Haplogroup E is the most prevalent among Africans and links together Ethiopians, West Africans and South Africans

.

Afrocentric critic Mary Lefkowitz says the Egypt was peopled by people from sub-Saharan Africa, not 'Caucasoid" invaders from the north.

"Recent work on skeletons and DNA suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North. See Bruce G. Trigger, "The Rise of Civilization in Egypt," Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol I, pp 489-90; S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54."
(Mary Lefkotitz (1997). Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. Basic Books. pg 242)

In Black Athena Revisited, Lefkowitz finds similarity between Egyptians and Sudanics and recommends the work of conservative anthropologist Nancy Lovell for more research on the subject.

Quote:
"not surprisingly, the Egyptian skulls were not very distance from the Jebel Moya [a Neolithic site in the southern Sudan] skulls, but were much more distance from all others, including those from West Africa. Such a study suggests a closer genetic affinity between peoples in Egypt and the northern Sudan, which were close geographically and are known to have had considerable cultural contact throughout prehistory and pharaonic history... Clearly more analyses of the physical remains of ancient Egyptians need to be done using current techniques, such as those of Nancy Lovell at the University of Alberta is using in her work.."
(- Mary Lefkowitz, "Black Athena Revisted. pp. 105-106)

Lefkowitz cites Keita 1993 in Not Out of Africa. Here is Keita on the Jebel Moya studies:
"Overall, when the Egyptian crania are evaluated in a Near Eastern (Lachish) versus African (Kerma, Jebel Moya, Ashanti) context) the affinity is with the Africans. The Sudan and Palestine are the most appropriate comparative regions which would have 'donated' people, along with the Sahara and Maghreb. Archaeology validates looking to these regions for population flow (see Hassan 1988)... Egyptian groups showed less overall affinity to Palestinian and Byzantine remains than to other African series, especially Sudanese." 
S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54


Here is the work of the anthropologist so strongly recommended by Lefkowitz, Nancy Lovell:
"There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa.. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas." (Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999) pp 328-332)

and

"must be placed in the context of hypotheses informed by archaeological, linguistic, geographic and other data. In such contexts, the physical anthropological evidence indicates that early Nile Valley populations can be identified as part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation. This variation represents the short and long term effects of evolutionary forces, such as gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection, influenced by culture and geography." ("Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999). pp 328-332)


The same Nancy Lovell recommended by Lefkowitz studied dental traits among some high status persons of the key Egyptian Naqada group and found that they resembled the peoples of Nubia.

"A biological affinities study based on frequencies of cranial nonmetric traits in skeletal samples from three cemeteries at Predynastic Naqada, Egypt, confirms the results of a recent nonmetric dental morphological analysis. Both cranial and dental traits analyses indicate that the individuals buried in a cemetery characterized archaeologically as high status are significantly different from individuals buried in two other, apparently non-elite cemeteries and that the non-elite samples are not significantly different from each other. A comparison with neighboring Nile Valley skeletal samples suggests that the high status cemetery represents an endogamous ruling or elite segment of the local population at Naqada, which is more closely related to populations in northern Nubia than to neighboring populations in southern Egypt."
(T. Prowse, and N. Lovell "Concordance of cranial and dental morphological traits and evidence for endogamy in ancient Egypt". American journal of physical anthropology. 1996, vol. 101, no2, pp. 237-246 (2 p.1/4)

Haplogrup M-1

"In Africa, haplogroup M1 has supra-equatorial distribution. As previously reported its highest frequencies and diversities are found in Ethiopia in particular and in East Africa in general. Two appreciable gradients exist. Frequencies significantly diminished from East to West and also going South to sub-Saharan areas. M1 is not uncommon in the Mediterranean basin showing a peak in the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is rare in continental Europe. Although in low frequencies, its presence in the Middle East has been well established from the South of the Arabian Peninsula to Anatolia and from the Levant to Iran."

Elsewhere...

"As an outgroup of the M1 genomic phylogenetic tree we used a published Indian M30 complete sequence. When this M30 lineage is compared to the rare M sequence previously detected in two Palestinians, it is evident that it belongs to the Indian super-clade M4'30, as it shares the basal mutation 12007. More specifically it belongs to the M30 branch because it also has transition 15431. M30 has a broad geographic, ethnic and linguistic range in India."

...and...

"Due to the scarcity of M lineages in the Near East and its richness in India, this region was proposed as the most probable origin of the M1 ancestor. However, recent studies based on Indian mtDNA sequences have not found any positive evidence that M1 originated in India." [24,25]

...from earlier...

"in two recent studies in which 24 and 56 Indian M complete sequences were analyzed no ancestral M1 lineages have been found."**

*cite: 

[24] Rajkumar R, Banerjee J, Gunturi HB, Trivedi R, Kashyap VK. Phylogeny and antiquity of M macrohaplogroup inferred from complete mtDNA sequence of Indian specific lineages. BMC Evol Biol. 2005;5:26. doi: 10.1186/1471-2148-5-26

[25] Mol Biol Evol. 2006. 23(3):683-90. The dazzling array of basal branches in the mtDNA macrohaplogroup M from India as inferred from complete genomes. Sun C, Kong QP, et al.

----------------------------------

Based on the high frequency and diversity of haplogroup M in India and elsewhere in Asia, some authors have suggested (versus [3]) that M may have arisen in Southwest Asia [16,17,31]. Finding M1 or a lineage ancestral to M1 in India, could help to explain the presence of M1 in Africa as a result of a back migration from India. Yet, to date this has not been achieved [15], this study). Therefore, one cannot rule out the still most parsimonious scenario that haplogroup M arose in East Africa [3]. Furthermore, the lack of L3 lineages other than M and N (indeed, L3M and L3N) in India is more consistent with the African launch of haplogroup M. On the other hand, one also observes that: i) M1 is the only variant of haplogroup M found in Africa; ii) M1 has a fairly restricted phylogeography in Africa, barely penetrating into sub-Saharan populations, being found predominantly in association with the Afro-Asiatic linguistic phylum – a finding that appears to be inconsistent with the distribution of sub-clades of haplogroups L3 and L2 that have similar time depths. — Mait Metspalu et al.

Since the initial peopling of South and West Asia by anatomically modern humans, when this region may well have provided the initial settlers who colonized much of the rest of Eurasia, the gene flow in and out of India of the maternally transmitted mtDNA has been surprisingly limited. Specifically, our analysis of the mtDNA haplogroups, which are shared between Indian and Iranian populations and exhibit coalescence ages corresponding to around the early Upper Paleolithic, indicates that they are present in India largely as Indian-specific sub-lineages. In contrast, other ancient Indian-specific variants of M and R are very rare outside the sub-continent. -Mait Metspalu

--BMC Genetics 2005, 6:41. Most of the extant mtDNA boundaries in South and Southwest Asia were likely shaped during the initial settlement of Eurasia by anatomically modern humans. Mait Metspalu,, Toomas Kivisild, et. al.

We found 489C (Table 3) in all Indian and eastern-African haplogroup M mtDNAs analysed, but not in the non-M haplogroup controls, including 20 Africans representing all African main lineages (6 L1, 4 L2, 10 L3) and 11 Asians.

These findings, and the lack of positive evidence (given the RFLP status) that the 10400 C->T transition defining M has happened more than once, suggest that it has a single common origin, but do not resolve its geographic origin. Analysis of position 10873 (the MnlI RFLP) revealed that all the M molecules (eastern African, Asian and those sporadically found in our population surveys) were 10873C (Table 3). As for the non-M mtDNAs, the ancient L1 and the L2 African-specific lineages5, as well as most L3 African mtDNAs, also carry 10873C.

Conversely, all non-M mtDNAs of non-African origin analysed so far carry 10873T. These data indicate that the **transition 10400 C-->T, which defines haplogroup M**, arose on an African background characterized by the ancestral state 10873C, which is also present in four primate (common and pygmy chimps, gorilla and orangutan) mtDNA sequences. — Semino et al.

Home | Quotations | Misc Notes | Hair | DemicDiff |

Egypt in Africa