Why Europeans are almost 1/3 African
We may have all come from Africa, but Africa did not stop there
It should be common knowledge by now that human beings in their modern form, Homo sapiens, first evolved in Africa. Exactly when we emerged on the scene remains uncertain (recent fossil discoveries suggest it may have happened over 300,000 years ago, a hundred millennia earlier than we originally thought), but whenever it was, most of our species’s history of existence would have played out on the so-called “Dark Continent”. It would have been no earlier than 70,000 years ago — and possibly as soon as 55,000 years ago — when the ancestors of all people outside of Africa would wander out of the continent and colonize the rest of the habitable world.
This would not have been the first dispersal of hominin apes out of Africa, mind you. Much in the press has been made of the fact that between 1–7% of modern human ancestry outside our ancestral continent comes from the descendants of earlier emigrants such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans. What may not be so widely publicized, however, is that the famous “Out of Africa” migration between 70–55,000 years ago would not have been the last movement of Homo sapiens from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, either. There is in fact a plethora of compelling evidence that humans from Africa continued to venture out and leave a permanent genetic mark on the ancestry of their Eurasian kin— even the “white” peoples of Europe.
I don’t mean a light dash, either. Almost one third of European ancestry descends from African admixture within the last 55,000 years.
As early as 1997, population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza observed in Genes, peoples, and languages that the ancestry of Europeans could be characterized as 2/3 Asian and 1/3 African. More recently, Jeffrey D. Wall and colleagues reported in 2013 that East Asian people had a higher proportion of ancestry from Neanderthals than did Europeans. Since Neanderthals are known to have lived in Europe and the Middle East but not East Asia, it seems unlikely that the ancestors of East Asians had any more contact with Neanderthals than those of Europeans. It would, however, make sense if the proportion of Neanderthal ancestry in Europeans got driven down by admixture with people with little to no such ancestry — namely, people from Africa.
In 2012, a population genetics blogger with the pseudonym “Ethio Helix” ran the ancestry of almost 3,000 individuals around the world through the program ADMIXTURE, measuring how much of their ancestry was of relatively recent African origin versus how much of it descended from the initial “Out of Africa” migration. His results revealed that between 28–29% of his European subjects’ ancestry was of recent African origin. This held true for European nationalities as different from one another as the Spanish, Italians, French, Slovenians, Lithuanians, and White American citizens from Utah.
In addition, African genetic haplogroups pop up quite often in some European populations. For example, almost 25% of Greek men carry the originally African Y-chromosomal haplogroup E.
That such discoveries would surprise most people of European descent is a given. It would certainly be ironic given the infamous history of white supremacists (or white nationalists, or alt-rightists, or whatever euphemism they want to be called these days) decrying “racial miscegenation” and “non-white immigration” as threats to Western civilization. However, even those who don’t subscribe to such ideological racism might still wonder when and how this African ancestry would have entered the European gene pool.
Most of it probably happened sometime before the first appearance of agriculture in Europe during the Neolithic period (7000–1700 BC).
Back in 1971, physical anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel wrote in The People of Lerna that the skeletal remains of Neolithic peoples in Greece and Macedonia showed “Negroid” physical traits common to African people, which he speculated had arrived in the region from the Nile Valley of Egypt and Sudan. More recently in 2005, C. Loring Brace claimed that the remains of a prehistoric Middle Eastern people called the Natufians — among the immediate predecessors to the first farmers in the Fertile Crescent and then Europe— showed “unexpected ties” to African populations.
Such ties between the Natufians and African populations may not be limited to skeletal features. Archaeologists such as Ofer Bar-Yosef and Graeme Barker describe the primitive tools the Natufians used as similar to those of earlier populations along Africa’s northern coast, even speculating that these similarities could attest to African technological influences if not a full-blown migration.
If the skeletal and archaeological data hinted at recent African admixture in the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent and their European offshoots, later genetic data from remains such as these would confirm it — even if the geneticists haven’t always realized it.
When analyzing ancient DNA extracted from various prehistoric remains in 2014, Iosif Lazaridis concluded that the first farmers to appear in Europe had 44% of their ancestry derived from a population he called “Basal Eurasian”, characterized by an almost complete absence of the Neanderthal ancestry that all non-African people have inherited today. He would later find in a second study that approximately half of the ancestry in Natufian and early Neolithic Middle Eastern populations came from this “Basal Eurasian” heritage.
Common sense alone would imply that this so-called “Basal Eurasian” component must actually be African. After all, it is the indigenous peoples of Africa, not anywhere in Eurasia or the rest of the habitable world, who have little to no Neanderthal ancestry. Yet, in a sense, Lazaridis’s label might only be partly wrong. One of the ramifications of the “Out of Africa” theory is that not all African people will be equally related to those outside the continent. Instead, those Africans from whom non-Africans splintered off (i.e. populations in the northeastern region of the continent) would have a greater genetic affinity to those non-Africans than would other Africans. And indeed, genetic research has revealed that native Northeast African ancestry is genetically closer to that of non-Africans than is ancestry from, say, West or Central Africa (the ancestry of aboriginal peoples from southernmost Africa, who speak Khoisan languages, is the furthest removed of all). This means that Northeast Africans really would represent a population basal to non-Africans (hence “Basal Eurasian”).
It is very likely, then, that the “Basal Eurasian” ancestry identified by Lazaridis and his colleagues actually comes from a native Northeast African population that stayed home on the continent for tens of millennia before moving into the Middle East and giving rise to the Natufians between 12,500 and 9500 BC. This African ancestry would have been absorbed and inherited by the Fertile Crescent’s Neolithic populations before they spread into Europe. With them would have arrived farming, animal husbandry, and the majority of the recent African ancestry that all modern Europeans possess.
This is not to say that Africans did not influence European ancestry after that point in the Neolithic. For example, skeletal remains with African characteristics have been uncovered in Roman-era sites in Britain, such as Leicester and York. We have also found a skull with a mixture of African and European features in a tomb in Ephesus, Turkey — it may belong to the famous Cleopatra’s (half?) sister Arsinoe. Given the influence of the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations around the Mediterranean basin in classical antiquity, it is not surprising that native Africans would have entered their population upon being incorporated into their empires.
For that matter, the Middle East may have also received influential African immigration even long after the time of the Natufians. Genetic data indicates the introgression of African ancestry into populations in Armenia around 3800 BC. It is around this same time period that linguists believe the Semitic languages (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic, and ancient Phoenician) would have appeared in the region. Since we know that Semitic is one branch of the larger “Afroasiatic” language phylum which first emerged in Northeast Africa, it seems likely that ancestral Semitic’s development in the Middle East is linked to the contemporaneous influx of additional African ancestry as far north as Armenia. In other words, it would have been yet another wave of Africans who brought the progenitor language of Semitic there.
And then, of course, there’s the historical incorporation of the Syro-Palestinian coast into two African empires, those of ancient Egypt and its Sudanese neighbor Kush.
All this history is important not only for its potential use for trolling white supremacists and eugenicists. It also attests to a little-appreciated influence of African people on the cultures of ancient Europe and the Middle East. Too often, Eurocentric accounts of history have regulated Africa and its indigenous peoples to the sidelines of importance, with one of the few exceptions being a de-Africanized misrepresentation of Egypt. The knowledge that Africa was not only the birthplace of all humankind, but also a major influence on the so-called cradles of Western civilization, should be one of many reasons to push it back into the spotlight of history that it deserves.
