Linguists place the Chadic languages in the central Sahel, around Lake Chad and the Komadugu basin. They probably spread there while the Sahara was still green, several thousand years ago, when pastoralists and fishers moved across a landscape of lakes and grassland that has since dried.
Genetic studies add a clue. A male-line lineage called R-V88 is unusually frequent among Chadic-speaking groups in the Lake Chad region, and Cruciani and colleagues (2010) interpreted it as a trace of early-to-mid Holocene movements across the Sahara. Reported frequencies among the Hausa vary from study to study, so this site gives no percentage.
Sources for this article
- Cruciani et al. 2010, whole article
- Newman 2000, introduction