What is the origin of the Natufians in the Levant?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by pluto2, Feb 2, 2009.

  1. pluto2 Banned Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,085
    What was the origin of the Natufians in the Levent? Did they come from Egypt?
     
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. mathman Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    2,002
    Since the Natufians lived around 10000 BC it is very hard to determine where they came from. Try Google to get what is known and some guesses.
     
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    According to this blog, which adds to what's in the Wikipedia article:
    This says that they barely have these people figured out at all. All they can say (and even that is not for sure) is that they're part of the population of Eurasians, the people whose ancestors migrated out of Africa around 50KYA. That doesn't mean they could not have come from Egypt, because by 10KYA North Africa had been long abandoned by the sub-Saharan Africans and repopulated by Eurasians. The Nubians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, etc., are more closely related to Europeans, Arabs, Chinese and Iroquois than they are to the people we now refer to as "Africans."

    It sounds to me like they haven't found any tissue with enough DNA integrity to analyze it. If and when they do, that will shed more light on the subject. So far they're basing their hypotheses on bone proportions.

    Nonetheless, it is quite possible that the "Natufians," as we call them (that name is a convenience, from the name of the place in Modern Israel where the archeological site was found, and claims no historical validity) were not a tribe in the Paleolithic sense. The region boasted a climate that yielded a bounty of food, permitting hunter-gatherers who had not yet invented the technology of agriculture to nonetheless build semi-permanent settlements.

    Food scarcity was arguably the main reason for hostility between tribes, so these villagers might have been somewhat sanguine about outsiders moving in with their new skills, interesting stories, and charming exotic ways... and looks.

    The Natufians are remarkable for having developed a Neolithic society without Neolithic technology.

    They also provide the earliest physical evidence of the domestication of dogs. In at least two Natufian graves, humans were buried with dogs.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. pluto2 Banned Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,085
    I agree with everything you said except this part. If anything Europeans, Arabs, Chinese and Iroquois are more related to Africans than vice versa. Ethiopians are Sudanese are absolutely African although they do have some ties with Arabians who crossed the red sea into the horn of Africa and Sudan not too long ago.

    Also about the Nubians and ancient Egyptians: Some Afrocentric scholars (see this thread) suggest they come from the south from Nubia which means that if they lived today we probably would call them "black Africans".
     
    Last edited: Feb 5, 2009
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    Well of course all the non-African peoples are descended from an African tribe that walked into Asia 50KYA during an ice age when food was scarce in Africa and sea levels were a couple of hundred feet lower. That's something that would only be considered controversial in Kentucky or the Third Reich. DNA analysis has even told us which tribe it is: the San or "Bushmen." The members of that tribe who didn't make the trek are still there, albeit much further south as a result of the abandonment of North Africa.
    The link between the peoples of North Africa and western Asia is much earlier than that, more like 10KYA. The technology of pastoral nomadism had just been invented in Asia and it gave the Asians an ability the still-Mesolithic Africans didn't have: to survive in such a desolate region. So they recolonized it.
    Admittedly, it's not easy to analyze the DNA of people who live at the crossroads of three continents. The people who live there today have a strong superstratum of Semitic DNA from the days when the armies of Caliph Omar obliterated Egyptian civilization and turned it into an Arab land. Not to mention the genetic souvenirs of more ancient adventurers and warriors like the Romans and Greeks and even slaves like the exiled Jews. Perhaps more research will settle the question eventually.

    In the meantime, arguably the best evidence we've got is linguistic. The language of the ancient Egyptians as well as those of the modern inhabitants of northeastern Africa belong to the Afro-Asiatic language family, and are related to Hebrew, Arabic, Assyrian, Aramaic, etc. If North Africa was not recolonized by west Asians, then west Asia must have experienced a second wave of migration out of Africa. That's not a totally implausible hypothesis but it has a lot of holes.

    The people whose descendants founded Egyptian civilization were pastoral nomads. I don't think animal husbandry, one of the two technologies that launched the Agricultural Revolution (the other of course is farming) and ushered in the Neolithic Era, had yet been developed by the nearby African people in 7000-8000BCE. It's much more likely to have been brought over from the Levant, where agriculture was well established and the first Stone Age cities were already taking form.
    I really hate using skin color as a demographic because it's such an ephemeral trait. When a people migrates to a more northern or southern region, their descendants' skins become lighter or darker to completely adjust to the angle of the sun in a mere two millennia. After all, the very dark Marathi and the very light Lithuanians are both Eastern Indo-Europeans, separated only by a few thousand years of migration in opposite directions. In England, the "N-word" is used as a derogatory term for Indians.

    I'm hoping for the day Rastafari Makonnen (Haile Selassie, an Ethiopian who nonetheless expressed solidarity with sub-Saharan Africa and dark-skinned people the world over) yearned for, "When the color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes." We just made a giant step in that direction in the USA.
     
  9. pluto2 Banned Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,085
  10. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    * * * * NOTE FROM THE LINGUISTICS MODERATOR * * * *

    The conjectures in the two articles referenced are nothing more than conjectures. The hypothesis of a Nostratic language family is intriguing but the evidence for it is far too weak to promote it to a theory. It is not regarded as authoritative among linguists and so it cannot be used in support of other hypotheses.

    The similarity of words in two or more language families is not conclusive evidence of a relationship of descent. It could as easily be evidence of a Sprachbund. In fact the evidence is just as compelling that the vocabulary of a language undergoes a complete turnover in roughly ten thousand years, even "immutable" words like pronouns and numerals. It's just as likely that the words are borrowings--the bread-and-butter English words use, very, second and question are all French; the Basque word for six is Spanish--and it's even more likely sheer coincidence. There are, after all, only so many phonemes.

    Other aspects of language undergo the same wrenching level of change in that time. It's now suspected that as recently as 2KYA, Chinese was not a tonal language. Grammar and syntax--basic paradigms like masculine/feminine and present/past/future--are far more ephemeral than we thought.

    I have frequently pointed out that the structure of one's language guides the way one thinks, since the majority of our most important thoughts are formed in words. Assuming this is true, then the way we think has changed enormously over the eons.

    Attempts at analyzing language beyond the 10,000-year veil have not turned up any respectable findings. Papers that suggest otherwise are simply in need of another level of peer review.
     
  11. pluto2 Banned Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,085
    True telling the origins of a language is quite different from telling the origins of a people. Language is part of culture but people of different ancestral origins can speak the same or a similar language and share other common cultural elements. So the origin of a language/culture tells nothing about the origin of a people.
     

Share This Page