BioMedNet: "Maternal line reveals origin of Arabic"
“Analysis of thousands of mitochondrial NA samples has led Estonian archeogeneticists to the origins of Arabic. Ene Metspalu of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Tartu University and the Estonian Biocentre in Tartu, claims to have evidence that the Arab-Berber languages of the Near and Middle East came out of East Africa around 10,000 years ago. She has found evidence for what may have been the last sizeable migration out of Africa before the slave trade....
“MtDNA is inherited through the maternal line, and by comparing their data with existing data on European, Indian, Siberian and other Central Asian populations, the researchers were able to create a comprehensive phylogenetic map of maternal lineages diverging from Africa and spreading towards Europe and Asia. Working in collaboration with language specialists, they found that this movement 10,000 years ago, which was probably centred on Ethiopia, could well have been responsible for seeding the Afro-Asiatic language from which all modern Arab-Berber languages are descended.
'This language was spoken in Africa 10,000 or 12,000 years ago,' Metspalu told BioMedNet News. 'We think it was around that time that carriers brought these Afro-Asiatic languages to the Near East.' The language, or its derivatives, later spread much further afield. What could have triggered the movement she can only speculate. One possibility is that increasing desertification was causing famine in Africa and driving hunters further afield in search of animals. Interestingly, the lineages they traced through this 10,000-year-old migration didn't seem to get much further north than modern-day Syria or east of modern-day Iraq. There is no evidence of the lineages in the mtDNA of people from Turkey or Iran, says Metspalu.'”
"To propose that the majority of modern populations of the Arabian peninsula, Mesopotamia and North Africa are direct descendants of populations predominant in the same regions 5,000 years ago, or in the case of Arabia and the Maghreb, just 500 years ago,
is to mislead and has simply created greater confusion with respect to the study of Afroasiatic biological and genetic origins, and in fact world history in general."- Dana Marniche