutionary, but anyone who reads about the history of the Bible knows that all likely or plausible points are contested. Establishing that the Philistines were indeed associated with the migration of Aegean “Sea Peoples” though a genetic connection between them and Southern Europeans at least narrows the window of argumentation.
A bigger issue is one mooted by many Biblical scholars: what were the origins of the Israelites? The standard narrative implies they were exogenous, with Abraham being from Ur (southern Mesopotamia), with a sojourn in Egypt. But most non-fundamentalist scholars believe that the Hebrews emerged organically out of the Canaanites. The relevance of genetics is clear then: at some point in the near future the origins of the people of Judaea will become more clear. My bet is that it does turn out that they’re mostly Canaanite, though I wouldn’t be surprised by some exogenous signal, as one sees with the Philistines, who by the time of genotyping seems to have been heavily Levantine, and eventually were likely absorbed..
A few months ago there was a preprint with an ancient Japanese genome, Jomon genome sheds light on East Asian population history. I read it but didn’t say anything at the time. I read it again, partly because I’m reading a history of Korea where the Wa, the early Japanese, show up to intervene in mainland affairs. This cameo made me think more deeply about what happened in Japan several thousand years ago.
The above genome comes from Honshu, and dates to 2,500 years before the present. And yet it’s quite different from modern Japanese! Here is the abstract:
Anatomical modern humans reached East Asia by >40,000 years ago (kya). However, key questions still remain elusive with regard to the route(s) and the number of wave(s) in the dispersal into East Eurasia. Ancient genomes at the edge of East Eurasia may shed light on the detail picture of peopling to East Eurasia. Here, we analyze the whole-genome sequence of a 2.5 kya individual (IK002) characterized with a typical Jomon culture that started in the Japanese archipelago >16 kya. The phylogenetic analyses support multiple waves of migration, with IK002 forming a lineage basal to the rest of the ancient/present-day East Eurasians examined, likely to represent some of the earliest-wave migrants who went north toward East Asia from Southeast Asia. Furthermore, IK002 has the extra genetic affinity with the indigenous Taiwan aborigines, which may support a coastal route of the Jomon-ancestry migration from Southeast Asia to the Japanese archipelago. This study highlight the power of ancient genomics with the isolated population to provide new insights into complex history in East Eurasia.
Matt observes that this means the expansion of agriculture into Southeast Asia occurred through a few pulses in rapid succession, rather than gradually over time, as seems likely the case in Europe and South Asia (“Early European Farmers” to Corded Ware, or Iranian agriculturalists to Central Asian agro-pastoralists). Austro-Asiatic speaking groups pushed out from the highlands of southern China 4-4,500 years ago. Meanwhile, people from further north seem to have pushed into the uplands of the western portion of upland Southeast Asia 500 to 1,000 years after this. Further east, Austronesians were sweeping along the coast and expanding into the maritime fringe.
But I am not intending to talk about Southeast Asia. Rather, I want to focus on China. Or perhaps more precisely the region and cultures that became China. Both the above papers suggest that the diversification of the Sino-Tibetan languages occurred around ~7,000 years ago. And, that they began expanding from the zone of inland China, the upper Yellow River basin, from the area occupied by the Yangshao culture. This would explain some peculiar genetic facts. First, the northern affinities of Tibeto-Burman groups in northeast India and in Burma itself (which might otherwise require later Tai migrations) mentioned above. But second, about ten years ago when the early work on EPAS1 and high altitude adaptation was done on Tibetans, their genetic relatedness to Han Chinese was surprisingly close! In fact, some estimate of divergence put it as recently as 3,000 years before the present (I think this was an underestimate, but it gets at the qualitative result).
The figure above is from The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years. If you had seen something like this five years ago, you’d be gobsmacked. But today this is not atypical, especially in light of the fact that Spain seems to harbor many good sites in relation to the preservation of ancient DNA. In the figure above you see an excellent representation of the different streams of ancestry and settlement within Spain over the last 8,000 years. You can conclude from it, for example, that only a small proportion of the ancestry of modern Spaniards derives from people who were residents of the peninsula during the Pleistocene. Similarly, you can also conclude that a minority, though non-trivial, proportion of the ancestry of modern-day Spaniards derives from people who arrived during Classical Antiquity and the Moorish period.
As you know, in the fact-checking process I was sent more than 100 statements of which a very high proportion (more than half) were incorrect. For example, as I mentioned to you in my letter of January 7, 20 of 49 statements presented to me for review on January 2 were incorrect, and 27 of the 36 statements presented to me for review on January 5 were incorrect. The high rate of errors was concerning as it suggested that the narrative based on them might not be supported by a solid set of facts. While a substantial number of these incorrect statements were removed through your fact-checking process, some errors got through, and I am therefore now requesting formal corrections of the following 5 errors that meaningfully affect the article, so it is important to set the record straight on them. (I have also identified additional errors, but those are for the most part smaller, so I am not requesting corrections in those cases.)
One of the frustrating aspects of The New York Magazine piece is that I have read probably read most of the Reich lab’s papers over the last 5 years or so (perhaps earlier), soI knew which factual points were false or exaggerations, but I didn’t want to highlight them incessantly because people would get lost in the muddle of detail. For example, in relation to this assertion:
About 5,000 years ago, a “relatively sudden” mass migration of nomadic herders from the east — the steppes of eastern Ukraine and southern Russia — swept in and almost entirely replaced the continent’s existing communities of hunter-gatherers and early farmers.
The figure from Haak et al. 2015 immediately came to mind. It literally rejects the characterization in a quick and simple figure (the population that purportedly “entirely replaced” is green). Obviously, the figure does not show what the piece claims Reich believes, and it is not credible that he would assert something that is refuted by the papers his own lab publishes. If you had read this area you would know all this, but even population geneticists who are not immersed in the human ancient DNA literature likely would not pick up on this. The sample size objection was in a similar class.
Here’s what I’m going to leave you if you are an outsider: if the author misrepresents so many details, how much should you trust them in broad strokes?
The piece was not reportage. It was rhetoric. Sophistry.
Update: David Reich asks for five corrections to the piece in The New York Times Magazine piece.
Didn’t mean to post so much about that crappy piece in The New York Tines Magazine. But there’s so much tendentious crap in it. That being said, I am probably not going to post much more on this, because David Reich’s response is up:
Letter in response to Jan. 17 article in The New York Times
January 19, 2019
To the Editor:
Gideon Lewis-Kraus (Jan. 17) profiles the nascent field of ancient DNA, which in the last few years has contributed to a transformation in our understanding of the deep human past. His article touches on important issues that we, as a field, have yet to deal with fully: including how to handle ancient remains ethically and in a way that preserves them for future generations; how geneticists and archaeologists can work in equal partnerships that reflect true respect for the insights of different disciplines; and how ancient DNA technology, which at present is applied efficiently only in large labs, can be made accessible to a wider group of scholars.
But Lewis-Kraus misunderstands several basic issues. First, he suggests that competition to publish is so extreme that standards become relaxed. As evidence, he cites a paper by my lab that was accepted on appeal after initial rejection, and another that was reviewed rapidly. In fact, mechanisms for appeal and expedited review when journals feel they are warranted are signs of healthy science, and both processes were carried out rigorously.
Second, he contends that ancient DNA specialists favor simplistic and sweeping claims. As evidence, he suggests that in 2015 I argued that the population of Europe was “almost entirely” replaced by people from the Eastern European Steppe. On the contrary, the paper he references and indeed my whole body of work argues for complex mixture, not simple replacement. Lewis-Kraus also suggests that I claimed that our first study of the people of the Pacific island chain of Vanuatu “conclusively demonstrated” no Papuan ancestry. But the paper in question was crystal-clear that these people could have had some Papuan ancestry – and indeed, to support his claim, Lewis-Kraus could only cite his own notes from an interview I gave him long after I had published a second paper proving that there was indeed a small proportion of Papuan ancestry.
Lewis-Kraus also suggests that I use small sample sizes to make unjustifiable sweeping claims. In fact, small sample sizes can be definitive when they yield results that are incompatible with prevailing theories, as when my colleagues and I described two samples that proved the existence of the Denisovans, a previously undocumented archaic human population. In my papers, I am careful to only make claims that can be supported by the data I have. In small-sample size studies, I emphasize that more samples are needed to flesh out the details of the initial findings. A major focus of my lab is generating the large data sets needed to do this.
Lewis-Kraus’s critiques are based on incomplete facts and largely anonymous sources whose motivations are impossible to assess. Curiously, he did not ask me about the great majority of his concerns. Had he done so, the evidence underlying his thesis that my work is “indistinguishable from the racialized notions of the swashbuckling imperial era” would have fallen apart. The truth, and the main theme of my 2018 bookWho We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, is exactly the opposite – namely, that ancient DNA findings have rendered racist and colonialist narratives untenable by showing that no human population is “pure” or unmixed. It is incumbent on scientists to avoid advocating for simplistic theories, and instead to pay attention to all available facts and come to nuanced conclusions. The same holds true for journalists reporting on science.
David Reich Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Boston, Massachusetts
There is a very long piece in The New York Times Magazine, Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?. It’s the talk of DNA-Twitter for obvious reasons. The very fact that you have a long piece in The New York Times Magazine on this topic means that David Reich is almost certainly going to made into something of a villain. The reason I say this is that these sort of narratives pitched to a general audience have to exhibit novelistic drama and plot, and so there are “spots” preexistent for both antagonists and protagonists. If the writer doesn’t create that narrative, the piece would probably never see the light of day. Who would read it?
So before the first pixel loaded, I knew:
1) David Reich was going to be the antagonist 2) And indigenous people, along with supporting archaeologists were going to be protagonists
This does not speak to whether this is “true” or not. It is simply how it was going to work out if the piece was ever going to be published because those are the elements of a story that would appeal to readers of The New York Times. This is a product strongly shaped by consumer demand.
One thing I want to address is a critique, expressed by some academics in the piece, that researchers in ancient DNA do not have the number of samples to make the generalizations that they make. This seems reasonable on the face of it, but one thing you have to consider is that when you obtain an individual’s DNA you get a window onto their whole pedigree. A single individual is actually a pedigree if you have its genome. A genome provides an enormous amount of data. It is an endpoint of a historical process of sexual reproduction that extends back many generations. This is how you can use a single whole genome to infer whole population histories. One of the consequences of humans being “evolutionarily young” is that we all bear the stamp of some common processes and events.
From a naive perspective, you can say things like “how do you know this person is related to other people in the area?” And taken in the aggregate there are cases where unrepresentative individuals will yield results that mislead researchers. But on the whole over the last decade or so these groups have developed certain intuitions and guidelines, and have been rather good at making inferences based on a few data rich individuals. They make mistakes. But most objections about the nature of the data are really unfounded (albeit, widespread).
Many of the aspects of the piece do ring true. There are only a few huge laboratories in the ancient DNA space which tend to hoover up samples and collaborators. I have a suspicion I know who this is: ‘One geneticist compared competing with the big labs to battling an entire navy ‘with a little dinghy, armed with a small knife.”‘ For Holocene period analysis, the two big players are the Reich group and that of Eske Willerslev (Johannes Krause is going to make a splash with Late Antiquity). Though Eske’s group is mentioned offhand, it is curious that he himself is not mentioned at all.
Young Eske
In many ways, Eske is a much more colorful figure than Reich, and many of the issues applicable to the work of the latter and his relationships with indigenous peoples and archaeologists apply to the former. But in the United States David Reich is a brand name to the general public that Eske is not, and there can be only one devil in the underworld. But from a narrative perspective, Reich presents less raw material. He is a soft-spoken and delicately built vegetarian computational biologist. Eske Willerslev is the scion of Vikings whose background is in fieldwork as an anthropologist. His autobiography, written in Danish, is apparently very colorful!
Over the last few days I’ve been looking at genetic data related to the Middle East, and as part of that process, I added some Ethiopian samples (in particular, Beta Israel). Which has brought me to thinking about the issue of the origins of the Ethiopians. In 2012 Pagani et al. published a paper which concluded modern Ethiopian peoples by and large emerged out of an admixture event that occurred around ~3,000 years ago. The Sub-Saharan African ancestors of Ethiopians seem to be most similar to the peoples of Sudan. The dating of this admixture is really recent historically. In fact Homer mentions Ethiopians, which suggests that people in the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean may have had some awareness of various populations in this region while the mixing between different ancestral streams was occurring at that very moment (recall most admixture datings pick up the last signals, not earlier ones).
Pagani and those working with him published follow-up paper which indicated that the Eurasian ancestry in Ethiopians is most similar to that in Egypt and the Levant, and not to that in southern Arabia (in particular, Yemen). Their method broke down “tracts” of Eurasian ancestry, and compared affinities segment-by-segment. This is curious because genome-wide methods (e.g., Admixture, Treemix) always indicate that the Eurasian affinity of Ethiopians are with Yemenis. Seeing as how Yemen is literally across the Red Sea, this is reasonable. Pagani et al. suggest that the Yemeni affinity is due to Ethiopian gene-flow into Yemen (the two regions are historically bound together through conquests, etc.).
To make a long story short, I’m not totally convinced by this analysis. Over the past few years, we have more information on the genesis of the East African genetic landscape. First, an ancient genome from Mota in the Ethiopian highlands dated to 4,500 years ago did not have Eurasian admixture. This confirms Pagani et al.’s supposition of a relatively recent admixture event in the Ethiopian highlands. Skoglund et al. 2017 reported on ancient DNA from a Tanzanian pastoralist dating to 3,100 years before the present. This individual’s Eurasian ancestry (~40 percent) is similar to that of pre-pottery Neolithic Levantines. In other words, they lack genetic affinity with farmers from the eastern regions of the Near East. In contrast, Skoglund et al. report that modern Somalis have about ~15 percent of their ancestry from these eastern (“Iranian”) farmers, as well as the Levantine ancestry.
The data seem to be pointing to the fact that the emergence of the genetic patterns in the “Horn of Africa” were likely complex, and occurred through multiple waves of interaction and migration. As the map above makes clears there are two major branches of the Afro-Asiatic language families present in Ethiopia and Somalia, Semitic and Cushitic. The presence of Arabic to the north and west is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Nubian languages were Nilo-Saharan, while the language of ancient Egypt was a separate branch of Afro-Asiatic from Cushitic and Semitic.
The ancient languages of Yemen are part of the same “South Semitic” family as the Ethiopian Semitic languages. Though this may have been cultural diffusion, it does suggest that the genetic signal of connection points to a real phenomenon in terms of migration. Yemenite Jews and many Yemeni non-Jews do not have very much Sub-Saharan African ancestry, suggesting to me that before the rise of Islam most of the gene-flow was from southern Arabia to Ethiopia. A dynamic which reversed with Islam, as a substantial minority of the ancestry of most Yemenis is now Sub-Saharan African.
This does not account for the Cushitic languages. It seems that the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic cultures, of whom the Tanzanian pastoralist in Skoglund et al. was a representative, spoke Cushitic languages. This would mean that the languages of the largest number of Ethiopians, and that of Somalia, is that of the earliest Eurasian migrants into much of Sub-Saharan East Africa. The “Iranian farmer” ancestry in modern Somalis indicates long-term contacts with later migrants, possibly Semitic-speaking populations. Only in the highlands of northern Ethiopia did Semitic languages overtake Cushitic ones. Meanwhile in much of East Africa Cushitic gave way to other languages, often from the Nilo-Saharan family.
There is the broader question of where Afro-Asiatic languages come from. The diversity of languages in Ethiopia have suggested to some that one should look in Africa. I think that Ethiopia’s diversity is like that of the Caucasus: an artifact of rugged mountainous terrain. Rather, the existence of a very distinct Egyptian language 5,000 years ago quite different from contemporaneous Semitic Akkadian, suggests that the roots of this language family are quite old. I suspect that Semitic was intrusive to Ethiopia from Yemen, and that Cushitic became dominant in the period after the Mota individual flourished, and probably arrived from the north. Both the affinities with Levant populations and Yemenis make sense in this light. Much stronger genome-wide affinities with Yemenis could be because of the Ethiopian admixture into Yemen at some basal level quite early in history.
Update: The always well informed “Lank” leaves this comment:
Several problems with this. The Somali model you are referring to models them as a mixture of the 3100 ybp Tanzanian pastoralist, modern Sudanese Dinka, and Iranian farmers. This is unrealistic for several reasons, which could explain the strange 15% Iran-related ancestry that would imply very significant Semitic ancestry in Somalis, since early Semites themselves were mostly not of Iran-related ancestry as far as we know.
Analyses of the 3100 YBP Tanzanian pastoralist’s raw data, e.g. using David’s G25, reveal her to be very similar to Somalis. She can actually be modeled as ~90% Somali, with admixture related to East/South African hunter-gatherers. This is plausible as hunter-gatherers were the natives of the Rift Valley, and mixed with the proto-South Cushites of the Savannah Pastoralist culture represented by this sample. We see this in modern South Cushitic Tanzanian Iraqw (and ‘Nilo-Hamites’ like the Datog, of mostly Cushitic ancestry and cultural affinity) as well, who have very significant mtDNA related to the native hunter-gatherers of the Rift Valley. Much more than the currently more numerous Bantus, who have arrived more recently, South Cushites have mixed with hunter-gatherers. So using admixed early South Cushites like the Tanzanian to model Somalis, who despite being a modern population are actually fairly similar to pre-proto-South Cushites, may be what results in the strange model. Other analyses show that Iran/CHG-related ancestry in Somalis, if present, is very low. The raw data is out there if you want to try the models yourself.
Mota is a highly interesting sample, but not relevant for dating the admixture in early Cushites. He was found in remote southwestern Ethiopia, not really a stronghold of Cushites even today. The African component in Somalis (and most of the SSA in Cushitic/Semitic Ethiopians) is more closely related to the Sudanese, not the Omotic-speaking groups, who we now know tend to have high levels of ancestry related to Mota (other than Omotic groups like the Wolayta living closer to Cushitic/Semitic groups).
The recent 3 kya admixture model for the majority of the Eurasian admixture in Cushitic/Semitic populations does not hold up to scrutiny. The predominant overall ancestry as well as Eurasian admixture levels of the Tanzanian 3100 YBP sample is actually very similar to Somalis, with some local admixture. Finding this sample resembling modern Cushites all the way in Tanzania supports that its admixture traces back to the very earliest Cushites, who are certainly older than 3000 years.
…Here, we report 34 ancient genome sequences, including two from fragmented milk teeth found at the ~31.6 thousand-year-old (kya) Yana RHS site, the earliest and northernmost Pleistocene human remains found. These genomes reveal complex patterns of past population admixture and replacement events throughout northeastern Siberia, with evidence for at least three large-scale human migrations into the region. The first inhabitants, a previously unknown population of “Ancient North Siberians” (ANS), represented by Yana RHS, diverged ~38 kya from Western Eurasians, soon after the latter split from East Asians. Between 20 and 11 kya, the ANS population was largely replaced by peoples with ancestry from East Asia, giving rise to ancestral Native Americans and “Ancient Paleosiberians” (AP), represented by a 9.8 kya skeleton from Kolyma River. AP are closely related to the Siberian ancestors of Native Americans, and ancestral to contemporary communities such as Koryaks and Itelmen. Paleoclimatic modelling shows evidence for a refuge during the last glacial maximum (LGM) in southeastern Beringia, suggesting Beringia as a possible location for the admixture forming both ancestral Native Americans and AP. Between 11 and 4 kya, AP were in turn largely replaced by another group of peoples with ancestry from East Asia, the “Neosiberians” from which many contemporary Siberians derive. We detect additional gene flow events in both directions across the Bering Strait during this time, influencing the genetic composition of Inuit, as well as Na Dene-speaking Northern Native Americans, whose Siberian-related ancestry components is closely related to AP. Our analyses reveal that the population history of northeastern Siberia was highly dynamic, starting in the Late Pleistocene and continuing well into the Late Holocene. The pattern observed in northeastern Siberia, with earlier, once widespread populations being replaced by distinct peoples, seems to have taken place across northern Eurasia, as far west as Scandinavia.
The preprint is very interesting and thorough, and the supplements are well over 100 pages. I read the genetics and linguistics portions. They make for some deep reading, and I really regret making fun of Iosif Lazaridis’ fondness for acronyms now.
I will make some cursory and general observations. First, the authors got really high coverage (so high quality) genomes from the Yana RS site. Notice that they’re doing more data-intense analytic methods. Second, they did not find any population with the affinities to Australo-Melanesian that several research groups have found among some Amazonians. Likely they are hiding somewhere…but the ancient DNA sampling is getting pretty good. We’re missing something. Third, I am not sure what to think about the very rapid bifurcation of lineages we’re seeing around ~40,000 years ago.
The ANS population, ancestral by and large to ANE, seems to be about ~75% West Eurasian (without much Basal Eurasian) and ~25% East Eurasian. Or at least that’s one model. Did they then absorb other peoples? Or, was there an ancient population structure in the primal ur-human horde pushing out of the Near East? That is, are the “West Eurasians” and “East Eurasians” simply the descendants of original human tribes venturing out of Africa ~50,000 years ago? Also, rather than discrete West Eurasian and East Eurasian components, perhaps there was a genetic cline where the proto-ANS occupied a position closer to the former, as opposed to some later pulse admixture?
Without more ancient DNA we probably won’t be able to resolve the various alternative models.
In the recent paper on the genetics of Philistines they had good quality DNA from 10 individuals. Some archaeologists have criticized over-generalizing from such a small dataset. Naively I think this is a good caution. But we have many many ancient DNA results from humans now, and I think this naive objection needs to be tamped down some. Additionally, 10 samples in a genomic sense have a lot more information than that “10” might imply.
Many of the aspects of the piece do ring true. There are only a few huge laboratories in the ancient DNA space which tend to hoover up samples and collaborators. I have a suspicion I know who this is: ‘One geneticist compared competing with the big labs to battling an entire navy ‘with a little dinghy, armed with a small knife.”‘ For Holocene period analysis, the two big players are the Reich group and that of Eske Willerslev (Johannes Krause is going to make a splash with Late Antiquity). Though Eske’s group is mentioned offhand, it is curious that he himself is not mentioned at all.
The data seem to be pointing to the fact that the emergence of the genetic patterns in the “Horn of Africa” were likely complex, and occurred through multiple waves of interaction and migration. As the map above makes clears there are two major branches of the Afro-Asiatic language families present in Ethiopia and Somalia, Semitic and Cushitic. The presence of Arabic to the north and west is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Nubian languages were Nilo-Saharan, while the language of ancient Egypt was a separate branch of Afro-Asiatic from Cushitic and Semitic.
