Mainstream scholars have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which includedthe Sudan,tropical Africa andthe Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period.[13][14][15][16] Pharaonic Egypt featured a physicalgradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities withSudanese andsouthernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links withLevantine andMediterranean populations.[17][18][19]
^"Northeast Africa is neither geographically or climatically uniform. Internally it varies widely in altitude, rainfall patterns, river systems, soil types and vegetation cover. In most historical studies the region is also further divided according to strict cultural and political boundaries. It is unusual, for instance, to compare the Sudan with the countries of East Africa, or Ethiopia with anything but itself. Yet the study of the history of ecological relationships makes possible, at the same time that it requires, a recognition of a broader outline to the region which not only acknowledges, but knits together its diverse range of societies".Johnson, Douglas H.; Anderson, David M. (26 June 2019).The Ecology Of Survival: Case Studies From Northeast African History. Routledge. pp. 1–15.ISBN978-1-000-31615-5.
^Daniel, Kendie (1988).NORTHEAST AFRICA AND THE WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER. Michigan, US. pp. 69–82.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Project MUSE. (2020).Northeast African Studies. Retrieved March 22, 2020. "This distinguished journal is devoted to the scholarly analysis of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan, as well as the Nile Valley, the Red Sea, and the lands adjacent to both."
^"There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa. The distribution of population characteristics seems to follow a clinal pattern from south to north, which may be explained by natural selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas.”Lovell, Nancy C. (1999). "Egyptians, physical anthropology of". InBard, Kathryn A.; Shubert, Steven Blake (eds.).Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. London: Routledge. pp. 328–331.ISBN0415185890.
^“The data clearly suggests that the population in southern Egypt became more diverse as the society more complex (Keita 1992). Egyptian society seems never to have been “closed”, and it is hard to believe that the modal phenotype could have remain unchanged, especially if social and sexual collection were operating. However, it is important to emphasize that, while the biology changed with increasing local social complexity, the ethnicity of Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change. The cultural morays, ritual formulae, and symbols used in writing, as far as can be ascertained, remained true to their southern origins”.Keita, S. O. Y. (1993)."Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships".History in Africa.20:129–154.doi:10.2307/3171969.ISSN0361-5413.JSTOR3171969.S2CID162330365.
^|p.85–“The physical anthropological findings from the major burial sites of those founding locales of ancient Egypt in the millennium BCE, notably El-Badari as well as Naqada, show no demographic indebtedness to the Levant. They reveal instead a population with cranial and dental features with closest parallels of those of other longtime populations of the surrounding areas of northeastern Africa, such as Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa. Members of this population did not come from somewhere else but were descendants of the long-term inhabitants of these portions of Africa going back many millennia.”Ehret, Christopher (20 June 2023).Ancient Africa: A Global History, to 300 CE. Princeton: Princeton University Press. pp. 83–86, 97,167–169.ISBN978-0-691-24409-9.Archived from the original on 22 March 2023. Retrieved20 March 2023.
^p.355 - “The importance of iconographic sources was emphasized in the main. Säve-Söderbergh and Leclant stressed that the links indicated by cave paintings between the vast expanses of the Sahara and the banks of the Nile nodded to a migration of peoples of the Sahara and groups from the South to the valley –something confirmed by research over the last thirty years. Diop set out to return Egypt to its southern African hinterland by systematically using Pharaonic statues and art to support his point of view. Although a debate on the north-south orientation of a ‘civilizing’ wave of peoples in the valley had prevailed up to that point, the avalanche of new data now made this idea redundant, suggesting instead the image of a growing and unifying political movement in the valley from south to north that repositioned its starting point back in time: in Upper Egypt, digs at the Uj tomb of King Scorpion at the Abydos necropolis push back the origin of the first Horus back to circa 3250 BCE, and the resumption of excavations at Nekhen led to the exhumation of the famous ‘Elephant Kings’ of Hierakonpolis (Nekhen) which have no inscriptions and date back even further to circa 3700 BCE.” p.356 - “It quantified the key impact of sub-Saharan populations and found a clear link between the Siwi and the peoples of North-East Africa. We could continue with work by Zakrzewski on the predynastic population of Nekhen, investigations by Crubezy which traced the boundaries of the ancient Khoisan settlement to Upper Egypt, where its faint traces remain identifiable, and Keita’s work, as the most groundbreaking.”' p.356 - “Hence the work by Cerny’s team highlighting the close links between the peoples of Upper Egypt, North Cameroon and Ethiopia – the Cameroon people living in the Mandara mountains speaking Chadic languages, and the Ethiopians speaking Kushitic languages, prior to Ge’ez being spread throughout the region during the Aksumite period. This broadens the linguistic debate to include language families that had been little studied or used in comparisons that have long focused on the East.”Anselin, Alain."Review of Ancient Civilizations of Africa: General History of Africa Volume II " in (General history of Africa, IX: General history of Africa revisited. pp. 355–75.
^Zakrzewski, Sonia R. (April 2007)."Population continuity or population change: Formation of the ancient Egyptian state".American Journal of Physical Anthropology.132 (4):501–509.Bibcode:2007AJPA..132..501Z.doi:10.1002/ajpa.20569.PMID17295300.When Mahalanobis D2 was used, the Naqadan and Badarian Predynastic samples exhibited more similarity to Nubian, Tigrean, and some more southern series than to some mid- to late Dynasticseries from northern Egypt (Mukherjee et al., 1955). The Badarian have been found to be very similar to a Kerma sample (Kushite Sudanese), using both the Penrose statistic (Nutter, 1958) and DFA of males alone (Keita,1990). Furthermore, Keita considered that Badarian males had a southern modal phenotype, and that together with a Naqada sample, they formed a southern Egyptian cluster as tropical variants together with a sample from Kerma
