Leiterband ceramics and other stray bits of info

More archaeological work in Lower Wadi Howar

A field report I found while looking for info on Leiterband pottery. Most usable quotes for me..

Leiterbandmotifs are the predominant decorative pattern of the earliest pastoral phase of Middle Wadi Howar, but also occur further west in the Chad,

 Leiterbandmotifs, which suggest a date in the fourth or third millennium BC

From a second pdf studying the same area (more interesting than the one above):

On the basis of 15 radiocarbon samples, the Leiterband complex dates chiefly between 5200 and 4000 14C yr

And the sequence goes in Wadi Howar… dotted wavy line (Holocene hunter gatherers) Laqiya (later hunter gatherers), then Leiterband (pastoralist). The oldest Leiterband marked is just a bit younger than 6,000 BP.

The only thing that troubles me mildly is that there is no mention of ovicaprines at the Leiterband sites. Lots of cattle though, and microliths that were probably used to bleed them. However a little digging tells me that ovicaprines were present in 5,500 BP at Al Kadada (which was founded about 6,000 BP), so the animals would have been known to the Leiterband people, just not herded by them. Possibly the lack of ovicaprines was due to the lusher conditions in the Wadi at the time that favoured cattle.

 And another pdf, Aridity, Change and Conflict in Africa, has more information: it seems that small livestock were a slightly later addition (behind by a few hundred years into Northern Sudan).

A look at the geology of the area explains why the Westward migration – Wadi Howar provides a route from the Nile to the West that would still have had water in the Leiterband era.

The development of the pottery design styles in the Wadi Howar region which dates the Leiterband transition to 6,000 BP. This one has the best info on the ceramics and their manufacture .

Well, we have an earliest date of 6,000 BP for the expansion of proto Chadic speakers West along Wadi Howar. So a Neolithic culture is strongly associated with Chadic speakers, which IMO adds more weight to a neolithic date for the expansion of v88 into Africa and it’s ‘marriage’ to L3f3.

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Eurasian Y chromosome R1b in Africa.

Human Y chromosome haplogroup R-V88: a paternal genetic record of early mid Holocene trans-Saharan connections and the spread of Chadic languages

Fulvio Cruciani et al.

Abstract

Although human Y chromosomes belonging to haplogroup R1b are quite rare in Africa, being found mainly in Asia and Europe, a group of chromosomes within the paragroup R-P25* are found concentrated in the central-western part of the African continent, where they can be detected at frequencies as high as 95%. Phylogenetic evidence and coalescence time estimates suggest that R-P25* chromosomes (or their phylogenetic ancestor) may have been carried to Africa by an Asia-to-Africa back migration in prehistoric times. Here, we describe six new mutations that define the relationships among the African R-P25* Y chromosomes and between these African chromosomes and earlier reported R-P25 Eurasian sub-lineages. The incorporation of these new mutations into a phylogeny of the R1b haplogroup led to the identification of a new clade (R1b1a or R-V88) encompassing all the African R-P25* and about half of the few European/west Asian R-P25* chromosomes. A worldwide phylogeographic analysis of the R1b haplogroup provided strong support to the Asia-to-Africa back-migration hypothesis. The analysis of the distribution of the R-V88 haplogroup in >1800 males from 69 African populations revealed a striking genetic contiguity between the Chadic-speaking peoples from the central Sahel and several other Afroasiatic-speaking groups from North Africa. The R-V88 coalescence time was estimated at 9200–5600 kya, in the early mid Holocene. We suggest that R-V88 is a paternal genetic record of the proposed mid-Holocene migration of proto-Chadic Afroasiatic speakers through the Central Sahara into the Lake Chad Basin, and geomorphological evidence is consistent with this view.

I haven’t had a look at the full text for this yet, but relevant to this is the mt DNA study of Chadic speakers which showed a passage from East Africa (somewhere to the West of the Nile in the Sudan is my guess, it’s the only place the v88 and L3f3 would meet up).

 A date ~8,000 YBP was estimated for the L3f3 sub-haplogroup, which is in good agreement with the supposed migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists and their linguistic differentiation from other Afro-Asiatic groups of East Africa.

Which isn’t inconsistent with the date for V88 proposed at 9,200-5,600 years, and is also a very close match for the arrival of the Neolithic in Africa.

 Just a brief  note on the mt DNA  study: the only Afro-Asiatic speaking group that the Chadic speakers plot closely to is Cushitic, which will probably make Blench happy, as he claims Chadic speakers are a split-off from Cushitic speaking pastoralists. It’s fairly obvious that the male line of Chadic speakers followed a path into Africa via the Sinai, then down the West bank of the Nile and then struck out West to Lake Chad, acquiring wives as they went. The only issue is the exact date. Holocene or Neolithic? Whatever the exact date, this brings the argument for an Asian origin for Afro-Asiatic out again, as (from the DNA here) the odds are 50% that it followed the male line in from Asia. I would like to comment that Chadic has cognates for sheep and goats that look like they share a root with Cushitic and Egyptian, which would at least date proto Chadic to the Neolithic, making the mt DNA date of 8,000 more likely to be close to the actual date for V88 to enter Africa.

Migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists within Africa based on population structure of Chad Basin and phylogeography of mitochondrial L3f haplogroup

Migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists within Africa based on population structure of Chad Basin and phylogeography of mitochondrial L3f haplogroup

Chad Basin, lying within the bidirectional corridor of African Sahel, is one of the most populated places in Sub-Saharan Africa today. The origin of its settlement appears connected with Holocene climatic ameliorations (aquatic resources) that started ~10,000 years before present (YBP). Although both Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo language families are encountered here, the most diversified group is the Chadic branch belonging to the Afro-Asiatic language phylum. In this article, we investigate the proposed ancient migration of Chadic pastoralists from Eastern Africa based on linguistic data and test for genetic traces of this migration in extant Chadic speaking populations.

Results
We performed whole mitochondrial genome sequencing of 16 L3f haplotypes, focused on clade L3f3 that occurs almost exclusively in Chadic speaking people living in the Chad Basin. These data supported the reconstruction of a L3f phylogenetic tree and calculation of times to the most recent common ancestor for all internal clades. A date ~8,000 YBP was estimated for the L3f3 sub-haplogroup, which is in good agreement with the supposed migration of Chadic speaking pastoralists and their linguistic differentiation from other Afro-Asiatic groups of East Africa. As a whole, the Afro-Asiatic language family presents low population structure, as 92.4% of mtDNA variation is found within populations and only 3.4% of variation can be attributed to diversity among language branches. The Chadic speaking populations form a relatively homogenous cluster, exhibiting lower diversification than the other Afro-Asiatic branches (Berber, Semitic and Cushitic).

Conclusions
The results of our study support an East African origin of mitochondrial L3f3 clade that is present almost exclusively within Chadic speaking people living in Chad Basin. Whole genome sequence-based dates show that the ancestral haplogroup L3f must have emerged soon after the Out-of-Africa migration (around 57,100 ± 9,400 YBP), but the “Chadic” L3f3 clade has much less internal variation, suggesting an expansion during the Holocene period about 8,000 ± 2,500 YBP. This time period in the Chad Basin is known to have been particularly favourable for the expansion of pastoralists coming from northeastern Africa, as suggested by archaeological, linguistic and climatic data.

Thank you for posting this Igbo. I do feel obliged to point out an impossibility in the text..

According to linguistic analyses of Afro-Asiatic branches, the common ancestors of extant Chadic and Cushitic peoples inhabited East or Northeast Africa ~7,000-8,000 years before present

Because for various reasons to do with goats and sheep there’s no way Cushitic is older than 5,500 BP. The evidence does speak to Chadic being a younger arrival in the area. Is the R1b associated with it from the North?

Another interesting observation (I’ve being trying to get hold of come Chadic Mt DNA) is the amount of L3 in the area. I suspect these are the surviving remnants of the North African L3 branches that got wiped out by the Eurasian back migrations across the Maghreb about 30-35k ago. I shall have another read of this later when my kids aren’t bugging me so much. Sigh.

Mitochondrial DNA of Chadic speaking peoples

mtDNA sequences of Chadic-speaking populations from northern Cameroon suggest their affinities with eastern Africa.

 No mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from Chadic-speaking peoples have yet been reported, even though these populations inhabit a vast territory from eastern Nigeria to central Chad. This paper deals with the mtDNA sequences of four Central Chadic populations (Hide, Kotoko, Mafa and Masa) from northern Cameroon, biological samples from which were collected during anthropological research in the area of their homeland. OBJECTIVE: The main goals of this article are to report new mtDNA sequences of Chadic-speaking populations, to analyse their genetic diversity and to establish their relationships within the peri-Saharan area in respect of geography and languages. SUBJECT AND METHODS: The analyses are based on 104 mtDNA haplotypes, which can be localized into four different areas of northern Cameroon. Data collection was based on a strict geographical sampling strategy; the ethnonyms are retained here only for comparative purposes.

 RESULTS: None of the examined Chadic populations displays a departure from the normal mismatch distribution pattern, and the null hypothesis of the expansion event cannot be rejected. Analyses of molecular variance and F(ST) genetic distances revealed that the Chadic-speaking groups of northern Cameroon share more similarities with the populations of the Upper and Middle Nile Valley and East Africa than with populations from Central Africa. The results show geographical clustering to be more important than the correlation of linguistic affiliations with molecular genetic data.

CONCLUSION: The observation that the Chadic group reveals some affinities to East Africans is extremely surprising giving the present-day geographical distance (around 2000 km) between them. These observations complement recent linguistic and archaeological findings, which consider the Chadic branch in the Afro-Asiatic phylum to be of eastern origin. A continuous, well-defined, geographic sampling strategy of the different genetic polymorphisms of the native populations of sub-Saharan Africa is further needed as the only way of understanding the differentiation of the mtDNA sequences at a micro-regional scale.

For a location, Chadic speaking people range across from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon.