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The Saharan Sea: Exploring north African influence on the early Neolithic west

The 'lineal script hypothesis', discussed in the previous blog post, was the academic tip of an iceberg of a smorgasbord of claims and reconstructions by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena and his fellow researchers. 

Their big idea is a sound one, that the drying of the lush savannah-grassland of the Sahara caused a mass exodus of peoples, languages and cultures, and contributed to a later sub-Saharan migration across the Sahel and into the Aegean. The environment of the prehistoric Sahara could have easily supported hundreds of thousands of herders and their families, and its disappearance must have had a tangible effect on surrounding communities and material cultures. 

      The postulated migrations of various historically-documented peoples from the lost Green Sahara, from the 4th                                             millennium BCE onwards. Credit: Arnaiz-Villena et al 2021.

Leaving the speculation about certain Greek myths and sketchy connections between Berber, Sumerian and Basque aside, let's focus on one specific argument: that the Atlantic megalithic phenomena spread across the Strait of Gibraltar, snaking its way along the western coast to Britain and Ireland; the 'Eurafrican' hypothesis. The authors present four tidbits of evidence:

  • The 'cart ruts' and stone monuments recently re-discovered in the Canary Islands are, like megaliths, aligned with solstices and lunar movements, and thus can be considered contemporary and interdependent.
  • Lineal scripts of a similar kind appear in the Canaries and in early Iron Age contexts in southwest Spain, at the Cumbres Mayores site.
  • The megalithic monuments of the northern Maghreb are celestially oriented southward, and appear to pre-date monuments in Malta, the Levant or ancient Egypt; and are similar in form to northwest European dolmens and Bronze Age monuments in Menorca.
  • The DNA of early Neolithic individuals in Iberia show little to no genetic influence from near Eastern farming communities, but their material culture bears affinities with the contemporary Maghreb and the predynastic Badarian culture of Egypt.
The first of these can be easily countered. Solar or lunar-aligned structures exist everywhere in the Old and New Worlds, and cannot be tied to any specific culture or time period. It is just part of our nature to see the stars as significant - although the adoption of farming may have increased the importance of the sun, marking periods in the agricultural year. 

The second and third are a little more tricky; it's not possible to directly date a stone monument, although the similarity between them and Atlantic versions does suggest a connection, perhaps in the opposite direction. Like the early farmers of Spain, the Badarians were cattle-farmers, and the fact they fashioned amulets in the shape of antelopes indicates that they were used to seeing these animals on an open savannah. There is just not enough evidence, though - for instance, DNA from pre-4th millennium BCE skeletons in the Sahara - to make any firm conclusions. Even if the pottery from the Maghreb and southwestern Iberia are close in style, this does not, as early medieval archaeology shows, a migration make. The fourth is likewise on thin ice; the comparison is quite literally between random lines on a rock, not with a neat, coherent order like the Ogham script.

They also go on to say that there is a historical bias in dating the extant stone stelae of southwest Spain and Portugal. The archaeologists, apparently, deliberately placed them in the early 1st millennium to tally with the arrival of the literate, classically-attested Phoenicians. According to them, they could well be far older; but this does not square with the dated material culture around them, and the clearly datable weaponry and armour depicted on them, which indeed comes from the end of the Late Bronze Age, at the turn of the 2nd millennium.

Notably, they barely touch on the Atlantic coast beyond southwest Iberia, assuming that the megaliths their are the predecessors of all others from Galicia to the Shetlands, and instead rely more on circumstantial evidence from Malta. The evidence so far provides a valid picture of a Mediterranean-Atlantic interaction sphere, where Saharan pastoralists freely moved into and impacted on the language and culture of the southwest, but nowhere near proof of a façade-wide north African legacy.

References:

Arnaiz-Villena, A., Medina, M., Ruíz-del-Valle, V., Palacio-Gruber, J., Lopez-Nares, A., Barrera-Gutiérrez, L., & Suarez-Trujillo, F. (2021). The Saharo-Canarian Circle: The forgotten Prehistory of Euro African Atlantic façade and its lack of eastern demic diffusion evidences. International Journal of Modern Anthropology, 2(16), 586-600.




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