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THE ULTIMATE NORTH AFRICAN THREAD.
This thread was asked by some members and i gladly accepted to make this thread.
First of all let me say that NAs in their vast majority are clearly their own people and ignorants should stop trying to link them with foreign nations or saying that they are a mix of ME + european + ssa. Moreover I'm not a geneticist or an anthropologist but i've been reading about NA's history and genetics for years now and i think that i can give an objective opinion about this region.
Here some facts to begin with :
- North africa = 6 018 920,8 km² which means it's bigger than south europe and the levantine region
- From my analyse there are differences between the western and the eastern part of north africa from a cultural and genetic point of view (so even in terms of phenotypes) the border between them would be the gulf of Sidra
- There are also differences between coastal north africans ( who have absorbed more mediterranean-like ancestry) and inland populations ( the difference is of course bigger with saharans)
- A mistake that a lot of people are making here is to think that if you don't look south euro then you're not mediterranean which is false because on every level coastal north africans are mediterraneans.
- A big portion of North africa is desertic but the vast majority of north africans don't live in the desertic area and most of them have never seen the desert in their life (except on the internet maybe).
- Berbers/north africans don't form one people with one culture and one language ( even before arabs came) that's why comparing them with egyptians , spaniards or persians is wrong. There are multiple berber dialects and multiple berber phenotypes and during most of their history they have never been united or felt united by race, culture, etc ( their biggest weakness imo they have always been extremely tribalistic it's still the case today btw )
Some genetic facts pls memorize them :
source: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/423079v1.fullMoreover, our model predicts that West Africans (represented by Yoruba) had 12.5±1.1% ancestry from a Taforalt-related group rather than Taforalt having ancestry from an unknown Sub-Saharan African source11; this may have mediated the limited Neanderthal admixture present in West Africans23. An advantage of our model is that it allows for a local North African component in the ancestry of Taforalt, rather than deriving them exclusively from Levantine and Sub-Saharan sources.
Which means that the ssa that most North africans get ( on gedmatch, commercial tests , etc ) was in fact an iberomaurusian component with only a little part of it being real ssa ( only G25 seems to be up to date about this ).
and here by taking the iberomaurusian into account that's what we get for the SSA among north africans :
Of course these are average results there is also the individual diversity to take into account. I've personally seen coastal berber with less than 5% but in general they all have it.
Now about the european ancestry :
Source : https://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6774#sec-2By 3,000 BCE, a continuity in the Neolithic spread brought Mediterranean-like ancestry to the Maghreb, most likely from Iberia. Other archaeological remains, such as African elephant ivory and ostrich eggs found in Iberian sites, confirm the existence of contacts and exchange networks through both sides of the Gibraltar strait at this time. Our analyses strongly support that at least some of the European ancestry observed today in North Africa is related to prehistoric migrations, and local Berber populations were already admixed with Europeans before the Roman conquest. Furthermore, additional European/Iberian ancestry could have reached the Maghreb after KEB people; this scenario is supported by the presence of Iberian-like Bell-Beaker pottery in more recent stratigraphic layers of IAM and KEB caves.
Most of the european ancestry of north africans (especially maghrebis) is ancient and has nothing to do with vandals, french,romans or the barbary slave trade.
Did the trans-saharan slave trade affect North africa ?
Imo yes but in less proportion than what it is commonly said here and only in some specific areas ( like big urban areas , desertic oasis, etc ) ---> Black people have always been marginalized and black men weren't allowed to marry berber women but it wasn't rare for a berber man to have children with his black slave and their children were not considered slaves ( for example one of the most famous sultan of the alawite dynasty Moulay ismail was half black).
All living Berbers have some form of or forms of symbiotic relationship with native Africans. In every Rifian village of any size, the ironwork is done by a Negroid smith. Other Negroids serve as butchers and town criers at weekly markets, and still others are musicians who wander from tribe to tribe enlivening weddings and other festivities. Negroids, then, are the principal service personal among agricultural Berbers, and probably have been so since the introduction of iron into North Africa early in the Christian era.
Among the part-time and full-time nomads the interracial relationship is more complicated. The Ait Atta for example, who pasture their sheep ion the middle Atlas in summer and in the Dades Valley to the south in winter, have their castles and gardens in Dades valley. There they delegate the agricultural work to caste of Negroid serfs, the Haratin. Other Haratin are found in oases all along the northern fringe of the Sahara, and indeed throughout the desert.The camel nomads, particular the famed Tuareg, or People of Vel, are divided into castes of nobles, imghad, or camel-breeding dependents who also have their Haratin, and slaves. The merchant communities of the great oases, like the Mzabites of Ghardaia, foster endogamy as they belong to a schismatic sect of Islam, that of the Khawarij, or Kharijites. They to have their gardens tilled by Haratin. From "THE LIVING RACES OF MAN" by Carleton S. Coon, 1965--->Wherever or however they, the Berbers refuse to mate with the Negroid lower classes, but human nature bing what it is, there evidently has been a certain amount of mixture. In Morocco, the most Caucasoid tribes are those of the Rif and the Middle Atlas; in Algeria they are the Kabyles and the Shawia; and in Libya, the sedentary tribesmen of Jebel Nefusa. In certain regions the trickle of mixture with Africans has been balanced by the absorption of Arabs, not so much tribe by tribe but through the establishment of saintly families survived from the earlier of the two main Arab invasions. These Arabs come most from al-Hijaz and Yemen, and were not Bedawin." from "THE LIVING RACES OF MAN" by Carleton S. Coon, 1965--->21% of Moroccans belong to Sub Saharan maternal Haplogroups, in contrast 6% SSA paternal Haplogroups.So it had an impact but coastal populations have been preserved from this ( except the ones who are the product of recent intern migrations of course)."By comparing ancient individuals from Abusir el-Meleq with modern Egyptian reference populations, we found an influx of sub-Saharan African ancestry after the Roman Period, which corroborates the findings by Henn and colleagues16. Further investigation would be needed to link this influx to particular historic processes. [B]Possible causal factors include increased mobility down the Nile and increased long-distance commerce between sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt49. Trans-Saharan slave trade may have been particularly important as it moved between 6 and 7 million sub-Saharan slaves to Northern Africa over a span of some 1,250 years, reaching its high point in the nineteenth century"
These are their modern descendents :
Now as for the arab impact people have to know that the conquest of the maghreb was made by ....berbers from libya who were freshly converted to islam and their generals were arabs ( so this first conquest didn't impact the genetic pool of maghrebi) but in Libya and especially eastern libya berbers there have been replaced and it's the only region in NA where the arab component is bigger than the berber one. What happened next is more interesting : during the XIth century some arab tribes (hilalian invasions) were sent to the maghreb by the fatimids to punish their zirid (ex) vassals and these arabs greatly impacted the maghreb especially on the socio-cultural level (that's where the arabization process really started) but less from a genetic point of view.
Now enough talking and let's take a look at Maghrebi phenotypes .
coastal type (phenotypes that are quite rare in more inland areas) :
Phenotypes who are mainly found in inland areas ( mountainous areas included ) in this case some of them are darker not because they have ssa but because they have less mediterranean-like ancestry (more iberomaurusian) :
Pre-desertic and desertic type :
Do not forget that internal migrations happened so you can find all those types in different regions.
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Originally Posted by grecoroman
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