Ma'a

[H. Mark Hubey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi wrote:
>
>
> In some cases, there are noticeable bushmanoid features among the Eyle---a
> light-yellowish complexion, eyes that look like those of the San, less hair
> than Cushites; I am not an anthropologists, and would not venture much into
> that area. However, in E.A., generally, though not absolutely, the peoples
> that met and clashed there have kept alive different cultures alive: that
> of the hunter-gather, the agriculturalist and the pastoralist (Cushites and
> Nilotes).

It seems like we can bring multiple evidences to bear on this point.
Some facts, or fact-like writings one can find in the literature"

1. Egyptians painted themselves red (and their womenfolk yellow) while
they painted Asians white and Negroids(?) black. Whether the "real"
Egyptians were really "black" is something that is fought over these
days.
Maybe they were related to the San (who apparently lived on the Horn of
Africa before being overrun by Bantu speakers).

2. Recent reports in Science and Science News said that the human groups
who possess the Y-chromosome (passed from father to son allegedly in the
same way as the mtDNA allegedly only passes from mother to daughter)
were
Nilo-Saharans, San, and some other groups in Sudan(?). This again points
to
the same region and to the same human group.

3. The most recent articles in Science says that the mtDNA is not passed
only from the mother to the daughter. (5 march 1999). It also says that
the
relatively recent report that said that the Neandertals split from the
rest
of humanity 600,000 years ago then must also be false. African EVe might
have
never existed and the mtDNA material could have been a recombination
with the
mother's genes with the father's donation. It is already beginning to
sound like
problems that linguists have trying to avoid having a language descend
from
two parents.

4. Whether the Neandertals spoke is still a favorite topic. If they did,
what
kind of language would they have had? Probably one poor in vowels if it
is
true that their articulatory apparatus would have prevented them from
making
the "supervowel" /i/. Then would we find these vowel poor and
consonant-clustered
languages where the Neandertals would have lived or mixed or interbred
with
the out-of-Africa contingent?  This region also stretches from the Horn
of
Africa, through the MIddle EAst to the North Caucasus. Ubykh with 82
consonants,
Kabardian with 1 (or 2) vowels, (classical) Arabic with /iua/,
vowel-poor
Hittite and Akkadian all point to that same region where the Neandertals
would
and could have mixed with the out-of-Africa contingent. This brings up
point
1 again. Why do the SAn have a yellowish (reddish) complexion instead of
being black after presumably having spent 2 million years or more under
the
hot African sun? (for more on this see, Hubey,1994)


5. Over the long-period, beyond what standard linguistics methodology
allegedly cannot have anything to say, we have to use other methods to
arrive at unconventional (but logical and rational) conclusions. Why is
it
that only some features of languages are used for geneticity when
languages
have so many other characteristics? (See Crowley,1992 and especially
Nichols'
works on this.)

6. Recent finds such as the Black Sea flood circa 5,500 BC and the
rising
of the ocean levels circa 12,000 years ago also point to the obvious.
IE, AA, and some of the Caucasian languages (probably) and the Khoisan
languages must be related in the distant feature. The languages being
spoken
in the ME before the proto-AA peoples migrated to the ME lacked initial
liquids which can be seen in the lack of initial r in Hittite and
Akkadian,
in Linear-B, and in the lack of them in the toponyms of Mesopotamia
region
before the Sumerians and Akkadians (see von Soden). Altaic and Dravidian
lacks
initial liquids. That means the people who lived in the ME did not all
get
absorbed and at least some of their relatives are still around and
kicking.


--
Best Regards,
Mark
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hubeyh at montclair.edu =-=-=-= http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey
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