Thread by @UUuuUUuuUU001, [THREAD] Who are the moors and why are they portrayed as black [...]

[THREAD] Who are the moors and why are they portrayed as black people ? (scientific explanation)

❂ There is no genetic, historical, archaeological or anthropological evidence of a massive population/ethnic replacement of the Maghrebi population after the 8th century A.D., instead of merely accounts and evidences of foreign immigration absorbed by the local people.

❂ The fact that some of the more isolated Amazigh-speaking peoples in the Mediterranean Maghreb tend to have less, not more, black traits and Subsaharan African ancestry than more cosmopolitan Arabized Maghrebis cannot be ignored.

❂ Since we know that most of Iberia was under Moorish rule for several centuries, and gene flow between Iberia and North Africa had begun even before that. In fact, after the fall of the western Roman Empire,

some imperial possessions in Hispania were attached to the exarchate of Africa ruled by an Amazigh Masmoudi christian named Yulyan (Julian).

❂ It’s useful to look at what genetic research in Iberia can provide us with to infer how Moors were like genetically. In fact, scientists were able to find two very intriguing genetic outliers in Chalcolithic Central Iberia (~5,000 years ago) and Bronze Age Southwest Iberia

(~3,000 years ago) who were much more similar genetically to modern Maghrebis than to either modern or ancient Iberians (or to Subsaharan Africans).

❂ Not only that: we now have direct evidence of the DNA makeup of Al-Andalus Muslims. Ancient DNA evidence in Muslim cemeteries of Medieval Iberia (Al-Andalus) did turn out to show a lot of extra Maghrebi ancestry (but beware: modern Maghrebi-related ancestry, that is, similar

to the genetic makeup of modern Moroccans, not typical Black Africans) as well as Levantine ancestry… but that doesn’t help those who claim Moors were Black Africans related to West Africans or to South Africans.

❂ Another inconvenient fact of modern research on ancient DNA is that there is not a dominance of Black African-related ancestry in any of the ancient North Africans that have had their autosomal DNA analyzed to date:

• Paleolithic, Early Neolithic and Late Neolithic individuals from Morocco, who had indigenous North African and Early Anatolian/European Farmer admixtures even now found in large frequencies in Maghrebis, especially Amazighs, and most closely related to Be Amazighs among modern

populations. The Paleolithic Ibeomaurisian sample from Taforalt (Morocco) is particularly interesting, because it probably indicates that North Africa was already very distinct from West Africa, Central Africa or East Africa even before the Neolithic Revolution and Metal Ages.

Mitochondrial diversity in Taforalt shows the absence of sub-Saharan haplogroups suggesting that Ibero-Maurusian individuals had not originated in sub-Saharan region.

• 7th-11th century DNA samples of Guanches from the Canary Islands, centuries before the European colonization, at a time when those islands were much more isolated than most of North Africa, nonetheless the native Guanches were found to be most similar to present-day Maghrebis

of Amazigh ancestry, particularly in Morocco, that is, even an isolated medieval population of North Africa that had migrated to the remote Canary Islands in the Antiquity.

(and, mind you, had not been using European slaves) was already pretty much like modern Mediterranean Berbers, not having that much West African-like or East African-like ancestry at all.

• Moreover, Maghrebis clearly form their own distinctive and pretty drifted genetic cluster in all genetic analyses, and the vast majority of their Y-DNA lineages are clearly North African in origin while their Mt-DNA lineages are mostly of remote West Eurasian origin,

but generally closer to Middle Eastern lineages than to European ones and substantially drifted apart from both, which indicates a very old presence in North Africa, evolving independently.

Let's test it using a comparison of the genetic ancestry profile of modern Moroccan Amazighs with that of Gambians, Mandenka, Ethiopians (Oromo), Spaniards, Italians, French and Saudi Arabians, modeling them as descendants of people similar to them:

- See the model below: unsurprisingly, a complete failure (a genetic distance of nearly 10%; a good result would be between roughly 1% and 3%), and the hypothesized "big impact" of European slavery and conquest (here represented by Spaniards, Italians and French people) is

nowhere to be found except for Andalusians (who just happen to be the European people closest to North Africa). The model is telling us: look for another explanation, this one is really bad.

Now, let's try modeling the same Moroccan Amazigh population as a simple mix of 4 ancient North African populations who had their autosomal DNA analyzed by reputable scientists and published in peer-reviewed publications:

- Yes, not very good, but still quite better than the hypothesis of a simple West/East African-like people + “recent” European/Middle Eastern migrants mix.

However, if you add some ancestral sources to account for the minor but substantial Subsaharan African gene flow (here, 3 options: Mandenka, Yoruba and Dinka), which is very divergent from the ancient North Africans, the fits become a lot better.

Now, if you consider that the Late Neolithic Moroccan sample was just one among many other expanding groups that were part of the spread of an agricultural lifestyle originally from Anatolia and Southeastern Europe, you might want to add just two more Neolithic

reference populations to see if the fits improve - and, yes, they do.

Now we have a model with a pretty nice level of genetic distance (1.81%), still confirming that this Moroccan Amazigh population has significant indigenous (Paleolithic + Early Neolithic)

Moroccan ancestry (~32%) not found in such high proportions anywhere else in Africa, and that most of their “European” ancestry is in fact owed to very ancient migrations during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras, more than 5,000 years ago.

❂ In conclusion, depictions of so called black Moors "online" are nothing but afrocentrism promoted spam, basically a cherry picked 19th & 18th century fantasy paintings usually done by certain exotic seeking European orientalists. Nothing much happened to the medieval Moors,

and in fact modern Moroccans are still the closest genetically even to people who lived in the region many millennia ago, let alone during the Middle Ages, less than 1,000 years ago.

The hypothesis that there was some mass movement of Europeans that overwhelmed the local

population and, mixing with it, completely prevailed over the native elements to form an entirely new population doesn’t hold water when you gather scientific data to assess it. Archaeological and documented evidences do not indicate that, and lots of DNA samples from North

Africa or of recent North African origin (in Iberia, mainly) point to the fact that, though of course they are not an unmixed and isolated continuity of the ancients, modern Maghrebis are by far the main descendants of the people who lived in North Africa in ancient times.

The “European thing” some people see in North Africans is owed only in a minor part to European invasions and slave trafficking after Classical Antiquity, and in fact derives mostly from shared ancestry going back to the massive westward expansion of West Asian farmers, mostly

(but not just) from Anatolia, between 6,000 and 9,000 years ago.

[END OF THE THREAD]

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