Monday, February 6, 2023

The Laal people who live in those villages speak their own language, which has no relation to any other language in the world.

From The Sons of Chad by Peter Nimitz.  

What a tangled journey it has been since we emerged from Africa 50-100,000 years ago.  The tale of the migration from Africa to Indonesia and then the reverse migration of Indonesians back to Africa and the first population of the Madagascar is one such tangled story.

Here is another.

Along the Chari River in southern Chad, there are two villages named Gori and Damtar. They are 10 kilometers from each other, and are on opposite sides of the river. To an ignorant outsider, the people of these two villages appear to be the same as their neighbors.

The Laal people who live in those villages speak their own language, which has no relation to any other language in the world. The languages of their neighbors are parts of considerably more widespread language families. As Laal people move away from their small towns into larger settlements, they are adopting these languages and being absorbed into the urban populations.

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The language of the Laal was just a hint at their unique origin story, a story that goes back to the Neolithic Balkans and involves the far more numerous Hausa people of Chad, Niger, and northern Nigeria. The Hausa language is part of the Chadic language family, shown below.

[snip]

With the end of the last parts of the Green Sahara in 2200 BC, the Leiterbanders themselves fragmented, scattering westwards across the Sahel and adopting new material cultures even as they kept their pastoral lifestyle. Their language unity fragmented, becoming as internally diverse as Indo-European. Some groups of Chadics raided into the jungles of Central Africa, eventually intermarrying with and becoming absorbed into the peoples from there, forming the Laal (modern Laal are 1.25-4% Eurasian in ancestry). They arrived in Lake Chad no later than 1000 BC, bringing cattle and the R1b-V88 lineage with them.

The last 3000 years proved unkind to the Chadics. Waves of new pastoral peoples rode across the Sahel, driving the Chadics out of their pasturelands and into mountain redoubts. Only the Hausa, whose adoption of agriculture enabled their population to grow far beyond that of pastoralists (farming can generate 10-20x as many calories per acre as pastoralism) were able to remain a major force.

Thus is the story of a Balkans man and his descendants. Balkans hunter-gatherers who were adopted by or who took over a tribe of Anatolian farmers. Settlers from Iberia who adapted to the Sahara. Saharan cow herders who raided the lands of a now dead river in Sudan. Desperate refugees fleeing the desertification of their old home to the mysterious lands of the south. A proud nomad people ruling the savanna, reduced to farmers, hiding in mountains, or fishermen marrying the peoples of the jungle and adopting a language unlike any other.

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