Q&A for History of Mankind (13)
Afrocentric discussions, from Sub-Saharan migrations to Egypt's Black Dynasty
Welcome! I'm David Roman and this is my History of Mankind newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone kind and decent forwarded it to you.
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This is the thirteenth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paying subscribers received an email asking for questions; and those are right below the paywall.
Before we get to that, let me remind you that my book ”Emperor Whisperers: a comparative history of ancient Western and Chinese philosophy” is available at Amazon here and also at a much cheaper price and straight from the publisher, which you can contact here. And it’s also free for all paid subscribers of A History of Mankind, who get an electronic copy.
Today we have a bunch of Afro-centric content, which I love because I think the history of Africa (north and south) remains undervalued and underappreciated, and everybody should know about more about the civilizations that emerged there, and those that didn’t and why.
Some of this stuff may sound very specialized, but it really illustrates global trends. For example, as I wrote in the popular post “The First Civilizations of Sub-Saharan Africa,” the Fulani are a very interesting case of a significant minority that doesn’t belong to the main Bantu line of Sub-Saharan ancestry, and yet found niches where it has persisted as a separate ethnicity to present times — something that also occurs in every other continent with other isolated groups, and requires explanation.
A wide spectrum of conflict, absorption and co-existence developed over the centuries of Bantu expansion. Kalambo Falls, near the southern end of Lake Tanganyika in central-eastern Africa, was settled by Bantu-speaking farmers as early as the fourth century AD, but an older, stone-age way of life continued alongside the agriculturalists for many centuries. In dry Southern Africa, especially modern-day Namibia, some Khoekhoe tribes – speakers of languages rich in click-consonants that represent the ultimate tribal identifying mark, since they can't ever be learned by non-native speakers – eventually adopted cattle herding from Bantu migrants.
Within the larger Bantu flow, there were smaller flows, adding up to Sub-Saharan's Africa mosaic-like ethnic structures; for example, the Fulani, pastoralist Niger-Congo speakers, migrated south and east across areas previously settled by Bantus picking some of the plains best adapted to their herds, and eventually made it all the way to Nigeria and Cameroon, where they remain a significant minority to this day, as well as regions near the Red Sea coast.
Generally speaking, Bantu (and Niger-Congo) patterns of conquest and re-settlement weren't strikingly different from those of Indo-Europeans or Austronesians; it was their environment that made a massive difference.
So, thank God that somebody had a closer look at the Fulani. The paper “Echoes from the last Green Sahara: whole genome analysis of Fulani, a key population to unveil the genetic evolutionary history of Africa,” by Eugenia D’Atanasio et al, looks at how and why the Sahelian Fulani are to this day the world’s largest nomadic pastoral ethnic group.
The authors find that, as previously suspected, the Fulani may be the descendants of ancient groups settled in the Sahara during its last Green phase (up to 3000 BC), which is also suggested by Y chromosome results. Their analyses showed that the non-sub-Saharan genetic ancestry component of Fulani cannot be only explained by recent admixture events, but it could be shaped at least in part by older events by events more ancient than previously reported, possibly tracing its origin to the last Green Sahara:
Conclusions According to our results, Fulani may be the descendants of Saharan cattle herders settled in that area during the last Green Sahara. The exact ancestry composition of such ghost Saharan population(s) cannot be completely unveiled from modern genomes only, but the joint analysis with the available African ancient samples suggested a similarity between ancient Saharans and Late Neolithic Moroccans.
I will also make a very brief reference to a famous, much commented upon paper on the role of women in hunter-gatherer societies. I had only a glimpse at the paper and it didn’t look great to me. In particular, it’s been decades since the use of observations of contemporary hunter gatherer environments — many of them African — has been accepted as strong evidence about the functioning of much older, presumably similar societies all over the planet. For more, detailed criticism of that paper, you can check here.
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