Why is there a huge rise of Afrocentrism in history?

[ArmoredCore]

Goddamn this post was thorough!

I'm assuming those guys (Nubians?) sitting on the floor in the spoiler picture are prisoners of war being accounted for by recorded number (i.e. there's an Egyptian guy standing above them who seems to be writing on a piece of wood or ceramic ostraca)? Look at their distinctive sub-Saharan features plus those big ass earrings! Very cool pic, thanks for sharing.

And what I am saying is that all that genetic and skeletal data is obfuscating the fact which I have said multiple times. The closest people to the ancient Egyptians are the Egyptians, especially the Upper Egyptians. Yet every time some "dataz" is posted we go all over the map to other places and other populations outside Egypt to try and find a match. Yet NONE of these people which are supposedly so close to the ancients look anything like the people in Upper Egypt to this day, many of whom are indeed black. That isn't anthropology that is nonsense. Basic observation shows clearly that the people in Upper Egypt especially, having LESS mixture with foreign elements retain the closest similarity to the ancient population. And this is obvious if one simply looks. There are no "indigenous white Eurasians" all over Upper Egypt as your "dataz" would suggest because if that were the case then when you go to Upper Egypt you would see them all over the place an you don't, even after all these years of mixing.

[sumskilz]

The closest people to the ancient Egyptians are the Egyptians, especially the Upper Egyptians.

The closest modern people to ancient Egyptians are specifically Egyptian Copts:





And North Sudanese Copts:



This has been demonstrated to you ad nauseum in posts #49, #52, #106, #108, #120, #152, #169, and #179.

Your posts have devolved into the equivalent to young earth creationism.

[athanaric]

And what I am saying is that all that genetic and skeletal data is obfuscating the fact which I have said multiple times. The closest people to the ancient Egyptians are the Egyptians, especially the Upper Egyptians. Yet every time some "dataz" is posted we go all over the map to other places and other populations outside Egypt to try and find a match. Yet NONE of these people which are supposedly so close to the ancients look anything like the people in Upper Egypt to this day, many of whom are indeed black. That isn't anthropology that is nonsense. Basic observation shows clearly that the people in Upper Egypt especially, having LESS mixture with foreign elements retain the closest similarity to the ancient population. And this is obvious if one simply looks. There are no "indigenous white Eurasians" all over Upper Egypt as your "dataz" would suggest because if that were the case then when you go to Upper Egypt you would see them all over the place an you don't, even after all these years of mixing.

Why don't you try to debate the facts and evidence presented by sumskilz (and hardly anyone else - certainly no one on your side of the argument) instead of making fun of scientific data like some Intelligent Design believer? You do know that "dataz", as you call it, is what makes science run in the first place, right? Are you familiar with the way science works, or do you just don't care?

edit - ninja'd again...

[sumskilz]

I find it odd that even from an intuitive perspective that it would be contentious that the people most similar to ancient Egyptians would be the people who maintained the language of ancient Egypt as their daily spoken language until at least the 17th Century CE, who still self-identify as rem en khēmi - "people of Egypt" in the Egyptian language, and who have been almost completely isolated from inward gene flow for almost 1,600 years.

[ArmoredCore]

The closest modern people to ancient Egyptians are specifically Egyptian Copts:





And North Sudanese Copts:



This has been demonstrated to you ad nauseum in posts #49, #52, #106, #108, #120, #152, #169, and #179.

Your posts have devolved into the equivalent to young earth creationism.

Oh and basically what you are saying is because they are lighter skinned they are more "pure" representations of the ancient population.
Yet the darker skinned populations in Upper Egypt and around places like Luxor don't count even though their complexion on average is closer to the "brown" of the ancient portraits.

No, the Copts are not "pure" isolated populations. They are heavily mixed with Greeks and others as Coptic Christianity is basically derived from Greek fathers in Egypt. All Egyptians have been impacted by population change over the last 2,000 years, even the so-called Nubians. And certainly these light skinned Coptic immigrants from Egypt are recent arrivals who in no way shape or form are more indigenous to the Upper Nile than the dam Upper Egyptians and Sudanese. You are simply determined to exclude Upper Egyptian people from the equation because you know that a lot of them are black even to this day. And this is where ancient Egyptian culture originated, Upper Egypt and Northern Sudan. So stop trying to pretend there is any credible science that says these ancient populations were somehow not black Africans like many of these people are to this day.

And before you speak of Coptic Christians you should read the actual history of Christianity in Sudan and Egypt. Before the Arabs invaded most of Egypt was Christian, as a result of Greek and then Roman activities. There were Christians in Sudan and Ethiopia. Those in Sudan and Upper Egypt were more similar to the natives of these regions including the Ethiopians. The Christians in Sudan were destroyed partly by Muhammad Ali of Egypt along with those in Upper Egypt. Those modern Copts are not more representative of ancient people along the Nile than the black people that have always been there. In your fantasy world black people aren't native to Upper Egypt and Sudan even though they have always been there and this is even among the mixed Arabic population of Egypt, not even going to the nomadic folks like the Beja. This isn't even scientific it is nonsense.

Yes you are right that Copts have historically identified themselves as inheriting the culture of ancient Egypt and being close to the ancients. And many others have also commented on the similarities between Copts and the ancients in the past, but the problem is all Copts aren't Egyptian. And todays population is not the same as the population even 200 years ago. And on top of that, the people of Upper Egypt are still Egyptians and still close to their own ancestors. Being Coptic has nothing to do with it.

Suffice to say modern Egypt is mixed and as time goes on will continue to get farther and farther away from what the ancients used to be.
And yes science can help in understanding this history, but to sit here and suggest that these populations 5,000 years ago would have looked like pale Levantines, Southern Europeans or any other population outside of Egypt is ridiculous. Especially when the Egyptians did not depict themselves like that and so many to this day don't look like that, even though there are some that do. These kinds of arguments oversimplify the history and diversity of the Egyptian population and try and remake it into some real world Cecil B. Demille fairy tale when it isn't. And it is especially hard to take such arguments seriously given the historical fact of European scientists having an agenda of proving the "racial superiority" of white Europeans throughout history. And ancient Egypt a cornerstone of that agenda, which is why to this day Egyptology is still promoting the same historical Cecil B. Demille fantasy of ancient Egypt that was promoted by the racist eugenicists like Petrie and Galton hundreds of years ago. Which is to say that "progress" is a hallmark of European society and the only way for this progress to take place is for Europeans to commit genocide or constant war against the non European people of the planet. Which is why historically Egypt was used by Morton to reinforce and uphold the practice of slavery in the United States. As if to say Europeans are descended from the ancient "white master race" of Egyptians and by subduing "Negroes" and other "inferior races" they are improving society and promoting civilization. Only somebody who is naive or disingenuous would claim this isn't the core issue.

[Himster]

It seems that Afrocentric revisionism is very similar to the far fetched delusions of of a certain group of people that once ruled a country we now call Germany, with all the same paranoia, victim-complex and obsession with arbitrary categorization. It's essentially Aryan-supremacism in black face.

[sumskilz]

Oh and basically what you are saying is because they are lighter skinned they are more "pure" representations of the ancient population.

No, I'm saying they are most similar based on primarily genetic evidence, but also quantifiable morphological evidence. These are the most reliable forms of evidence as they are considerably less open to subjective interpretation than other forms of evidence. There is considerable discontinuity between the prehistoric sub-Saharan population in the region and sub-Saharan components in the region which are part of the genome today. For example, Arredi et al 2004 didn't discover a single individual with Y-haplogroup A in his sampling of modern southern Egyptians which was predominate in the Neolithic Nubian remains tested by Yousef et al 2009. The current sub-Saharan elements in Egyptians arrived primarily since late antiquity according to IBD length and are only about half from neighboring sub-Saharan populations, the rest of their sub-Saharan ancestry is from populations more distant including West Africa. Multiple studies have come to this conclusion.

While Muslim Egyptians show some evidence of very low level European admixture presumably from Greek and Roman times, the Copts of Khartoum do not. So your speculation there is unfounded. In fact, the Southern Egyptians who you claim look just like the ancient Egyptians actually have six times as much recent Middle Eastern ancestry as the Copts from of Khartoum ~73% versus only ~12% in the Copts. This is only set off by the ~15-20% sub-Saharan ancestry which is usually 2% or less in the few Copts that have any. The funny thing is you appear to not be able to subjectively tell the difference between sub-Saharan admixed Egyptians and Beja despite the two only having about 20% of their ancestry in common as far as the last ~20,000 years goes, and this subjective impression is precisely how you're making your assessments.

At K=4, Beja and Copts are about 70% phylogenetically identical, whereas sub-Saharan admixed Egyptians and Copts are only about 20% identical (Arabs here are Arabized Nubians):



But I guess in your subjective view all brown and dark brown people look the same?

In summary:

Copts and Beja share about 70% of their ancestry from the last ~20,000 years, but...

Southern Egyptians and Beja share only about 20% of their ancestry from the last ~20,000 years

So if you're claiming ancient Egyptians were most like Southern Egyptians and Beja, two populations who don't share that much in common genetically, then clearly your subjective assessments leave much to be desired.

[ArmoredCore]

No, I'm saying they are most similar based on primarily genetic evidence, but also quantifiable morphological evidence. These are the most reliable forms of evidence as they are considerably less open to subjective interpretation than other forms of evidence. There is considerable discontinuity between the prehistoric sub-Saharan population in the region and sub-Saharan components in the region which are part of the genome today. For example, Arredi et al 2004 didn't discover a single individual with Y-haplogroup A in his sampling of modern southern Egyptians which was predominate in the Neolithic Nubian remains tested by Yousef et al 2009. The current sub-Saharan elements in Egyptians arrived primarily since late antiquity according to IBD length and are only about half from neighboring sub-Saharan populations, the rest of their sub-Saharan ancestry is from populations more distant including West Africa. Multiple studies have come to this conclusion.

While Muslim Egyptians show some evidence of very low level European admixture presumably from Greek and Roman times, the Copts of Khartoum do not. So your speculation there is unfounded. In fact, the Southern Egyptians who you claim look just like the ancient Egyptians actually have six times as much recent Middle Eastern ancestry as the Copts from of Khartoum ~73% versus only ~12% in the Copts. This is only set off by the ~15-20% sub-Saharan ancestry which is usually 2% or less in the few Copts that have any. The funny thing is you appear to not be able to subjectively tell the difference between sub-Saharan admixed Egyptians and Beja despite the two only having about 20% of their ancestry in common as far as the last ~20,000 years goes, and this subjective impression is precisely how you're making your assessments.

At K=4, Beja and Copts are about 70% phylogenetically identical, whereas sub-Saharan admixed Egyptians and Copts are only about 20% identical (Arabs here are Arabized Nubians):



But I guess in your subjective view all brown and dark brown people look the same?

In summary:

Copts and Beja share about 70% of their ancestry from the last ~20,000 years, but...

Southern Egyptians and Beja share only about 20% of their ancestry from the last ~20,000 years

So if you're claiming ancient Egyptians were most like Southern Egyptians and Beja, two populations who don't share that much in common genetically, then clearly your subjective assessments leave much to be desired.

Again, the genetics don't say what you say they claim. They don't say that the ancient Egyptian populations of Upper Egypt and North Africa were "back migrants" from "Eurasia".
There are no Eurasian looking white folks in Upper Egypt even to this day. And for goodness sake there is absolutely no close physical similarity between the Beja and those Copts.
Again, you simply are avoiding the obvious that black folks are indigenous to Upper Egypt and rather than refute that fact you make up some other story about Copts being more like the ancient Egyptians than the Upper Egyptians. Keep in mind that in order to prove this one would need DNA of the ancient mummies to compare against. Which hasn't been published and therefore is all speculation. However, in no analysis of any remains from any mummies in Upper Egypt, NONE of them show similarities to "Eurasians". So that genetic data only proves that the modern populations are mixed and not that they are the same as the ancients.

Also of the studies you referenced only one is available which tries to argue that E3b2 originates outside of Africa. Whether it does or not is not the point here, even though they themselves admit that there is hardly any population outside Africa with this gene and E3b is an African haplogroup. But it says bluntly that the Egyptians are farthest away from those popualtions in Northwest Africa who carry the gene. So that in itself disproves the closeness between Egyptians and "other North Africans" which you keep trying to claim.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1216069/

Which again proves my point that the only populations close to the Ancients are Egyptians generally and specifically Upper Egyptians and then Northern Sudanese and these people were not Eurasian back migrants.....

Oh and found that other study from the University of Khartoum. Notice how the ACTUAL study reinforces what I said. And this is from your "dataz" (doctored twisted up misrepresented info):

Accordingly, through limited on number of aDNA samples, there is enough data to suggest and to tally with the historical evidence of the dominance by Nilotic elements during the early state formation in the Nile Valley, and as the states thrived there was a dominance by other elements particularly Nuba/Nubians. In Y-chromosome terms this mean in simplest terms introgression of the YAP insertion (haplogroups E and D), and Eurasian Haplogroups which are defined by F-M89 against a background of haplogroup A-M13. The data analysis of the extant Y-chromosomes suggests that the bulk of genetic diversity appears to be a consequence of recent migrations and demographic events X

Even though they label F-M89 as "Eurasian" it would certainly be laughably absurd to claim that the Meroitic Christians that carried it were "white Eurasians". And even if it was, they are long after the phaoronic period.

Haplogroup F-M89 and YAP appeared to be more frequent among Meroitic, Post-Meroitic and Christian periods. Haplogroup B-M60 was not observed in the sample analyzed.

[sumskilz]

Again, the genetics don't say what you say they claim. They don't say that the ancient Egyptian populations of Upper Egypt and North Africa were "back migrants" from "Eurasia".

The dark green component in the K=4 admixture I just posted is back-migrant, we know this because at K=2 it matches the out-of-Africa populations rather than the sub-Saharan populations (it becomes part of the dark blue here):

There are no Eurasian looking white folks in Upper Egypt even to this day.
And for goodness sake there is absolutely no close physical similarity between the Beja and those Copts.

We've already determined that your subjective assessments are unscientific crap. Beja and Copts share about 70% of their ancestry in the last ~20,000 years, and yet they aren't really that similar genetically. The measure is Fst=0.021 which is about the same genetic distance as between Russians and Bedouins. That's a lot for two populations who are so close to each other geographically. The reason they are so different is that the 30% of their ancestry that they don't share is very different. This is a good example of why subjective assessments of common ancestry aren't reliable. I guarantee that Barack Obama is at least 50% identical to his mother allele for allele and at the same time genetically very different from her.

These Andamanese girls are more closely related to Northern Europeans (Fst=0.176) than to West Africans (Fst=0.219) despite retaining some African-like features due to the environment they live in:



Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Somalis are closer to Southern Europeans (Fst=0.091) than to West Africans (Fst=0.105)(Shriner et al 2014).

Again, you simply are avoiding the obvious that black folks are indigenous to Upper Egypt and rather than refute that fact you make up some other story about Copts being more like the ancient Egyptians than the Upper Egyptians. Keep in mind that in order to prove this one would need DNA of the ancient mummies to compare against. Which hasn't been published and therefore is all speculation. However, in no analysis of any remains from any mummies in Upper Egypt, NONE of them show similarities to "Eurasians". So that genetic data only proves that the modern populations are mixed and not that they are the same as the ancients.

If you don't understand all the genetic evidence I've presented and how it fits with morphological evidence, then I don't know what else to say. If newly published genetic evidence ran counter to the osteological data I would favor the genetic evidence, however there is no reason to believe that it would. It certainly would refine our understanding, but since I'm open to a range of reasonable possibilities, it seems unlikely that it would fall outside that range.

Also of the studies you referenced only one is available which tries to argue that E3b2 originates outside of Africa. Whether it does or not is not the point here, even though they themselves admit that there is hardly any population outside Africa with this gene and E3b is an African haplogroup.

Whether E3b originates outside Africa or not is irrelevant to its association with back-migrants since it's ancestral clade DE does. It may very well originate inside Africa, but since it is descended from an out-of-Africa clade and associated with back-migrant autosomal DNA, that doesn't matter much to the discussion at hand. It seems to have been spread with the Afro-Asiatic languages and pastoralism from somewhere near the Red Sea.

This should explain why you see various forms of E in Africa:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

(Gurdasani et al 2014)

Older back migrations are covered in Henn et al 2012, Hodgson et al 2014, and Dobon et al 2015.

But it says bluntly that the Egyptians are farthest away from those popualtions in Northwest Africa who carry the gene. So that in itself disproves the closeness between Egyptians and "other North Africans" which you keep trying to claim.

Uh... that's not a PCA plot. What that's saying is that modern Egyptians have the lowest E3b2 frequency but the highest diversity. That completely supports what I'm saying. Naturally they would have a low frequency since the ancient Egyptian component has been significantly displaced during the Muslim conquest. Modern Egyptians only have about ~6% of the North African autosomal element. It's Copts that have 88% of the North African autosomal element. It's the Copts that are more Berber-like, not modern Egyptians in general. Although the high diversity means that the haplogroup had a longer time to acquire mutations, which suggests that it is older in Egypt, as in the ancestors of the Berbers arrived in Northwest Africa via Northeast Africa which is completely consistent with the back-migration. The defining mutation of what was called E3b2 in 2004 and E1b1b1b1a as of 2015 is M81, so the haplogroup can be less confusingly referred to as E-M81. E-M215 and E-M78 are the parent and sister clades of E-M81. They constitute 21% of Coptic Y-haplogroups (Hassan et al 2008; 2015 tree). This further supports the connection.

Which again proves my point that the only populations close to the Ancients are Egyptians generally and specifically Upper Egyptians and then Northern Sudanese and these people were not Eurasian back migrants.....

Misunderstanding what you're looking at doesn't prove much, but as I said before, it's possible that upper Egyptians might have initially been similar to Beja who have about 70% back migrant ancestry, 30% sub-Saharan ancestry.

Oh and found that other study from the University of Khartoum. Notice how the ACTUAL study reinforces what I said. And this is from your "dataz" (doctored twisted up misrepresented info):

Even though they label F-M89 as "Eurasian" it would certainly be laughably absurd to claim that the Meroitic Christians that carried it were "white Eurasians". And even if it was, they are long after the phaoronic period.

Complete strawman. You are aware that everyone can read what I actually wrote? Do you realize that when you put something in quotation marks it's to indicate what someone else said rather than what you are saying? Do you also play chess against yourself and get excited when you win?

What I claimed was discontinuity between the Neolithic and Meroitic periods and that the DNA of the Meroitic Christians reflected colonization from further down the Nile. Again, nothing is inconsistent with my claims and I don't think there is any debate about Nubia. The Neolithic remains are from Upper Nubia.

EDIT: I just noticed that the Y-chromosome pairwise genetic distance between Beja and Copts (0.0662) versus modern Nubians (0.0615) is about the same and much closer than the Beja are to any other populations. More striking is the fact that the Y-chromosome distance between Copts and modern Nubians isn't statistically significant. Y-haplogroup A-M13 was predominant in the Neolithic samples from Nubia at 75%, but is completely missing from modern Nubians. This further supports genetic discontinuity in Nubia and progressive colonization by Egyptians. However A-M13 is still common in Southern Sudan, suggesting that the ancient Nubians were probably more like the modern Dinka.

On the other hand, the mtDNA distance between Copts and modern Nubians is significant (0.1997) while the distance between modern Nubians and various Southern Sudanese groups is statistically insignificant.

The most logical interpretation is that modern Nubians are primarily the descendants of Egyptian men and Nubian women, and according to the ancient DNA samples, this had already started to happen prior to the Meroitic period.

A Y-chromosome plot indicating similarity in male mediated ancestry:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Copts and modern Nubians are near identical, and fact that all the Sudanese male ancestries are more similar to Turks than to Senegalese really shows the absurdity of Afrocentrism.

[Ludicus]

Great posts,sumskilz.
An old afrocentric similar thread,The African Origin of Ancient Egyptian Civilization
Where is MKGlouisville (Egypt was black African just get over it!) when ArmoredCore needs him?
--------

Why is there a huge rise of Afrocentrism in history?

Book, Ancient Egypt in Africa, David O´Connor, excerpt,

Popular interest in Ancient Egypt’s relationship with Africa has grown since the late 1980s, and is particularly associated with the growth of Afrocentrism in the USA. This growth was in part related to the publishing of Bernal’s Black Athena (1987; and see Chapter 2), which further encouraged scholars in a number of disciplines to reconsider the academic production of knowledge as an element of western imperialism.

African archaeologists, especially those working outside the northeastern corner of the continent, have been reluctant to re-awaken interest in Ancient Egypt. This is largely because the topic, as many of the chapters of this book demonstrate, has an embarrassing history of supposition and invention which African archaeologists, rather ironically, considered to be safely buried, having been suitably dealt with in the past. In this volume re-excavation and examination of these old theories has been a difficult but ultimately enlightening experience.

--
Michael Rowlands , " The Unity of Africa"
" Afrocentrist position seeks an African renaissance to construct a new African history"

[PikeStance]

Yes, Sumskilz excellent posts. Anthropology is more of an hobby of mine. My understanding far outweigh my ability to explain as clear as you.

I hadn't realized that Afrocentrism as made a come back. I know it was popular back in the late 80s/ 90s.
When I first taught in the Ivory Coast, I showed a documentary to my mostly West African students. Someone alluded to a connection between African Americans and Egypt. My students were beside themselves! "They are not Egyptians! "They are like us, West Africans!" Why do they claim they are Egyptian? I have to say I didn't blame their anger. After all, they felt like they were not good enough for Americans of African descent. IMHO, Afrocentrism is a false premise. The notion that Egypt was a great civilization and therefore the modern African is capable of such feats undermines the notion that there are no real distinction among people.

For me, stating Egypt is black or white seems like reverse genetic engineering. We are imposing our modern day conceptualization of race IMHO.