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European Lineages in Africa

And there’s another paternal lineage that might preserve evidence of movements between Neolithic Europe and Africa. That lineage is R1B V88. Today R1B V88 reaches its highest European Lineages in Africa frequencies in the central Sahel, particularly in northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad and Niger. In some sample populations of northern Cameroon, it’s carried by more than 3/4 of the men. It also survives at much lower frequencies in parts of North Africa like Egypt and in Sardinia.

The oldest known carriers of R1B V88 were messylithic hunter gatherers in the Balkans. These include two individuals from the Iron Gates region of Serbia dating to around 9,000 BC. Watch my video on Leensky Ve to find out more about these people.

During the Neolithic, the lineage is seen in European farming populations. A man buried at a cave site in the Pyrenees in around 5100 BC carried R1B V88. Interestingly, this was a massacre site of early farmers, perhaps by local hunter gatherers or by another farming group. V88 was also common among ancient Sardinians. This distribution suggests that a paternal lineage originally carried by European hunter gatherers was incorporated into expanding Neolithic farming populations and carried westwards through Mediterranean Europe.

After that, however, there is a gap in the direct evidence. As of now, there’s only two Yapper group samples from the Moroccan colony site and they’re both G2A. If we could get more samples from the region, perhaps we would find V88 among them. The African part of the story has instead been reconstructed mainly from the family tree of modern Y chromosomes.

One study estimated that V88 originated in Europe approximately 12,000 years ago and that the ancestors of its African branches entered the Sahara between about 6,700 to 5,900 BC. But these are statistical estimates of when different branches shared common ancestors, not direct dates for a migration. And they don’t tell us where the Mediterranean was crossed, but the estimated date range is within the African humid period when lakes, rivers, and extensive grasslands occupied regions that are now desert. These conditions would have made movement across the green Sahara far easier than it is today.

The same genetic study identified a later expansion of V88 around the Lake Chad basin between about 3800 and 3,300 BC. This expansion likely accounts for much of the lineage’s present concentration in the central Sel. Who carried this lineage towards Lake Chad is unknown. We have to look at the archaeological evidence for possible cultures in these regions at this time and see if any of them might fit with these kinds of movements. One plausible candidate is the pastural populations archaeologists associate with the Tenarian tradition. They occupied the central Sahara during the same broad period in which V88 underwent its rapid expansion.

Some Tenarian communities practiced cattle husbandry, constructed megalithic monuments, and carried out ritual cattle sacrifice. The people buried at the site of Goro were also physically distinct from the population that had occupied the region before them. being shorter and more slender and with a cranial morphology described as Mediterranean. It’s thought the megalithic and cattle sacrifice traditions of the Tenarians were a response to the aridification that ultimately drove them out of the Sahara and into the Sahel by about 2200 BC. And as the broad waters of Lake Meachad receded, fertile lands were exposed and settled by agriculturalists.

A mobile patrinearally organized pastoral society would provide a plausible mechanism for the expansion of a single paternal lineage. The Y chromosomes could be spread through founder effects, clan expansions and unequal reproductive success. The same kind of processes seen in later Indo-Uropean societies in fact. But this is just a hypothesis. We don’t yet have any Tenarian DNA. The V88 lineage might have been carried by Tenarian pastoralists or by another unsampled Saharan population.

And the concentration of V88 among a number of Chadicsp speakaking peoples led researchers to propose that its expansion was connected with the spread of the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. The association isn’t exact though. V88 is also found among people speaking Nylo Saharan, Niger Congo and unclassified languages. Anyway, the V88 lineage seems to be linked with the expansions of Chadic speaking populations across the region.

By the late Neolithic, North African groups were a mixture of people and cultures from the Mediterranean, the Levant, and the Sahara. And we have evidence suggesting a remarkable journey of a lineage over thousands of years from the Mesolithic hunter gatherers of the Balkans to Neolithic Iberia into the green Sahara, the drying Lake Chad, and into tropical West Africa. And we now know that around 5,500 BC, pioneering Neolithic farmers, men and women, crossed from Iberia, established communities, and mixed with local Mcgrebi people. The crops, livestock, and technologies they introduced were then adopted and transformed by local communities spreading the Neolithic way of life through North Africa.

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