AFRICAN ORIGIN OF WORLD POPULATION

AFRICAN ORIGIN OF WORLD POPULATION

AFRICAN ORIGIN OF WORLD POPULATION

The African origin of the world population is a well-established fact. Between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began migrating from the African continent and populating parts of Europe and Asia (Chang, 1963). They reached the Australian continent in canoes sometime between 35,000 and 65,000 years ago (Van Sertima, 1976). Until about the 5th century, the majority of people who lived in Europe were African (Van Sertima, 1985). Traces of these African Knights were found in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France, where they were known as Moors, Mauritanians, Morien, Morand, Moreno, Morano, etc. (Van Sertima, 1985).

Most of the population of modern China — one-fifth of all the people living today — owes its genetic origins to Africa (Chang, 1963). The first Africans in China were apparently people akin to the Batwa of Central Africa and the people of the Andaman Islands today — we call the Diminutive Africoids (whom Chinese historians called Black Dwarfs) and are variously called Pygmies, Negritos, and Aeta (Van Sertima, 1976). In the first century B.C.E., the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus penned that, “From Ethiopia he (Osiris) passed through Arabia, bordering upon the Red Sea as far as India…. He built many cities in India, one of which he called Nysa, willing to have remembrance of that (Nysa) in Egypt, where he was brought up” (Diodorus Siculus, 1935). One of the first documented instances of Africans sailing and settling in the Americas were black Egyptians led by King Ramses III, during the 19th dynasty in 1292 BCE (Van Sertima, 1976).

In fact, in 445 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs’ great seafaring and navigational skills (Herodotus, 1920). In 1311 CE, another major wave of African exploration to the New World was led by King Abubakari II, the ruler of the fourteenth-century Mali Empire, which was larger than the Holy Roman Empire (Van Sertima, 1976). During the early 1940s, archaeologists uncovered a civilization known as the Olmecs of 1200 BC, which pre-dated any other advanced civilization in the Americas (Coe, 1962). The Olmec civilization, which was of African origin and dominated by Africans, was the first significant civilization in Mesoamerica and the Mother Culture of Mexico (Van Sertima, 1976).

References

1. Chang, K. C. (1963). The Archaeology of Ancient China. New Haven: Yale University Press.
2. Van Sertima, I. (1976). They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America. New York: Random House.
3. Van Sertima, I. (1985). African Presence in Early Europe. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
4. Coe, M. D. (1962). Mexico. New York: Praeger.
5. Diodorus Siculus. (1935). Library of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
6. Herodotus. (1920). The Histories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.