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Originally posted by Evergreen:
Ancient watercourses and biogeography
of the Sahara explain the peopling of the desert

Drakea et. al.

PNAS 2011

The Peopling of the Sahara During the Holocene

We hypothesize that the differences in animal resources between the northern and southern Sahara during the early Holocene influenced the way it was peopled by humans. The north–south contrast in Saharan species ranges are remarkably similar to some key lithic, bone tool, and linguistic spatial distributions, suggesting that the peopling of the region during the early Holocene humid phase was driven by cultural adaptations that allowed exploitation of specific fauna. The early Holocene archaeology of the Sahara is characterized by a regional distribution of specific archaeological cultures, such as those defined by barbed bone points, fishhooks, Ounanian arrow-points, and, more controversially, pottery. The Sahara today is largely populated by speakers of Afroasiatic
languages, Berber and Arabic, with some Nilo Saharan languages (Teda-Daza and Zaghawa) in the region of Northern Chad, and Songhay cluster languages scattered across Mali and Niger. However, it is clear that this situation is recent; Berberspeaking Tuareg moved into the Central Sahara ∼1500 y ago and the spread of the Hassaniya Moors into Mauritania probably dates from the 15th Century. Before this time, the central and southern Sahara are thought to have been populated by Nilo-Saharan speakers. The Nilo-Saharan language phylum is both widespread and strongly internally divided, suggesting considerable antiquity. Its greatest diversity is in the east, where a large number of small branches are found suggesting the original locus of expansion. Although fragmented into enclave populations today, the presence and pattern of relic populations in the northern desert points strongly to a much wider distribution in the past, covering the region from the Ethio-Sudan borderland to Mauritania and southwest Morocco.
It has long been suggested that Nilo-Saharan languages might correlate with barbed bone points, the so-called “Aqualithic” superimposes the sites of known barbed bone points on a map of current Nilo-Saharan languages, showing a remarkable similarity in spatial distribution, and also a notable correspondence with Holocene distribution of large aquatic species. It appears that the expansion of aquatic resources in the Holocene made the Sahara attractive to populations with existing fishing and riverine hunting skills. Their ability to hunt hippopotamus and crocodiles and to catch a wide variety of deepwater fish species would have propelled a rapid dispersal from east to west
and into the central Sahara, to judge by the numerous branches of Nilo-Saharan in the east. Their movement further north would have been restricted by the absence of many of these species. However, the presence of an isolated Nilo-Saharan population (the Koranje, a branch of Songhay) and a barbed bone point in Northwest Africa near the headwaters of the catchment of the Soura River, the river that links the Atlas mountains to the lakes in the Ahnet-Mouydir basin, forming a corridor from the central Sahara to Northwest Africa, indicates that a few groups may have traversed the green Sahara using the most promising routes. There is direct linguistic evidence that Nilo-Saharan populations exploited these aquatic resources in the form of a widespread cognate for “hippo” from
Gumuz in Ethiopia, to Songhay in Mali. SI Appendix, Table S2 shows similar forms for “crocodile,” although in this case the cognates are split between eastern and western languages. We hypothesize that the other economic revolution that occurred in the Sahara at approximately the same time was the southward spread of the bow and arrow. North African hunters would have observed the new abundance of large and unfamiliar land mammals to the south, notably elephant and giraffe. In a dispersal inverse to that of the Nilo-Saharans, they would have been attracted southward to hunt these animals with the bow and arrow. The “Ounanian” of Northern Mali, Southern Algeria, Niger, and central Egypt at ca. 10 ka is partly defined by a
distinctive type of arrow point. These arrowheads are found in much of the northern Sahara (Fig. 3) and are generally considered
to have spread from Northwest Africa. This view is supported by the affinity of this industry with the Epipalaeolithic that also appears to have colonized the Sahara from the north. No
Ounanian points occur in West Africa before 10 ka, suggesting the movement of a technology across the desert from north to south around this time. Our model envisages the initial Holocene repopulation of the Sahara being carried out by two separate populations practicing two quite different resource exploitation strategies: (i) aquatic foraging using bone point and fish hook technology, and (ii) savanna hunting using the bow and arrow. By linking the distribution of the Nilo-Saharan language phyla to the archaeological distribution of aquatic- and terrestrial-adapted technologies, we explain the pattern of human repopulation of the desert in terms of the changing faunal distribution, which is in turn dictated by the nature of trans- Saharan hydrological linkages.

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Posts: 2007 | From: Washington State | Registered: Oct 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by zarahan:
Interesting that they link Nilo-Saharan to barbed
hooks of the aqualithic culture. How do you think
the two strategies- aqualithic and savannah-hunting
played out in the Nile Valley?

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Posts: 8889 | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by The Explorer:
About the "Tuareg" thing, i.e. their supposed movement into central Sahara at ca. 1500 years ago. From where, one might query. Tamasheq/"Tuaregs" are visibly absent in eastern Africa, i.e. if Libyan territory is not considered. Whatever may be said of their ultimate proto-Imazighen eastern African ancestors sometime ca. early-mid Holocene, nothing comes to mind that would suggest that the actual ethnogenesis of the Tamasheq ("Tuaregs") occurred outside of either central or western Africa; common western African hg L mtDNA markers [e.g. hg L1b, L2b, L3e2b, L3e3, L3f1] had been identified in Tamasheq samples from as far as Tahala and Jebel al Awaynat in Libya, which suggests that the Tamasheq there were not totally isolated from western African originated folks, likely western African Tamasheq counterparts.

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Posts: 8889 | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged |