Quote:

"Intralimb (crural and brachial) indices are significantly higher in ancient Egyptians than in American Whites (except crural index among females), i.e., Egyptians have relatively longer distal segments (Table 4). Intralimb indices are not significantly different between Egyptians and American Blacks... Many of those who have studied ancient Egyptians have commented on their characteristically ‘‘tropical’’ or ‘‘African’’ body plan (Warren, 1897; Masali, 1972; Robins, 1983; Robins and Shute, 1983, 1984, 1986; Zakrzewski, 2003). Egyptians also fall within the range of modern African populations (Ruff and Walker, 1993), but close to the upper limit of modern Europeans as well, at least for the crural index (brachial indices are definitely more ‘‘African’’).. In terms of femoral and tibial length to total skeletal height proportions, we found that ancient Egyptians are significantly different from US Blacks, although still closer to Blacks than to Whites."


("Stature estimation in ancient Egyptians..' Raxter and Ruff et al.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2008, Jun;136(2):147-55

"Ancient Egypt belongs to a language group known as 'Afroasiatic' (formerly called Hamito-Semitic) and its closest relatives are other north-east African languages from Somalia to Chad. Egypt's cultural features, both material and ideological and particularly in the earliest phases, show clear connections with that same broad area. In sum, ancient Egypt was an African culture, developed by African peoples, who had wide ranging contacts in north Africa and western Asia." (Morkot, Robert (2005) The Egyptians: An Introduction. Routledge. p. 10)

--Anselin, A (2011) Some notes about an early African pool of cultures from which emerged Egyptian civilization.
In: Egypt in its African Context. 2009. Proceedings-  Museum, University of Manchester, England. Karen Exell (ed). BAR International Series 2204 2011
Archaeopress Publishers of British Archaeological Reports

"These same log shape variables were subjected to two forms of cluster analysis: neighbor-joining (NJ) and unweighted pair-group method using averages (UPGMA) tree analysis. Figure 8 is the NJ tree. It has two main branches—a long and linear body build branch that includes the Egyptians, Sub-Saharan Africans (except for the Pygmies), and African-Americans and a second, less linear body form branch that includes the Inuit, Europeans, Euro-Americans, Puebloans, Nubians, and Pygmies. Note that the Nubians used in this study are thought by some to represent an immigrant population from Europe or Western Asia [see Holliday (1995)]."
--Holiday, T. (2010) Body proportions of circumpolar peoples as evidenced from skeletal data. AmerJrPhyAntrho, 142: 2. 287-302

"From the Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period different lines of evidence support an out-of-Africa Mesolithic migration to the Levant by northeastern African groups that had biological affinities with sub-Saharan populations. From a genetic point of view, several recent genetic studies have shown that subSanaran genetic lineages (affiliated with the Y-chromosome PN2 clade; Underhill et al. 2001) have spread through Egypt into the Near East, the Mediterranean area, and, for some lineages, as far north as Turkey (E3b-M35 Y lineage; Cinniogclu et al. 2004; Luis et al. 2004), probably during several dispersal episodes since the Mesolithic (Cinniogelu et al. 2004; King et al. 2008; Lucotte and Mercier 2003; Luis et al. 2004; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999; Semino et al. 2004; Underhill et al. 2001). This finding is in agreement with morphological data that suggest that populations with sub-Saharan morphological elements were present in northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic to at least the early Holocene, and diffused northward to the Levant and Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic. 

Indeed, the rare and incomplete Paleolithic to early Neolithic skeletal specimens found in Egypt - such as the 33,000-year-old Nazlet Khater specimen (Pinhasi and Semai 2000), the Wadi Kubbaniya skeleton from the late Paleolithic site in the upper Nile valley (Wendorf et al. 1986), the Qarunian (Faiyum) early Neolithic crania (Henneberg et al. 1989; Midant-Reynes 2000), and the Nabta specimen from the Neolithic Nabta Playa site in the western desert of Egypt (Henneberg et al. 1980) - show, with regard to the great African biological diversity, similarities with some of the sub-Saharan middle Paleolithic and modern sub-Saharan specimens. 

This affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans has also been noticed by several other investigators (Angel 1972; Berry and Berry 1967, 1972; Keita 1995) and has been recently reinforced by the study of Brace et al. (2005), which clearly shows that the cranial morphology of prehistoric and recent northeast African populations is linked to sub-Saharan populations (Niger-Congo populations). These results support the hypothesis that some of the Paleolithic-early Holocene populations from northeast Africa were probably descendents of sub-Saharan ancestral populations...... This northward migration of northeastern African populations carrying sub-Saharan biological elements is concordant with the morphological homogeneity of the Natufian populations (Bocquentin 2003), which present morphological affinity with sub-Saharan populations (Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005). 

In addition, the Neolithic revolution was assumed to arise in the late Pleistocene Natufians and subsequently spread into Anatolia and Europe (Bar-Yosef 2002), and the first Anatolian farmers, Neolithic to Bronze Age Mediterraneans and to some degree other Neolithic-Bronze Age Europeans, show morphological affinities with the Natufians (and indirectly with sub-Saharan populations; Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005), in concordance with a process of demie diffusion accompanying the 
extension of the Neolithic revolution (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994)."

---Cranial Discrete Traits in a Byzantine Population and Eastern Mediterranean Population Movements
F. X. Ricaut, M. Waelkens. Human Biology, Volume 80, Number 5, October 2008, pp. 535-564