Before 15,000 BCE: (The M35/215 Y-Chromosome Lineage as Genetic Confirmation — This Lineage Originating Broadly in the Horn of Africa and East Africa, Then S…

Before 15,000 BCE: (The M35/215 Y-Chromosome Lineage as Genetic Confirmation — This Lineage Originating Broadly in the Horn of Africa and East Africa, Then Spreading to Egypt in the Eras Before Farming, from There to the Areas of the Levant Where Pre-Proto-Semitic Was Spoken, and Also to North Africa and the Sahara Where It Is Common Among Amazigh Speakers, the Distribution Partially Paralleling the History of the Spread of the Afrasian Language Family): The available genetic evidence adds a fourth line of confirmation to the archaeological, linguistic, and climatological evidence. The M35/215 Y-chromosome lineage had its origins broadly in the Horn of Africa and East Africa. It then spread to Egypt in the eras before farming; from there to the areas of the Levant where the pre-proto-Semitic branch of the Afrasian family was spoken; and also to North Africa and the Sahara, where it is common among Amazigh speakers. The distribution partially parallels the history of the spread of the Afrasian language family as described throughout Ehret’s account: origins in the Horn, a movement of people northward to Egypt bringing a new demographic component of Horn of Africa origin into the existing population seventeen thousand years ago, with subsequent spreads of Afrasian speakers to the Levant and across North and Saharan Africa, bringing the same Y-chromosome lineage to the existing populations of those regions. Four independent lines of evidence — linguistics, archaeology, climatology, and now genetics — all converge on the same narrative. The M35/215 lineage is, in a sense, the genetic signature of the Afrasian expansion itself: born in the Horn, carried to Egypt by grain harvesters, and from Egypt dispersed to the Levant and the Sahara by the daughter populations that would become the Semitic and Chado-Amazigh speakers. The genes tell the same story as the words, the tools, and the climate. Africa sent its people northward, and those people carried the biological as well as the cultural and linguistic foundations of what would become ancient Egyptian civilization.