East African Bushmen

[Mikey Brass]

Hi all,

With apologies for my silence over the last while. Work's just become too much. Anyways, while doing more photocopying relatively recently I came across this article and I thought I'd sahre its conclusions:

Alan Morris. 2003. The myth of the East African "Bushmen". South African Archaeological Bulletin 58(178): 85-90

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The evidence from osteology, serogenetics and anthropometry povides no satisfactory biological support for the presence of KhoiSan peoples in East Africa during prehistoric times. Nearly all of the evidence in support of this contention was collected during the period of racial typological assessment in physical anthropology and the conclusions of these studies are considered suspect by today's ethodological techniques. Studies that have re-assessed prehistoric crania according to multivariate techniques have consistently rejected any relationships between these crania and the skulls of modern or prehistoric KhoiSan populations. Likewise, anthropometric and serogenetic studies have shown no relationship between living East Africans and their South African counterparts.

Linguistic connections between the East African "KhoiSan" and the South African KhoiSan languages are not rejected but the presence of clicks in these languages must not be considered proof of the biological unit of the people who speak the languages. Like the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA haplotypes shared by modern Ethiopians and KhoiSan, these should be taken as signs of survivorship of ancient genetic polymorphisms and not survivorship of ancient people. The history recorded by the presence of clicks and ancient gene lineages underlie more recent population events but it is the more recent population events that have defined and shaped the KhoiSan and modern East Africans.

With the demise of the East African KhoiSan myth, other models of origin for the populations of sub-Saharan Africa must be considered. New models must be generated to help explain current language and population distribution in Africa and these must reflect the possible complexity and dynamism of population change in Africa during the Holocene. This paper favours a distinct regionalisation of prehistoric populations where living KhoiSan groups are seen as native to the southern African sub-region and their specific biological features represent their specific genetic history in that region alone.

[anthrostudies]

I think I would have to argue against the conclusion here about there being no modern Capoids in East Africa.  Ive seen pictures of Sandawe and Dahalo people and they have the South African facial features of bushmen, or al least Nguni like Nelson Mandela. For instance this Dahalo man could be a Nguni speaker http://www.ipacc.org.za/default.asp?sPage=/gallery/ea_sept02_SD/ea_sept02_sd01.asp and the Sandawe man on the right looks even more like a bushman http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030421/gallery/eve_zoom.jpg .

(Although I don't think anyone has ever suggested that most East Africans are descended from Capoids anyway. Where he says there is "no relationship between living East Africans and their South African counterparts", is he referring to East Africans in general? If he is, hes making an unfair comparison.)

I don't understand what he means by "Like the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA haplotypes shared by modern Ethiopians and KhoiSan, these should be taken as signs of survivorship of ancient genetic polymorphisms and not survivorship of ancient people."

These haplogroups hes talking about, are a monophyletic side branch to other human haplogroups, or at least the paternal haplogroup I is, I'm not sure about the mtDNA lineages, but I was under the impression that they were also a monophyletic haplogroup.

And although hes correct in saying that language isn't genetic, and I know that the inclusion of East African click languages in Khoisan isn't very well supported, its controversial to say that the click is primitive. (Why would the click be lost?) So I still think that the correlation between genetic evidence, physical anthropology, click sounds and  rock art strongly supports the old idea of East African bushmen, in my own opinion.