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Does anyone know if the exact origins of the Afro-Asiatic language has been determined by linguist? Is it somewhere in Africa or the middle east?
I'd like to relate this to the origins of the ancient Egyptians. Since they spoke an Afro-Asiatic language what does that indicate about their origins?
Does anyone know if the exact origins of the Afro-Asiatic language has been determined by linguist? Is it somewhere in Africa or the middle east?
I'd like to relate this to the origins of the ancient Egyptians. Since they spoke an Afro-Asiatic language what does that indicate about their origins?
Afro-Asiatic a language family - hundreds of languages. There is no "Afro-Asiatic language" per se.
To add on to the Egyptian part of my question. Some of you may know that back in May it came out that some Egyptian mummies' DNA showed them to have been related to people coming from the Levant area of western Asia. But some critics of these results say that if the Egyptians largely came from the middle east then the Egyptians would have been Semitic speakers. The Egyptians were Afro-Asiatic speakers instead.
Africa has the largest group of Afro-Asiatic speakers. But I've seen info saying that some linguist believe that the Afro-Asiatic language family originated in the Levant instead of Africa and was then carried out to other places like North Africa by migrants from the Levant. This is one reason I was curious to know if Africa or the middle east has been determined to be the homeland of this language family? If the homeland was the Levant then I guess that would explain how the language became a part of Egypt through those Eurasian migrants to North Africa?
The linguistic term "Afro-Asiatic" replaced the old "racial" categories of Hamitic and Semitic, although I'm not sure it is much of an advance.
All "humans" apparently migrated out of Africa, with the Levant one of the first stops along the way. Haplogroup J (Y-DNA) is believed to have evolved in Western Asia and spread starting around 6,000 BC to North Africa along with the Neolithic Revolution, but did not supplant the hunter-gatherer populations that already lived there and had migrated to the Nile River Valley and the Mediterranean Coast, as the Sahara dried up, going from a lush "wonderland" to an arid desert.
The failure to locate a "homeland" in which Proto-Afro-Asiatic was spoken might mean that there isn't one, but two, with previously separate language traditions merging rather than sharing a common root.
The scientists obtained information about variations in mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child, from 90 mummies. Because of contamination, the team was able to acquire detailed nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, from only three mummies.
Both types of genomic material showed that ancient Egyptians shared little DNA with modern sub-Saharan Africans. Instead, their closest relatives were people living during the Neolithic and Bronze ages in an area known as the Levant. Strikingly, the mummies were more closely related to ancient Europeans and Anatolians than to modern Egyptians.
The researchers say that there was probably a pulse of sub-Saharan African DNA into Egypt roughly 700 years ago. The mixing of ancient Egyptians and Africans from further south means that modern Egyptians can trace 8% more of their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africans than can the mummies from Abusir el-Meleq.
The new data can’t explain why the ancient Egyptians were so tightly aligned with people from the Middle East. Was it the result of migration, or were the Stone Age hunter-gatherers of northern Africa genetically similar to those of the Levant? It’s too early to tell, Krause says, but there’s a better chance now of getting answers.
Results are from Middle Egypt (the ancient town of Abusir el-Meleq) from 1,380 BC to 425 AD. Questions remain as to how much ancient Upper and Lower Egyptian populations might have differed from that of Middle Egypt. Possible sources of Levantine/Anatolian DNA:
* Invasion of the Hyksos (1,720-1,570 BC), a purportedly Semitic group who introduced chariot warfare into Egypt and dominated Lower and Middle Egypt for 150 years. The Hyksos were hated as a foreign and alien invaders.
* Spread of Neolithic farmers from the Levant and Anatolia c. 5,000 BC (Badarian culture), who sought out fluvial plains and riverine valleys with rich soil deposits for settlement.
* Reverse migration of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers into a wetter North African/Sahara region c. 10,000 BC from the Levant, following the original out-migratton of Homo Sapiens from Africa (c. 100,000-50,000 BC). With the drying up of the Saharan "savannah", these populations migrated to the Mediterranean coast and the Nile River Valley.
Last edited by CrazyDonkey; 01-25-2018 at 12:12 PM..
The new data can’t explain why the ancient Egyptians were so tightly aligned with people from the Middle East. Was it the result of migration, or were the Stone Age hunter-gatherers of northern Africa genetically similar to those of the Levant? It’s too early to tell, Krause says, but there’s a better chance now of getting answers.
I hope they can do some test on the old kingdom population. Those results would be interesting. From what I've read from different people in response to these DNA test they are most interested in what Egypt was like before the Hyksos since they were the first outsiders to rule Egypt.
Afro-Asiatic languages is a very broad language family similar to Indo-European languages. There are 6 branches in the Afro-Asiatic language family: Berber, Chadic, Cu****ic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. Ancient Egyptian is most similar to Semitic which originated in the middle east, but it is also similar to Cu****ic which originated in the horn of Africa. What probably happened is that the Cu****ic family migrated down the Nile and formed the extinct Egyptian family and from there created a Semitic off shoot. However it's possible that Egyptian was an off shoot of Semitic, or that both Cu****ic and Semitic were offshoots of Egyptian, so I can't really so who came first. But to answer your question, the entire family of the Afro-Asiatic family's origin is unclear, some speculate the horn of Africa, upper Egypt, or even the Levant. You can look into it more here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_Urheimat
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