The Original Neat Story
Egyptians from around the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic periods, likely genetically similar to Natufians and Neolithic Levantines, intermingled with northern Sudanese people from the same era, who were probably akin to modern Nilotic speaking groups like the Dinka once you exclude their more recent West African admixture.
Fast-forward past some complex archaeo-cultural interactions and developments and the result of these centuries of intermixture between the natives of Sudan and Egypt likely culminates into the peoples of the Sudanese Neolithic period, a subset of whom around 3500 to 3000 BCE begin to expand into the Horn of Africa with their Cushitic languages [1-2]:
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These pastoral Cushites are the Proto-Agaw-East-South Cushites [1]:
The Agaw (Central Cushitic) group remained in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, while the Eastern Cushites spread across the central, southern, and eastern highlands of Ethiopia, the Afar triangle, and Greater Somalia. Meanwhile, the Southern Cushites eventually continued their migration into Kenya and Tanzania, giving rise to groups like the Cushitic-speaking Iraqw whilst significantly influencing non-Cushitic speaking populations such as the Maasai, Tutsi, and Khoekhoe.
Though I’m glossing over details such as additional East Cushitic migrations south of the Horn and pre-historic Cushitic expansions into Chad and possibly also parts of Arabia such as Yemen [3], this captures the core narrative. As they entered the Horn, these Cushitic groups intermingled with the native hunter-gatherer populations, whose genomic profile is well-represented by the ancient DNA sample known as "Mota", discovered in the Mota Cave in Southwestern Ethiopia [4]. Let's call these early inhabitants of the Horn "Ethiopian Hunter-Gatherers" (Ethio-HGs).
Mota-related ancestry appears most prominent among Omotic speaking Ethiopians whose linguistic predecessors appear to have likely entered the Horn before their linguistic kin, the Cushites [5]; but make no mistake, everyone in the Horn has this ancestry and it seems almost unique to the region in the modern world:
Then seemingly around 1000 to 500 BCE the Proto-Ethiosemitic (PES) people come from what is now Yemen and begin to settle the Eritrean coast and the northern Highlands of Ethiopia. [6] We appear to owe them for the Ge'ez script and the other Ethiosemitic languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea today (Amharic, Tigrinya, Harari, Gurage etc.).
We also possibly owe other Iron-Age Yemenis who may not have necessarily been PES speakers for the introduction of the camel which appears to have an OSA origin into the Somali territories [7], the Asiatic admixture in Horn Africans' bovine and caprine livestock [8], and the paternal lineage (Y-DNA) T-L208 at least among Somalis (20-30% of the ethnic group) given that the dominant Somali subclade of T-BY181210 is a subclade of T-BY182320 which finds its most basal carrier to be a Southern Arabian from the Asir region of Saudi Arabia which was historically and culturally an extension of Yemen [9]:
Fast forward through centuries of intra-Horn migrations and intermixture and you eventually get this once you run an ancestry proportions model like a monte carlo simulation based model using something like the global 25 PCA coordinates of Mota alongside Dinkas, Natufians, and Yemenis from the al-Jawf Governorate as stand-ins for ancient populations such as Ethio-HGs, Pre-historic Sudanese, Pre-historic Egyptians and Iron-Age Yemenis respectively:
Almost all Cushites and Ethiosemites being principally a cross between those early Egyptians and Sudanese with varying degrees of Ethiopian Hunter-Gatherer (mostly Omotic speaker mediated?) and Iron-Age Yemeni admixture. Simple, clear and neat. It's a nice story, an easy to understand story those of us across the "anthrosphere" formed over the years by running Horner genomes through models ourselves, reading peer-reviewed papers on the region, consulting history and comparative linguistic literature and trying to weave it all together.
All we really needed were ancient and medieval genomes from across Northeast Africa and Arabia to understand this story in more precise detail but it didn't seem like it was going to change much at all in terms of the big picture.
The broad strokes appeared on the money until...
Linguistic cracks formed
Truthfully, the first linguistic cracks in this story appeared before its formation. And those cracks would be the evidence of a Highland East Cushitic (HEC) substratum of loan words in the Nubian languages:
Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, a Professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne, found as early as the '90s that Nobiin and other Nubian languages had loan words relating to agriculture and pastoralism from HEC which implied that, at some point, HEC speakers predated these Nilo-Saharan (NS) speakers along the Nile in areas such as Upper Nubia, seemingly before at least 1500 BCE [11].
This didn't make much sense to myself and several others when we first read about it over a decade ago. It pointed to the possibility that if not Meroitic then at least "Kerman" was HEC given these loans which made little sense since by any time well after 3500 BCE such as 1500 BCE, the ancestors of HEC speakers would have firmly been in Ethiopia, with an Agaw buffer and lots of mountains, river valley and desert between them and Upper Nubia where it seems Nobiin speakers may have usurped them or at the very least came into contact with them.
Myself and others wrote this off as just a mistake on her part. She probably just noticed the long known evidence of Afro-Asiatic and Cushitic links seemingly evident in Upper Nubia [13-14] including a possible Cushitic substratum in Meroitic, the Iron-Age language of Upper Nubia, that she herself noted [15] and misattributed this particular influence in the Nubian languages as HEC when it was probably North-Cushitic influences she was picking up on given that this has long been posited to be the group that was historically dominant in Lower Nubia [16] possibly up into the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, it was strange that at least two other scholars that I know of such as the linguist Roger Blench and the Egyptologist and Nubiologist Julien Cooper seemed to corroborate and double down on these HEC influences. [10,17]
One of them, Julien Cooper, in fact builds on this to some extent in that he poses the possibility that the Kerman culture's northern cousin, the Wawat culture (C-Group), may have had East-Cushitic roots as well in that the Queen of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II, Queen Aashayet, possesses a name that seems to align with a Lowland East Cushitic (LEC) origin rather than a HEC or North-Cushitic origin:
The root is present in many of the ‘East Cushitic’ languages and all of what Bender calls ‘Core Eastern’ (Lowland, Somali, Arboroid, and Oromoid) as well as the Dullay languages but is absent in North Cushitic, Central Cushitic, and Southern Cushitic. The status of this root in Highland East Cushitic is uncertain and likely a loan. Hudson links these lexical items meaning ‘honour, respect’ with the same root meaning ‘heavy’ as a shift of /s/ to /f/ is attested across some Cushitic languages.65Based on their forms and their isolated position in Highland East Cushitic, they are likely loans from Oromo, a language which exercises significant influence throughout the Ethiopian Highlands and on Highland East Cushitic languages in particular.
It is interesting, however, how at least two of the Queen's retainers are, unlike her, explicitly stated to be of "Medjay" origin. Medjay at this time being a term that referred to a likely North-Cushitic speaking people of the Eastern Desert and the Red Sea Hills which may in turn relate to the slightly later documented "Pan-Grave culture" phenomenon (circa 2000-1500 BCE) [18] which, all together, in my posts going forward I will simply refer to as the Medjay Culture. These Medjay women, unlike the Queen, have names that can perhaps be convincingly connected to North-Cushitic:
"The name Mkhnt stands out in this discussion as possibly one of the safer and earlier names in Egyptian texts connected to a Beja root.
...
If this reading of Fdqyt is admitted, the name could originate from the Egyptian word fdq ‘to sever, hack’ or indeed its cognate in Beja fedig ‘to loose, free, liberate, divorce’.88 Although on probability one would usually favour an Egyptian etymology for onomastics that contain a demonstrable Egyptian root in an Egyptian text, a combination of factors including her Medjay ethnicity, foreign-named individuals on the sarcophagus, plus the fact that the Egyptian root fdq is never employed in personal names might give cause to support a foreign etymology here too.
The above mentioned Beja words are also present in other branches of Cushitic: Agaw (fatag ‘cut off, tear’), Saho (fatag ‘cut up’), and Oromo (fottoqa ‘to chip’). This presents almost identical problems to the previously discussed ‘Cushitic’ etymologies. This purpoted name could well be Beja but likewise this cannot be taken as certain when this root is present across Central and East Cushitic languages."
Yet the Queen seems of "Nubian" origins like them. One blatant example of this being that she is depicted in Ancient Egyptian art as darker skinned than the Egyptian women and men serving her in a manner similar to her two retainers, Mkhnt and Fdqyt. But her name does not seem possibly NC like theirs. This may seem strange but scholars, as Cooper points out, have long believed in a "Nile-Cushitic" language and people living along Nubia and there is a possibility that these people were not North-Cushites but a separate group, such as East-Cushites, and the Queen may have been of this group and most likely the subsection of this group directly bordering Egypt:
What you will notice about the rough mapping of the three Bronze-Age Nubian cultures I have created above is that the Medjay and the Wawat appear to often overlap, with Medjay sites—if we cautiously assume Pan-Grave sites are representative of "Medjay"—being found along the Eastern Desert but also along the Nile from Lower Nubia into a bit of Upper Egypt (begins at Aswan) as shown above [18], yet not as much so, to my knowledge, down into Upper Nubia along Kerman sections of the Nile.
This points to the two cultures being somewhat intermingled and in strong contact even though they may have linguistically belonged to two completely distinct subbranches of Cushitic. This may explain why the Queen was possibly of a different Cushitic linguistic subgroup from her two retainers. These were distinct Cushitic peoples but still geographically congruous and, from looking at the archaeology of the individual cultures, clearly of one wider macro-culture together all the way down to Kerma.
To be frank, this near perfectly aligns with even the more recent relationship Beja (North-Cushitic) tribes of the Eastern Desert, Red Sea Hills and Nile Valley have had with Egyptians and NS-speaking Nubians along the Nile; an ethnolinguistic separateness and some cultural separateness yet frequent historical interactions [19] and moving amongst them semi-nomadically even fairly recently as far north as Upper Egypt.
Nevertheless, I still found all this a bit out there. Some Queen's name and a HEC substratum maybe pointing to the Kermans being HEC speakers or at least East Cushites was interesting but I didn't want to make much of it without more. Then a recent blog article by a comparative linguist dropped:
"Against a backdrop of hunter-gatherers and then herders wandering in a more-verdant climate, the 5th millennium BCE aridification forced the linguistic ancestor of Ancient Egyptian into arriving from the West and setting up as what became the Naqada culture of Upper Egypt, a fateful development that would result in expansion into Lower Egypt, absorption of Cushitic-speaking peoples there, and a misleading geographical cleavage in a Berber-Semitic-Cushitic sub-branch of Afroasiatic, what with the remaining Cushitic peoples being stranded to the South and Southeast of Egyptian’s new home."
As quoted above, this linguist posits that the Egyptian branch of Afro-Asiatic shows a Cushitic substratum which goes nicely with the newest structuring I've heard of among some comparative linguists, such as this linguist, where they appear to reject the idea of a "Semitic-Egyptian-Berber" (SEB) node [18] that then diversified into Semitic, Egyptian and Berber and instead argue that it is clearly Semitic, Cushitic and Berber that are the closest to one another and arguably form a Cushitic-Semitic-Berber node where the latter two are the closest within the node, similar to structures posed in the past by linguists such as Bender [10] and Diakonoff [21]:
But of course this always seemed to me a strange structuring from a geographic standpoint because I can understand where early archaeologists, historians and comparative linguists were coming from in favoring a "SEB" node because it fits so well geographically. Egyptian is in the middle and remains in Northeast Africa along the Nile Valley area whereas Berber goes west into the Maghreb and Semitic goes east into West Asia. It's a neat picture, but reality doesn't much care how neat things look to us, it seems.
Instead what appears to have perhaps occurred was that the branch left behind along the center in the Nile valley was Cushitic rather than Egyptian and that later, sometime around the Neolithic and Copper Ages, it was usurped and absorbed by Egyptian from the west:
Not just Cushitic, however, but East-Cushitic. As in, at least according to this linguist's analysis and identification of the substratum in Egyptian, East-Cushitic seems to have at one point been the subbranch of Afro-Asiatic languages that dominated from the Nile Delta down to Aswan, and if a few things had happened differently, it may have remained so and today an East-Cushitic language would have been one of the two oldest recorded languages in Human history alongside Sumerian when the Ancient Egyptian civilization inevitably developed.
Truly shocking and I'd be inclined, no matter how well one frames the comparative linguistic arguments, to be very skeptical yet it aligns remarkably well with the proposed Cushitic-Semitic-Berber node and other linguistic evidence I've mentioned above regarding East-Cushitic's presence along Upper and Lower Nubia posed by at least 3 other linguists.
It does seem, if this is all further corroborated and built upon through future linguistic inquiries, quite apparent that at the very minimum, East Cushites did not go down to the Horn in a Proto-Agaw-East-South state with their other Cushitic kin at around 3500-3000 BCE and only began to form in the Horn, but they were instead already seemingly formed in Egypt and Sudan then were gradually absorbed by waves of Egyptian, Nilo-Saharan and perhaps even North-Cushitic speakers.
And not simply absorbed but also, to some extent, displaced where a subset of these Cushites clearly migrated down into the Horn of Africa as the linguistic predecessors of groups such as today's Sidamos, Hadiyas, Gedeos, Afars, Sahos, Oromos, Somalis and several other ethnic groups.
The Cushitic migration into the Horn is essentially starting to seem like one that happened in waves. Perhaps the earliest migrants, the Pastoral Neolithic people (PN), were mainly South-Cushites? It should at least be food for thought that linguists such as Christopher Ehret more recently date Proto-South Cushitic to approximately 5,000ybp (3000 BCE) [1] which appears to line up remarkably with the 3500-3000 BCE dating for the PN's earliest appearance south of Sudan in areas such as the Horn as discussed on this blog previously.
As you can tell from the structuring of Cushitic shared earlier in this post, East and South have a strong relationship with some linguists at times even suggesting South Cushitic isn't truly its own branch but merely a subbranch of East Cushitic. [23] What I find interesting in tandem with this is that the South Cushites appear to have been to some extent agro-pastoral, being familiar with both agricultural and pastoral terminologies.
This aligns with evidence that the Proto-Central (Agaw) and Proto-East Cushitic populations also possessed terminology for both farming and pastoralism based on the work of several linguists [23–26], and clear evidence that they subsequently left behind historically pastoral, agro-pastoral, and settled farming groups in the Horn—including the proto-HEC and Proto-LEC communities—that later developed distinct and locally adapted agricultural complexes within the region [27–28].
This is perhaps important because it aligns well with this idea of a Nile Cushitic people. The archaeological cultures prevalent on the Nubian sections of the Nile were all agro-pastoral rather than strictly or overly skewed toward pastoralism. This is true for the Wawat, the Kermans and the earlier Nubian A-Group (3800 BCE – 2800 BCE) that was essentially ancestral to these cultures and centered on Lower Nubia.
Relief art from the Gebel Sheikh Suleiman site that appears to depict a war between Predynastic to early Dynastic Egyptians and the Nubian A-Group people circa 3000 BCE [29]
It is further striking how the middle and most developed period of the Nubian A-Group culture (between 3500-3100 BCE) [30-31] which also contains its purported "peak" according to some sources (circa 3250–3150 BCE) [32] is contemporaneous with when the PN are beginning to appear south of Sudan (3500-3000 BCE) whilst possibly carrying innovations specific to the A-Group period among the ancient Nubian cultures such as incense burning. [33-35]
Perhaps this signals that this was a period of growth and prosperity where the culture found itself able to expand outward or perhaps even before the period immediately after this one (3100-2800 BCE) sections of the cultural horizon were already becoming aware of a coming decline and need to depart?
As depicted in the sketch of an Egyptian relief above, this later decline was in part triggered by Egyptian incursions and attacks on Nubia at the time. Perhaps early signs and forms of such aggression, among other factors, was what triggered a section of the agro-pastoral A-Group people to break off and begin migrating southwards into the Horn and Southeast Africa and these people were essentially the PNs?
In any case, whether it was prosperity or calamity that pushed these early PN migrants southwards, it is interesting how the peak and declines of the culture are so close to when the Pastoral Neolithic begins to appear south of Sudan.
Furthermore, with their having left it seems their East Cushitic kin would continue to endure in Lower and Upper Nubia until they too were in part pushed out by various factors such as Nilo-Saharan incursions and it may be that they are represented by the later migration from Sudan I've spoken of on this blog in the past as possibly bringing earlier West Asian admixture (pre-PES but post 3500-3000 BCE Cushitic dispersals) that I now think may very well mark a migration of later East Cushites:
All of this further fits well with this later migration from Sudan being associated with new agricultural innovations being introduced such as the plough (see post linked above) alongside the fact that, as stated previously, the Wawat and Kerman cultures were both agro-pastoral, unlike the more pastoral skewed Medjay culture.
In the case of Kerma you had a situation where they appeared to boast a few urban settlements with Kerma as the chief among them with some large-scale civic architecture as well as evidence of bronze production localized specifically to the city of Kerma—though so far no evidence of tin and copper mining that may have been acquired via Egypt instead— [36] yet the vast majority of Kerman sites were otherwise at best small villages and largely pastoral, semi-nomadic and Neolithic in character. [37]
Wawat in comparison was seemingly only familiar with bronze through importation from Egypt where its elites were found buried with Egyptian bronze implements [38], and it was further familiar with Egyptian writing as what seem to be Wawat rulers have left behind inscriptions in Ancient Egyptian either through acquiring Egyptian scribes or knowing the script themselves whilst adopting a governance system modeled to some extent after that of the Ancient Egyptians. [39].
Something they may have passed onto the following Kushite/Meroitic culture given that the Meroitic word "Qore" for "Ruler" appears to share roots with the Proto-East-Cushitic word "Koro" which in turn corresponds with the modern Somali word "Boqor" for "King". [15] Yet the same scholars who have noted this lexical connection have the borrowing of "Qore/Koro" going in the Meroitic → East Cushitic direction but now I wonder if it isn't the other way around given that East-Cushitic quite possibly preceded Meroitic in Upper Nubia.
This was in fact the very argument Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst made; that encroaching Meroitic speakers adopted rulership terms and customs from a prior Cushitic-speaking base in Nubia. [11,15] Yet it should be stressed that, familiarity with Egyptian bronze, governance systems and hieroglyphs aside, this was an otherwise Neolithic, pastoral and semi-nomadic culture with at best small village-sized sites. [38]
And with that being said, it's quite interesting in that Kerma and Wawat were both in arguably a sort of proto-civilization stage. One possessing some urbanism, some metallurgy at least in its main urban center; and the other being familiar with some writing and adopting the Egyptian governance system on some level. If they had combined they could have formed a more full picture as their later Kushite descendants would.
This to me explains why this possible later wave of East Cushites migrating into the Horn didn't immediately launch it into some sort of "civilizational period" which it appears we only begin to see with influences from Yemen between 1000 BCE and 0 CE. The cultures of Wawat and Kerma were largely still Neolithic agro-pastoral cultures with only a minority being aware of things such as writing and urbanism, hence why they probably didn't spread these cultural elements strongly to the Horn?
Nevertheless, all of this linguistic and archaeological evidence is rather compelling and of course reconstructing the movements and history of pre-historic East Cushites is principally a linguistic endeavor yet it must be stated that...
Population Genetic Evidence exists as well
The first genetic crack myself and others noticed in the original hypothesis was that when we finally got some Cushitic speaker ancient DNA in the form of the Pastoral Neolithic samples from Kenya (Savanna Pastoral Neolithic and Elementeitan), something just wasn't adding up:
What isn't adding up, you wonder? Well, it's that several of these sampled PN populations appear comparable in terms of MENA ancestry to modern Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites despite having significant Ethio-HG related admixture from Hunter-Gatherer groups in the Horn and seemingly also Southeast Africa which I've simplified below as just "Ethio-HG" ancestry:
Admixture from these groups no doubt reduced their other ancestries such as their pre-historic Sudanese (Dinka), Pre-historic Egyptian (Natufian & Iberomaurusian) ancestry and possible trace amounts of Chalcolithic period Iranian ancestry so just how much did they have prior to this Ethio-HG related admixture? Some simple math I drummed up in this Excel workbook to get to the bottom of this would give you admixture levels roughly like this:
Simply put, it is impossible for people with this genetic profile to have been the sole Cushitic speaking ancestors of ethnic groups such as Somalis, Oromos, Amharas and Tigrinyas. Even without our Iron-Age Yemeni admixture, we would be noticeably more MENA than we are now, especially when you consider those two early pastoralists who would appear to be 65-75% MENA if they lacked Ethio-HG-related admixture.
Those of us who saw these results over half a decade ago began to theorize immediately that either the Cushites who entered the Horn at around 3500-3000 BCE were diverse in admixture levels from the outset—something arguably confirmed by those two early pastoralists—or there were waves of migrations into the region and that the waves brought people with distinct admixture levels with modern Horn African Cushites and Ethiosemites ultimately being descended from a later wave or an intermixture between these various waves.
Not much could be said beyond that until we had ancient DNA from the Horn and Sudan to give us a better understanding.
Some like myself did try to run some models in the meantime such as trying to see if the "older layer of West-Asian admixture" theory (pre-PES but post 3500-3000 BCE) was correct by trying to model populations such as Somalis and Habeshas using Yemenis, Arabians as a whole, and Egyptian groups such as Egyptian Copts and Iron-Age Egyptians to see if our non-Natufian-like admixture would wind up split (part Arabian and part Egyptian) with the theory being that if we did descend from post 3000 BCE waves from Sudan and Egypt then perhaps they would have had Iran-Chalcolithic related ancestry like Arabians do—despite some contradictory results discussed on this blog—and a chunk of what looked "Yemeni" in us could in fact prove Ancient (Historic/Dynastic) Egyptian in origin.
The results were rather confusing:
When any Arabian group other than Yemenis is utilized, Somalis almost entirely favor the Iron-Age Egyptians while other Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites look part Iron-Age Egyptian and part Arabian. Looks like the earlier West-Asian admixture theory might be confirmed? But when you throw in Yemenis the model begins to weaken:
Then when you use samples from the al-Jawf, Dhamar, Ma'rib and al-Bayda governorates or Yemenite-Jews, the admixture begins to look entirely Arabian mediated:
This is compelling and muddies the waters because more westerly and northerly parts of Yemen, where all those governorates are and where at least the urban cohort of Yemenite Jewry was historically most concentrated, [40] would be where you'd expect the Proto-Ethiosemites to have roughly come from given that they expanded from what is now Yemen to northern Eritrea [41]. A little too coincidental, in my opinion.
I also failed to model these Yemeni groups as carrying Ethiopian Hunter-Gatherer-related ancestry using straight-forward models so it doesn't appear to track that their stronger affinity for these Horn groups is due to Horn admixture in them that might be related to something such as the proposed Cushitic substratum in the MSA languages of Yemen [42], or Yemen and the Horn's long history of back and forth contact such as Somalis and Habeshas being all over Yemen since Antiquity, the Middle-Ages and Early Modern era [43-47]:
So, perhaps it really is all Proto-Ethiosemitic ancestry. On that point, I must also emphasize that the Pastoral Neolithic samples also appear to exhibit a form of MENA-related ancestry which includes Chalcolithic Iranian-related ancestry, as seen in some of the models I previously shared.
This not only further muddies efforts to detect "later-wave" admixture but, surprisingly enough, also lends support to the notion that much, if not all, of the post-Chalcolithic admixture found in present-day Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites may ultimately derive from the PES people:
It is quite damning that the youngest sample among them, the Hyrax Hill sample dating to 2,300 years ago [48], hundreds of years after the PES people's arrival in Northern Eritrea and Ethiopia, is the sample whose non-Natufian-like admixture looks identical to that of modern Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites in having a strong affinity for Yemenis from the al-Jawf governorate.
Perhaps there was MENA admixture in the region carrying with it Post-Chalcolithic ancestry since the first waves of Cushitic speaking pastoralists arrived but it seems based on this that this admixture was entirely replaced by ancestry from the PES people and possibly also other closely related Iron-Age Yemeni people who may have had a separate effect on Somalis as I implied in the first section of this post will discuss in a future post.
However, a major problem that ought to be pointed out with models like the ones I have been sharing is that Arabian and Egyptian populations are simply too similar in their genetic (autosomal) profile. In fact, the populations from the Southern Levant, Egypt and Arabia within the last ~3,000-3,500 years are all fairly similar in terms of "basal" autosomal makeup:
Samaritans; the Naqab Bedouins; Yemenis, Najdis and certain other Peninsular Arab groups; Egyptian Copts and the Iron-Age Egyptian samples; Early Bronze-Age samples from Jordan— they all form a cluster and while there certainly are differences within this cluster it's very easy when trying to model a group as carrying ancestry from more than one of these groups for the model to simply fail or be untrustworthy and reliant on overfitting if it succeeds.
With this in mind, is it entirely possible that what looks "Jawf-Yemeni" in modern Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites as well as that Hyrax Hill sample is in fact an amalgam of Ancient Egyptian and Iron-Age Yemeni ancestry that just hit the right proportions of basal components like Natufian-like ancestry to look very similar to modern Yemenis from the al-Jawf governorate? Yes.
Nevertheless, it is also possible this is just entirely Iron-Age Yemeni ancestry in these groups and that whatever else seems to perhaps be in those other Pastoral-Neolithic samples mostly got "admixed out". As I stated, confusing and muddy stuff.
So, with the notion of modeling us as part Ancient Egyptian proving difficult there wasn't much to go on for a few years until something truly groundbreaking hit in the form of Y-DNA data:
You see, Somalis' most prominent Y-DNA Haplogroup is E-V32 (60-75% frequency) and under E-V32 it appears that Somalis so far overwhelmingly belong to the E-Z813 subclade you see pictured and linked to above on Yfull, a platform that maps all the Y-DNA lineages across the world using a large repository of ancient and modern samples. And within that subclade the most basal samples are an Egyptian from Upper Egypt, a Nablusi Palestinian and a recently sampled Sudanese individual.
Why does this matter? Because the Time-To-Most-Recent-Ancestor (TMRCA) for this lineage, is ~4,300 years ago (~2300 BCE). Meaning Somalis had to have shared a paternal ancestor with that Sudanese individual, the Upper Egyptian and the Palestinian right around when cultures such as the Wawat, Kerma and the Medjay existed, with all three cultures sharing a general time frame within around 2500 to 1500 BCE.
This was huge, to say the least. It, genetically speaking, confirmed that there had to have been a migration into the Horn from Sudan after the 3500-3000 BCE period of initial Cushitic Pastoralist dispersals into the region, as late as sometime after 2300 BCE, a few hundred years after the pyramids of Giza were built in Egypt, given that it's obvious that the ancestor of E-Z813 had to have been more north somewhere in either Sudan or Egypt given the northerly origin of all three basal samples.
We will of course need all of this confirmed through ancient DNA sampling but for now I think it's a safe assumption that this lineage originated somewhere more north based on those basal samples.
So there we have it. The ancient Pastoral Neolithic samples suggest the likelihood of multiple waves of admixture into the region, just as the linguistic data also implies; evidence for historical-period Egyptian admixture remains muddy but not implausible; and, finally, the Y-DNA data effectively confirms more than one wave and incredibly aligns with when the linguistic data places East Cushites, the linguistic ancestors of Somalis, in Nubia. I'm still rather shocked at how well the dating lines up.
But linguistics and genetics aren't all we have to go off of...
A lot of other things are also beginning to make sense
There are in actuality many aspects of Somali, East Cushitic and greater Horn Cushite and Ethiosemite culture which parallel with Ancient Egypt and Nubia. These parallels are so apparent that for years they have inspired what one might call "Hoteps" all over the internet to highlight our ethnic groups at times as the true descendants of the Ancient Egyptians and while these individuals may be misguided in that way of putting it, they were not entirely taking note of nothing, nor were they the first to take note.
Long before their existence, Western scholars developed the now-discredited “Hamitic Hypothesis”, a colonial-era racial theory that classified both modern and ancient Egyptians, Berbers, and Cushitic-speaking Horn Africans (often including Nubians) as a “Caucasoid” stock. This framework was then used to claim that metallurgy, farming, pastoralism, political complexity, and virtually all forms of civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa were often introduced by these supposed “Hamites.” [49]
And while these scholars, much like modern Hoteps, were off the mark they too were not noticing nothing when they explicitly connected groups such as Somalis, Oromos and Bejas to the ancient Nubians and Egyptians. [50]
The most obvious of these similarities both groups would have noticed would be the traditional attire native from Southern Egypt down to Northern Kenya as recently as the early 20th century:
"The Tobe, or Abyssinian “Quarry,” is the general garment of Africa from Zayla to Bornou. In the Somali country it is a cotton sheet eight cubits long, and two breadths sewn together. An article of various uses, like the Highland plaid, it is worn in many ways; sometimes the right arm is bared; in cold weather the whole person is muffled up, and in summer it is allowed to full below the waist. Generally it is passed behind the back, rests upon the left shoulder, is carried forward over the breast, surrounds the body, and ends hanging on the left shoulder, where it displays a gaudy silk fringe of red and yellow. This is the man’s Tobe. The woman’s dress is of similar material, but differently worn: the edges are knotted generally over the right, sometimes over the left shoulder; it is girdled round the waist, below which hangs a lappet, which in cold weather can be brought like a hood over the head. Though highly becoming, and picturesque as the Roman toga, the Somali Tobe is by no means the most decorous of dresses: women in the towns often prefer the Arab costume,—a short-sleeved robe extending to the knee, and a Futah or loin-cloth underneath." - Richard F. Burton, 1850s [51]
Beyond clothing, we find even martial customs that appear to align. Among Somalis, Beja [50], and other Horn peoples [49], it was historically common to dip arrows in poison when hunting or waging war:
"Leaving the before-mentioned town of Brava, on the coast further on towards the Red Sea, there is another very large and beautiful town, called Magadoxo, belonging to the Moors, and it has a king over it, and is a place of great trade in merchandise. Ships come there from the kingdom of Cambay and from Aden with stuffs of all sorts, and with other merchandise of all kinds, and with spices. And they carry away from there much gold, ivory, beeswax, and other things upon which they make a profit. In this town there is plenty of meat, wheat, barley, and horses, and much fruit; it is a very rich place. All the people speak Arabic; they are dusky, and black, and some of them white. They are but bad warriors, and use herbs with their arrows to defend themselves from their enemies." - Duarte Barbosa, early 1500s CE [53]
This aligns with what we know of ancient Nubian warfare where by at least the Iron Age, their archers were renowned for both their skill with and use of poison-tipped arrows. Then as early as the Bronze-Age, the very name “Ta-Seti,” used by the Egyptians to refer to Nubia since the First Dynasty (~3100–2900 BCE), meant “Land of the Bow”:
"The Egyptians referred to Nubia as Ta-Seti, the 'Land of the Bow', a name reflecting the archery skills of its inhabitants" [54]
With early Upper Egyptians right next door to Nubia showing some of the earliest known evidence of poison-tipped archery:
"The earliest supposed evidence of poisoned arrows used for hunting or war dates back to the Egyptian Predynastic period. The black compound found on the tips of some arrows found at the site of Naga ed Der tomb (2481–2050 BC) are presently being analysed but a preliminary test … has proven the presence of a toxic substance." [55]
Above you will also see a depiction of an Early Modern Somali archer, not far chronologically removed from the archers who defended Mogadishu against Portuguese incursions with poison-tipped arrows. Beneath him, Bronze-Age (circa 2134-1991 BCE) Nubian archers as seen through Ancient Egyptian eyes. The resemblance is, to say the least, uncanny.
There is furthermore the widespread historical Horn tradition of shaving children’s heads in intricate patterns until they came of age where, at least in the case of Somalis, only then were they allowed to grow their hair fully, a practice still found among the Afar of the Danakil desert:
This appears remarkably similar to the “Sidelock of Youth” concept seen in Ancient Egypt at least as early as the Old Kingdom's 6th Dynasty (circa 2345-2181 BCE):
A practice historically found among the North-Cushitic speaking Beja of Sudan and Egypt [56] but also various Horn African groups such as the Ethiosemitic speaking Amhara [57] and the East Cushitic speaking Afar [58] and Somali [59] alongside groups neighboring these Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites such as the Omotic speaking Wolayta of Southwestern Ethiopia [60]:
But these are mostly surface-level aesthetic parallels. Beneath them lie more entrenched, ceremonial traditions. For example, the deeply rooted—and tragic—practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), found widely across the Horn [61], has clear antecedents in Ancient Egypt, with the earliest evidence of it in Northeast Africa dating to about 2000 BCE in Ancient Egypt:
"Iconographic and textual evidence link female genital cutting to ritual and status in Egypt as early as the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000 BCE), with later classical sources affirming its longstanding cultural presence." [62]
“Despite the scarcity of physical remains, ritualized female circumcision is documented in Ancient Egypt by ca. 2000 BCE and may represent continuity with later Northeast African practices." [63]
Even male circumcision appears to perhaps have pre-Abrahamic origins in the Horn, practiced among the Waaqeffanna practicing Oromo [64] and Rendille [65]; much like in Ancient Egypt, where it was a documented custom as early as the Sixth Dynasty (circa. 2345–2181 BCE) [66].
Yet some of the most peculiar similarities aren’t the broad “Pan-Horn” ones further shared with Sudan or Chad. Instead, they so far appear distinct to East Cushites. One strong example: the use of wooden headrests, common among Somalis and other East Cushitic people and their South and East Cushitic-influenced neighbors in Southeast Africa:
Another is the male custom of adorning the head with feathers once practiced by Somalis, other East Cushites, and their South and East Cushitic-influenced neighbors in Southeast Africa:
"They are a fighting race carrying, as a rule, spears, shields and short swords; and guns when they can get them. In some tribes warriors by killing a man earn the right to wear an ostrich-feather in their hair." - Somalis, early 1900s [69]
Turkana man in Kenya adorned with an ostrich feather
Curiously, this exact tradition turns up in the Eastern Desert of Egypt—where the Medjay Culture and its predecessors flourished and their Beja descendants have historically flourished [70-71]—as early as the Predynastic Period (circa 4400–3100 BCE), but also in Lower Nubia, being practiced by an Egyptian soldier, around the time East Cushites may still have been dominant in the area (circa 1800–1550 BCE) [72] based on the linguistic evidence discussed previously, with the tradition even further appearing among Upper Nubians in the period immediately after Cushitic speakers were seemingly usurped along the Nile (circa 1342–1325 BCE) where it appears among the entourage of the Nubian Prince Heqanefer:
Stamped clay nodule from Buhen (Second Cataract) depicting an Egyptian soldier and captive, likely used as a military pass for boundary control in Lower Nubia (circa 1800–1550 BCE) [73]
Rulership symbolism offers even more interesting evidence. Both Ancient Egyptians and East Cushites, such as Somalis, seem to place deep symbolic value on beards, particularly the goatee area, in leadership symbolism. Somali terms like Guurti and Garaad seem intertwined with this symbolism, as noted by a highly knowledgeable lay observer in Somali anthropology discussion circles:
"It is obvious to anyone who even studies the etymology of the Somali language that Garaad has a Somali origin. It comes from the root etymology ''Gar'' which is the root construct of several legal and governance word constructs within the legal system of Xeer and the Somali language. Few examples i saw someone post elsewhere about the Xeer legal terminology, notice they all begin with ''Gar'':
'Gar cadaawe: (strict adjudication), Gar Sokeeye: (flexible adjudication), Garsoorid: (jury verdict, judiciary system, judgment of a case by a court or group of people), Gar: (hearing/ verdict), Garawshiiyo: (concession), Garnaqsi: (defend; to justify or vindicate), Gardhigasho: (bringing case to the mediators), Gar-diiddo: (unwilling to accept any ruling), Garyigil: (willing to accept any rules), Garqaadasho: (acceptance of a verdict)'
Gar(Justice/Wisdom) + Aad (Move towards) = Garaad= One who moves towards or seeks Justice.
Some examples of other Somali word constructions using Gar-Garaad. From A Grammar of the Somali Language: With Examples in Prose and Verse by Kirk
[75]"
This seems to resonate with the beard's role in Egyptian iconography since the Predynastic period:
"The ornament known … as the ‘divine beard’ is one of the most widespread and enduring conventions in ancient Egyptian iconography, associated almost exclusively with gods … It goes back to some of the earliest examples … in the Early Dynastic period (3rd millennium BCE)." [76]
Interestingly, Ancient Egyptian depictions focus specifically on the goatee section of the beard and in Somali, the term "gar" means beard, but in my colloquial experience, it can often also refer more specifically to chin, goatee or non-mustache parts of the beard; in fact, the very word "gar" also means chin.
But the symbolic similarities don't end there. The shepherd's crook-like scepter of the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs known as the Was-Scepter, dating to early as the First Dynasty (circa 3100 BCE) [77], is nearly identical in style to crooks carried by the likes of Somali and Turkana herders today, a connection scholars have pointed out [78]:
Fascinatingly, the general Somali word for "stick" or "staff", rather than the specific term for this crook (Hangool), appears to possibly share a linguistic root with a similarly revered staff among Amharas (Word is Ul in Somali and Dula in Amharic) who are an Ethiosemitic speaking, Central Cushitic (Agaw) descended—rather than East-Cushitic descended—people.
Further along this vein of sharing motifs and customs with ancient Nile Valley rulers is the fact that the long documented "Cushitic fish taboo" found among both Ethiosemites such as Amharas [79] and Cushites such as Somalis in the Horn and Bejas in Sudan [80] was a tradition also present among Iron-Age Nubian rulers [82] who may have held this over as a custom from their Bronze-Age predecessors as the populations of the Horn and Bejas may have as well:
"The stela of the Nubian king, Piye, describes his victory against a coalition of Delta princes, and his ascension to the Egyptian throne. The inscription informs us that, except for king Namart, no northern and southern rulers could enter the Egyptian palace because they were uncircumcised and were eaters of fish." [82]
Drawing of the upper part of King Piye's victory stela. Piye ruled both Nubia and Egypt from 744 to 714 BCE as the founder of Egypt's 25th dynasty
Interestingly, this custom seems perhaps rooted in some form of ancient serpent cultism. [83] It is found among Bedouin Arabs to some extent [84-85] and several historic Amazigh people [86], with at least the former also seeming to connect their aversion toward fish in some way to serpents the way Cushites do:
"Thus, we read of some Cushites who look at fish as unclean water snakes and on fish eating as a disgrace." [80]
"The camel party tasted fish her for the first time, having first refused the present of an uncooked code, saying they would prefer to eat a snake." - quote about Bedouin Arabs [87]
Which then brings to mind all the persistent and prolific serpentine myths found among Cushites and Ethiosemites in the Horn:
"Across Oromo traditions, snakes—often as river spirits—are bound to origins, authority, and priesthood: Guji and Arsi origin tales link founding figures to powerful serpents (e.g., Arsi traditions of the first Oromo’s daughter seized and impregnated by the river-serpent Boranticha); among the Borana, snakes are ritually respected and tended; and the Qallu (high priests) are closely associated with serpents in regalia and rite—such as a forehead qallacha/qalaca headpiece secured with a snakeskin strap—with snakes explicitly tied to these high priests as well as secular leaders." [my paraphrase] [88]
"These finds, dating from the Proto‑Aksumite (3rd–1st centuries B.C.) and the first part of the Aksumite (1st–4th centuries A.D.) periods, may support the reality of the cult of the snake and the practice of human sacrifices, two elements characterizing the Ethiopian traditions related to Arwe, the mythic snake‑king of Aksum." [89]
"The distant Mijerteen Somali recounted the following myth: known as Mahmud Saleban, the newly-born founder of three Mijerteen clan segments was found with his twin—a poisonous snake, mas—lying next to him (Cerulli 1957: 78–79). All the descendants of Mahmud Saleban respected and even protected mas (snakes) from fellow tribespeople, and the snakes would do no harm to them. Were a descendant bitten by a mas, the bite would prove harmless (Ibid.)." [90]
Serpentine myths and fixations which bring to mind similar elements in Ancient Egypt. For example, to those familiar with Ancient Egyptian mythology, the Oromo origin story, featuring a primordial river-serpent linked to both the origins of the Oromo and the authority of rulers, bears some resemblance to the Ancient Egyptian creation myth. In that myth, all existence, including the Gods themselves, arises from Atum, a primordial deity who dwells in a primeval ocean (Nun), who, at both the dawn of creation and its ultimate end, assumes the form of a serpent. [91-92]
Is it a mere coincidence that both cultures believe in a creation myth involving a water dwelling serpent? Is it furthermore a coincidence that both cultures tie snakes to rulership such as in the case of how Nehebkau, a primordial Ancient Egyptian snake deity, sustains the King's spiritual essence after death and acts a messenger for him in the afterlife? (2432 to 2310 BCE) [93-94] Or how the Oromo snake-priests’ headdresses featuring snakeskin perhaps parallels the Uraeus, an emblem of divine protection and royal legitimacy worn by Egyptian rulers from the reign of Den (3011 to 2921 BCE) and onward? [95]
Is it yet again a coincidence that the Aksumites also connect snakes to some form of rulership with the myth of Arwe, a Snake-King who demands human sacrifice? Or yet another coincidence that the Majeerteen Somali tradition of Mahmud Saleban’s descendants being protected from snakebites thanks to a sacred serpent resembles the Ancient Egyptian belief that sacred serpents like those represented by the uraeus serpent conferred ritual protection against venom, as expressed in the anti-snake spells of the Pyramid Texts (Utterances 298–299, reign of Unas, circa 2353 to 2323 BCE)? [96]
Regardless, the persistent ties to rulership are what I find most striking such as an ancient snake that ruled the land and snakes being associated with tribal chieftains which brings to mind the aforementioned serpentine symbolism in the regalia of the Pharaohs (Uraeus):
"The earliest depiction of the uraeus—the rearing cobra on the king’s brow—probably dates to the reign of Den. (insert: circa. 3011 to 2921 BCE)
...
Such a feature next appears in the early Third Dynasty (insert: circa 2686 to 2613 BCE), on a relief of Netjerikhet from the Wadi Maghara, Sinai. The adoption of the uraeus into royal iconography seems to be another example of the innovation which characterises the reign of Den." [95]
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On their own these similarities in venerating serpents and tying them to rulership may not be much but when considered alongside the fish taboo shared with Iron-Age Nubians and all the other clear cultural parallels as well as the nature of the Pharaoh's regalia where we have the false beard, the scepter and the fact that we know the rulers of Bronze-Age Wawat adapted some elements of Ancient Egyptian rulership customs [97] whilst their Kerman counterparts began to do the same toward the end of the Kerma culture at around 1550 BCE [98], this certainly provides intriguing food for thought as to where Horn Africans acquired and built upon some of these customs and motifs around snakes.
And as riveting as they are to go through, the cultural links and similarities seem innumerable and I would likely require a whole team of anthropologists and a thesis to properly cover them so I will cease with one final truly fascinating cultural connection that I may have stumbled onto myself; a religious one between Somalis and the Ancient Egyptians and Nubians.
I first encountered mention of this figure from Somalis' pre-Islamic past many years ago in a book where he is described a "Messenger of Death" and a marabou, a type of bird [99] only to later encounter this same figure being written about by a Somali columnist at Kenya's The Standard who apparently grew up somewhat traditionally in the Somali countryside of Kenya [100]. The columnist carries on the description of this figure as a harbinger of death but instead associates him more with falcons and why Somalis, in his experience, have a cultural fear of such birds of prey.
This was quite a surprise for me because the name of this figure in Somalis' culture is "Huur" and the reason this is relevant is because Old Kingdom Egyptian sources attested that one of the principal deities of Ta-Seti—in this context referring to Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia [101-103]—during the Bronze-Age was Horus, the falcon headed Ancient Egyptian and Nubian God of kingship, healing, protection, the sun and the sky:
In fact, the capital of predynastic Upper Egypt, close to the border with Lower Nubia, was a Horus cult city aptly named "Hierakonpolis" (City of the Falcon) during the Hellenic period [104]. Even further, the Sidelock of Youth tradition which modern Horn African Cushites and Ethiosemites appear to carry on in some form as discussed earlier, centers around Horus:
"Another attribute sometimes associated with sem-priests is the sidelock, a sign of youth that identifies them with Horus.” This note appears immediately after describing sem-priests “from the Old Kingdom … depicted in tomb scenes showing mortuary rituals." [105]
Horus' name in Ancient Egyptian is even more interesting as it would have been written without vowels as "Ḥr" [106] with the "hard H" (voiceless pharyngeal fricative) often found in Afro-Asiatic languages such as Ancient Egyptian, Somali and Arabic. That makes the Somali word only different in that it vocalizes the first consonant differently and adds a vowel that may very well have been present in the original Egyptian.
I would love for a linguist to take a crack at this but to my layman eyes the words appear so similar as to possibly be cognates then you have both figures bearing some elements of falcon symbolism and this just so happening to once be one of the most popular Gods of the ancient Lower Nubians and their Upper Egyptian neighbors during the Bronze-Age; the period when the Wawat (Lower Nubia) and Kerma cultures were in play. Appears too much to be coincidental.
Especially once one becomes aware of Horus' connection to the shaven head/sidelock of youth tradition that appears to have been preserved across the Horn of Africa in some form until fairly recently.
Whilst Huur's role in the mythology appears to have shifted among Somalis as a harbinger of death rather than a central God who represents things such as kingship and protection, it appears this may very well be a case of cultural memory; the ancestors of Somalis unknowingly remembering what was once a prominent deity of their ancient ancestors in Bronze-Age Nubia. Much like how all the prior outlined customs have seemingly survived in some form or another thousands of years later.
However, all of that intriguing cultural data aside, there is the perhaps even more striking matter of physical resemblance. Somalis appear to be among the closest known modern populations to Predynastic Upper Egyptians of the Naqada Culture in terms of craniofacial structure [107]:
As you can see, in terms of craniofacial traits such as nasal height, cheekbone width and vault length to name but a few among several; Somalis cluster remarkably close to Bronze-Age Naqadans which means the two groups would have had very similar facial features. Yet, unlike Somalis, Naqadans appear in other literature to have more "Eurasian" seeming dental traits in contrast to Somalis whose dental traits appear to lean more Sub-Saharan African (SSA). [108-109]
To me this possibly implies that these Naqadans do not have nearly as much AEA-related (SSA) ancestry as Somalis and may in turn be the source of much of Somalis' MENA ancestry and that Somalis through some quirk of chance and selection leaned more heavily toward their MENA side in terms of facial features rather than their more SSA (AEA) side.
What’s particularly curious about this, however, is that these pre-historic Egyptians of the Naqada culture are a surprisingly late Predynastic Copper and Bronze Age group from Upper Egypt. Given the "original neat story" outlined at the start of this post, one might expect Somalis to have closer affinities with earlier Neolithic or Epipaleolithic Egyptians or other MENA groups like the Epipaleolithic Natufians, the latter of which also appear in the study cited for that craniofacial cluster above.
But instead, Somalis seem to for now phenotypically reflect a late group like the Naqadans; a possible sign that early East Cushitic groups may have been part of the population substrate in Copper Age Egypt itself as that linguist's blog post suggests.
In fact, it's quite a remarkable coincidence that in the quote from the linguist I previously shared, they were theorizing that the Naqadans were the result of East Cushites being encroached on by Egyptian speakers from the Western Desert. As in the Naqadans' immediate ancestors would have possibly been East-Cushitic speakers.
It is further gripping to note that the Naqada culture is centered on the town of Naqada in the Qena Governorate where it was first discovered. This is important to emphasize because this is the same Qena Governorate that the Upper Egyptian who carries a basal clade of Somalis' Y-DNA E-Z813 hails from. One too many remarkable coincidences, in my humble opinion.
Which brings us back to all of the cultural similarities as well. What makes many of them so compelling is their timing being perhaps a little too convenient to be coincidental. Nearly all these cultural parallels—across attire, warfare, headrests, symbolism and customs—align with pre-Hellenic and pre-Christian Egypt and Nubia.
If trade alone explains these cultural exchanges, why does it seem to have abruptly ended by the Hellenistic period? No notable cultural influences from Hellenistic and Christian Egypt and Nubia appear in the Horn, especially among East-Cushites. Even Christianity in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea spread via Levantine contact, not via Nubia or Egypt [110].
This raises an intriguing possibility: many of these cultural similarities may not have traveled from Egypt to the Horn via trade, but rather, originated upstream among the ancestors of today’s East Cushites and Horn Africans, when they were still settled in the Nile Valley during the Bronze Age.
What makes this even more compelling, to my eyes, is that so many of these traditions keep, surprisingly, falling within the time frame of 2500 to 1500 BCE in terms of when they originated or were at least first documented:
Poison-tipped Arrows: 2481–2050 BCE
Sidelock of Youth: 2345-2181 BCE
Female-Genital-Mutilation (FGM): 2345–2181 BCE
Headrest: 2323–2150 BCE
Male Circumcision: ~2000 BCE
Likely animal-fat based hair-gel: ~1500 BCE
And the list goes on and on as you no doubt know from reading this blog post. So, why do the earliest known dates for all of these traditions align with when the Wawat and Kerma cultures were thriving and making consistent contact with Ancient Egypt? The same period when linguists appear to find some evidence of East Cushitic presence along the Nile? The same period Somalis' Y-DNA would have seemingly been somewhere in either Upper Egypt or Nubia?
Far too much to be coincidental, in my humble opinion.
In light of all this, a not so neat, but likely more accurate, story is that multiple waves of Cushitic speakers entered the Horn. The first, around 3500 BCE, may very well have been largely South Cushites whilst a later wave, as much as 2,000 years later, brought East Cushitic or a segment of it along with Somalis’ Y-DNA, later Nubian cultural elements and possibly even Somalis' specifically Naqadan-like phenotypic features.
These later arrivals likely came from populations living near and along the Nile Valley until at least 1500 BCE, who then moved south and likely mixed with earlier Cushitic and Omotic groups in the Horn to form the basal ancestral make up of all modern Horn Cushites and Ethiosemites since some of the cultural influences they brought with them such as the agricultural advances appear all over the Horn and they likely would have passed through regions such as the northern highlands of Ethiopia to get to the modern spread of East-Cushites we have today in areas such as Southwestern Ethiopia.
This would be highly speculative if it stood on one point such as the cultural data. But when considered alongside the linguistic, archaeological, genetic, and craniometric data it begins to look very much like an overall case has been formed for East-Cushites in particular having lived along the Nile as recently as at least 1500 BCE with the Wawat and Kerman cultures effectively being a previously ignored element in the Horn's ancestral story and likely the deepest ancestral and direct linguistic progenitors of today's East Cushites such as Oromos, Sidamas, Gedeos, Sahos, Afars, and Somalis.
- I am aware that yet another Old Kingdom Egyptian sample is out now. And I will be making a follow up post where I try to model modern Horn Africans utilizing it and go into how it relates to all of the above. Much of the genetic analysis phase of this post was done many months before that sample was released so I did not get the chance to integrate it, but preliminarily noodling about with it, last I checked, produced some promising results.
- The reference list follows the Vancouver style not because I studied in a field or institution that required it, but simply because I enjoy the format in terms of aesthetics and clarity. Please note that when citations appear as “1–4”, this indicates 1, 2, 3, and 4. When they appear as “1, 4”, it means 1 and 4 only.
- Some of you might also be wondering where cultural horizons such as Gash and Butana fit into all of this and I have a future post planned for those cultures as they absolutely deserve.
- All my charts, PCAs, and genomic modeling are available in both R-script and output formats on GitHub. I value transparency, so every step is fully replicable, with all code clearly annotated and easy to follow. I even made my own edited version of nMonte in R that lets you run several Target samples at once like Vahaduo does. Enjoy.
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