Did the ancestors of Amazigh/Berbers originate in the Levant or Arabia, or are they indigenous..

[Sikeliot]

to North Africa?

Berbers seem to derive from 3 sources... an Iberian-like source, an Arabian-like source, and some Sub-Saharan affinity.

When did each arrive? When did the ancestors of Berbers split from the ancestors of other Afroasiatic people, and did they originate in the Arabian Peninsula or some other part of West Asia and then migrate into North Africa?

[Mens-Sarda]

There are signs of human presence in that area since remote ages (12.000 b.C.), like cave paintings and graffiti; perhaps the ancestors of Berbers always lived there, when the Sahara was not a desert but a huge savannah, with lakes and rivers and the usual fauna of African animals we see in documentaries. When the Sahara region underwent desertification about 6000 - 4000 years ago the Berbers' ancestors moved to north Africa in less arid areas, while other groups moved eastwards, when the Yellow Nile, a now extinct tributary of the Nile started to dry, (totally disappeared 2000 yars ago) they reached the Nile valley giving birth to Egyptian civilization. The western Egyptian and Sudanese deserts are full of prehistorical graffiti made by these peoples, these graffiti look like the prototypes of the Egyptian art (if we look also at the animal headed Egyptian gods, they are clearly derived from primitive totem animals).

[Leto]

I think they must be West Eurasian originally. However now they are seriously mixed with Africans. I would like to see some Kabyle GEDmatch results. For example Zinedine Zidane's who passes as white.

[Mens-Sarda]

Pure blood Berbers probably descend from the Ibero-Maurusian culture, white people who arrived from Iberia escaping from the Ice Age. While from south arrived black skinned people, probably the ancestors of modern day Touareghs, which are black skinned people who speak a Berber language.

If we look to the ancient rock paintings found on the mountains of Tassili N'Ajjer in southern Algeria we find rock paintings which depict black people and white people, and also women dancing and wearing animal masks which look very similar to the Egyptian gods.

Tassili is here :

http://smarthistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/parkmap-870x421.jpg

The white ladies of Tassili (3000 b.C.) :

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Tassili_ladies.jpg

Tassili black dancers :

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/0a/ef/87/0aef878e59e88bbab4b10b434787aac6.jpg

Tassili dancers wearing animal masks (incredibly similar to Egyptian gods) :

http://www.fjexpeditions.com/tassili/rockart/hoax.jpg

[Damião de Góis]

Their main haplogroup suggests an african origin.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/World_Map_of_Y-DNA_Haplogroups.png

[AtlantoMediterranean]

Pure blood Berbers probably descend from the Ibero-Maurusian culture, white people who arrived from Iberia escaping from the Ice Age. While from south arrived black skinned people, probably the ancestors of modern day Touareghs, which are black skinned people who speak a Berber language.


And the whites of Iberia came from where for to arrive in Iberia ?

[Kelmendasi]

They could be native in the area considering that Afro-Asiatic languages originate in Africa and their main haplogroup, E-M81, is native there (although some theories state that E originates in west Asia from DE going by how it's brother clade, D, is only found in Asia). But they received a lot of input from west Asian migrations dating from the Neolithic and Paleolithic.