People are generally familiar with the infamous Nazi ideology of a Germanic Aryan master race, however, few people will be familiar with a similar hypothesis regarding the African continent: the Hamitic hypothesis. It has a long, convoluted history and goes back to the bible. It developed into a racial theory based on Noah’s three sons: Sem, Japheth and Ham, from whom the Semites (Asians), Japhites (Europeans) and Hamites (Africans) supposedly originated. C. G. Seligman wrote in Races of Africa (1930)
Apart from relatively late Semitic influence... the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushman, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali ...The incoming Hamites were pastoral 'Europeans'-arriving wave after wave-better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes.
The Hamitic hypothesis has done a lot of harm during the colonial period and was also used as a pretext in the Rwandan genocide on both Tutsi (originally pastoralists) and Hutu (originally farmers). The word Hamitic has all but disappeared from scientific discourse and the linguistic group has been subsumed as Kushitic together with Semitic in the Afroasiatic language family. Recently Michael Robinson made fun of it in his TEDx talk: “A Theory You've Never Heard Of”. However, rather than making fun of it, it would be more sensible to consider the part of the Hamitic hypothesis that is not based on any ideas of racist thinking, i.e. the spread of pastoralism from the Near East.
Pontus Skoglund analyzed ancient DNA from the approximately thirty-one-hundred-year-old remains of an infant girl from Tanzania in equatorial East Africa, and an approximately twelve-hundred-year-old sample from the western Cape region of South Africa, both buried among artifacts and animal bones that identified them as being from herder populations. The Tanzanian girl was a member of the ghost herding population that Pickrell and I had predicted: a group that derived most of its ancestry from ancient East African hunter-gatherers, and the remaining part from an ancient West Eurasian–related population. This population almost certainly played a major role in spreading cattle herding from the Near East and North Africa across sub-Saharan Africa. (David Reich, 2017)
Haplogroup J1 largely correlates with Afroasiatic languages and those languages seem to have been spread by mobile pastoralism. It is possible that the language family was entirely spread by herding and not herding/farming through pastoralists who came to dominate local farming populations as is the case of the Tutsi and Hutu.
The Tutsi speak a Bantu language (spread by farming) which they adopted from the Hutu. However, they have a high genetic relatedness to the Maasai, who speak a Nilo-Saharan language, which may represent another language family spread by mobile pastoralism.
Ultimately both language families may be at least partially related via pastoralism. The Afroasiatic language family is considered to be about 12,000 years old and may have had its very origin in the original population that started cattle or sheep herding in the Zagros mountains.
The fact that Tutsi have more Near Eastern genetic admixture does not make them racially superior to the Hutus in any way. Hitler would turn in his grave if he found out that Slavic peoples, who he considered inferior, have more Ayran (or Yamnaya) admixture than the alleged Germanic master race.
The moral of the story is that we tend to have underestimated the role of mobile pastoralism in the spreading of languages. Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Altaic languages were all spread widely by pastoralism and while I don’t think there was ever a Proto-Nostratic language, I do think that mobile pastoralism accounts for a lot of the similarities among the speakers of this hypothetical super-family.
If you found this article interested you might want to check out my book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZR3KPVH
Comments
Post a Comment