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This paper reviews some concepts, comments, and studies from various time periods, as well as recent presentations in the media and studies, on Nile Valley peoples. It illustrates problems related to ongoing racial paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Male Badarian crania were analyzed using the generalized distance of Mahalanobis in a comparative analysis with other African and European series from the Howells's database. The study was carried out to examine the affinities of the Badarians to evaluate, in preliminary fashion, a demic diffusion hypothesis that postulates that horticulture and the Afro-Asiatic language family were brought ultimately from southern Europe. (The assumption was made that the southern Europeans would be more similar to the central and northern Europeans than to any indigenous African populations.) The Badarians show a greater affinity to indigenous Africans while not being identical. This suggests that the Badarians were more affiliated with local and an indigenous African population than with Europeans. It is more likely that Near Eastern/southern European domesticated animals and plants were adopted by indigenous Nile Valley people without a major immigration of non-Africans. There was more of cultural transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the study "Genes, Tribes, and African History," by Scott MacEachern, which has been published within the issue. MacEachern's article focused on human genetics and African social history. Referring to the insights given in the study, the author feels that the study is useful for further investigation. According to the author, there are some technical problems in the study. Some racial typologies have been suggested by the author.

The possible factors involved in the generation of p49a,f TaqI Y-chromosome spatial diversity in Egypt were explored. The object was to consider explanations beyond those that emphasize gene flow mediated via military campaigns within the Nile corridor during the dynastic period. Current patterns of the most common variants (V, XI, and IV) have been suggested to be primarily related to Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom political actions in Nubia, including occasional settler colonization, and the conquest of Egypt by Kush (in upper Nubia, northern Sudan), thus initiating the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. However, a synthesis of evidence from archaeology, historical linguistics, texts, distribution of haplotypes outside Egypt, and some demographic considerations lends greater support to the establishment, before the Middle Kingdom, of the observed distributions of the most prevalent haplotypes V, XI, and IV. It is suggested that the pattern of diversity for these variants in the Egyptian Nile Valley was largely the product of population events that occurred in the late Pleistocene to mid-Holocene through the First Dynasty, and was sustained by continuous smaller-scale bidirectional migrations/interactions. The higher frequency of V in Ethiopia than in Nubia or upper (southern) Egypt has to be taken into account in any discussion of variation in the Nile Valley., (Copyright 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc)

A principal components analysis was carried out on male crania from the northeast quadrant of Africa and selected European and other African series. Individuals, not predefined groups, were the units of study, while nevertheless keeping group membership in evidence. The first principal component seems to largely capture "size" variation in crania from all of the regions. The same general morphometric trends were found to exist within the African and European crania, although there was some broad separation along a cline. Anatomically, the second principal component captures predominant trends denoting a broader to narrower nasal aperture combined with a similar shape change in the maxilla, an inverse relation between face-base lengths ("projection") and base breadths, and a decrease in anterior base length relative to base breadth. The third principal component broadly describes trends within Africa and Europe: specifically, a change from a combination of a relatively narrower face and longer vault, to one of a wider face and shorter vault; it shows the northeast quadrant Africans along a cline with the other Africans. Stated in relative terms, the northeastern Africans tend to exhibit narrower bases in relationship to more projecting faces, and broader nasal areas than Europeans, although there is range of variation. Relative to the other African groups, they have narrower nasal areas and narrower faces in relationship to vault length. The crania from the northeast quadrant of Africa collectively demonstrate the greatest pattern of overlap with both Europeans and other Africans. Variation was found to be high in all series but greatest in the African material as a whole. Individuals from different geographical regions frequently plotted near each other, revealing aspects of variation at the level of individuals that is obscured by concentrating on the most distinctive facial traits once used to construct "types." The high level of African interindividual variation in craniometric pattern is reminiscent of the great level of molecular diversity found in Africa. These results, coupled with those of Y chromosome studies, may help generate hypotheses concerning the length of time over which recent craniometric variation emerged in Africa.