Q&A for History of Mankind (8)

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This is the eighth Q&A for History of Mankind. Paid subscribers received an email soliciting questions and I got some.

I picked four that I think I can shed the most light upon. First, tradition calls on me to comment upon new pieces of scholarship that pertain to older posts.

Here’s a Nature paper about DNA extracted from a 4,000-year old hair found in northern Sudan, just south of Egypt. The DNA is consistent with what the authors call established models for the southward dispersal of Middle Nile Valley pastoral populations to the Rift Valley of eastern Africa, and provide a possible genetic source population for this dispersal.

In summary: the finding reinforces earlier views that Asiatic populations (eventually called “Aamu” in the Egyptian tradition, the famous Hyksos of Western scholarship that I discussed in this post…

Hyksos: The Jews in Egypt

…moved southwards along the Nile River Valley. This southward movement towards Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have been more common than the opposite movement of black Africans towards the north, at least in antiquity.

A second paper of interest refers to the oldest Canaanite-language inscription ever found, dating to about 1700 BC, and engraved on an ivory comb. Curiously, it includes a spell against lice. It’s also worth citing this one in the context of the Hyksos post, one of the most popular in the history of this newsletter — and the previous paper, about the importance of hair in DNA research.

Now, for the questions: