A thought on Lydians

[Kraftr]

Lately I saw a bit about the Natufians, who spread over north Africa and Arab peninsula and Horn of Africa. A Darker type human mostly still present in Arab genes. I saw Africans and Arabs fight in the comments over if they were African or Caucasian. I have speculated myself if the old Europeans even interacted with sub-Saharans, because of distance, their low numbers nor involvement in trade back then.
Back in the day people were called black merely because of black (facial) hair, eyes, or copper skin while still being european genetically .
So then Lydians where actually these Natufians, and any subSaharans where just considered part of them, and encountered through them. On some maps the northwest of Turkey was/is called Lydia, I think there is where Europe considered its border. On ancient maps also only Northern Africa is depicted, maybe as a map of 'our' world, not the whole world.
Natufians if I understand correctly appear to have mostly Caucasian genes without Neanderthal, a few percent subsaharan because of proximity, so they're maybe a really old European type, like a first wave.
Another option;
(South)Indians could be Lydians in Scythian eyes, and the three human mothers concept may have been a really old one that migrated west. The Lydian name may have been used for all southern tribes. I met an east-African that from his looks I would guess was a Hindustani.

sidenote;
I don't consider standard out-of-Africa theory to be unshakingly proven, Natufian DNA might be a key to that question both ways.

[ott]

It is indeed well possible that use of the term Lyda's children/folk varried, although the few descriptions fit well with some of the known negroid types (curly hair like lambs, hints of cannibalism).

Varried use seems more obviously the case with Finda's children/folk, as discussed in the 2015 blog post FINDA WAS GÉL?.

[Kraftr]

yeah, that is true, and it is said that it's quiet fruitless engaging with them, so there was low interest in doing business with them, keeping them out of recorded history. So later I thought maybe that would point toward that Natufians could have been considered European. People like Morrocans, Ethiopians and Yemenites may have become progressively more subsaharan, just like Egyptians, but could have started out as very old European (atlantian?) outposts. I noticed similarity between Egyptian and Maltese structures. Btw the smiley in my post was unintended, a typo I didn't catch.
I think I'm still not taking enough time before I post, also because I'm learning, not educating. it's hard!

[Er Aldaric]

I was just learning more about the Natufians recently as well. From what I know calling them 'black' or 'white' would both be untrue. The Natufians predate the time of the OL by a few thousand years, by then they would have splintered into various semitic peoples. The Natufians origin seems clouded and that has lead to some debate, for example this YouTube video I came across, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_u8UUuv_P4&t=123s. It seems the consensus is Natufians came from Basal Eurasians and some other admixtures, but all of pre-history is speculative and each model is reconstruction after reconstruction, Basal Eurasians are a sort of hypothetical people group created to smooth over gaps. With the OL, at least for the time period and places it covers we are no longer shooting in the dark, but until it is accepted academics will continue to divide people groups based on what style of pottery they favored.

But back to the Natufians. They were the ancestors to all semites. Their relation to 'blacks' as far as I know comes from the mixture between East Africans and Semites. The Natufian must have been swarthy and had archaic semitic features, not sub-saharan or European (Fryan) ones. Interestingly though Natufian genes are perhaps what causes semites despite lacking any European admixture to take on lighter features, and sometimes red hair. The Fryas view of three racial mothers (while Frya seems to be a historical person) comes from the their limited world view. There are more than just one 'black' race endemic to global south. ASI (Ancestral South Indians) related to Dravidians would have looked negroid, like the North Sentinels tribe.

I'm an armchair anthropologist and even then no where near as knowledgeable as others, but I have a hypothesis that there may be an ancestral connection between Neanderthal and Natufians. As stated earlier, the red hair. Neanderthals inhabited the levant, and if it is true that Cro-Magnon committed genocide on the Neanderthal in Europe it is possible the survivors continued in the levant and later developed into the Natufian. Neanderthals would have been intelligent and so it makes sense that their progeny would also be - Natufians are believed to be some of the first farmers. There is morphological similarities between Neanderthal and modern day jewish peoples skulls. There is more, but I'll stop there. I need to gather more evidence before I reach any conclusions.


Natufian Reconstruction