Black Genesis

by Robert Bauval

  The born-and-bred-American Walker insists that he is not African, that he has never been to Africa and has no desire to go there. He sees himself as “an old-fashioned intellectual critic” and adds, “I don’t like a lot of work being done in the field. . . . Just because you want to believe the world was created by black people doesn’t make it so . . .”11 Actually, though many may disagree with Walker about the ancient Egyptians, it is possible to find admirable the fact that he does not think his own Blackness should affect his scholastic conclusions. This may be a hopeful indicator that personal ethnicity should not affect our scientific or scholarly conclusions. Further, perhaps there is a problem of terminology—it may be accurate to label these commentators as Afrocentrists, for Afrocentrism is a pseudoscience, but only in the same way that Eurocentrism should be considered a pseudoscience. Both imply an attempt to fit data and observations into a box of preconceived notions. If the data, on balance, indicates that the people who originated the pharaonic civilization of Egypt were indeed Black Africans, then drawing such a conclusion need not be labeled Afrocentric or anti-Eurocentric—it may be thought of simply as accurate.

  THE OUT OF AFRICA EVE

  Ironically, in spite of views such as those of Clarence Walker, scientists in the field of genetics have been pointing out that it may actually be correct to say that the world was created by Black people. In 2009, more than a century after the exploration of darkest Africa by Livingstone, Burton, Stanley, and others, the BBC aired a documentary series titled The Incredible Human Journey. In the series, introduced to a wide British public, was the notion that all human beings alive today have their origins in Africa—indeed, that these origins can be traced to a single Black African woman, the so-called Out of Africa Eve. This view is now widely held by scientists, and it is also called the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis, because it traces the ancestral lineage of humans back through the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on only from the mother. This hypothesis was first published by a team of University of California biochemists in Nature magazine in 1987.12

  Mitochondrial Eve: Mitochondrial DNA exists in human cells outside of the cell nucleus in membrane-enclosed organelles called mitochondria and contains a genome that is independent of the nuclear DNA genome. At conception mitochondrial DNA is passed on separately from the nuclear DNA, with mitochondrial DNA transmitted only from the mother without combination from the father. Thus mitochondrial DNA passes from generation to generation with very little change, only infrequent mutations change the mitochondrial DNA over time. Genetic scientists realized if they could measure the variance (set of all differences) among currently living humans, and if they could estimate the mitochondrial DNA mutation rate, then they could estimate the “origin time” from which all of today’s humans’ mitochondrial DNA must have come. The logic is sort of similar to the way the “big bang” creation of the universe was first discovered—astronomers observed that all distant galaxies were moving away from each other and then measured the rate at which the galaxies are now moving apart and simply turned the clock backward to when the galaxies would have all been in the same place, about fourteen billion years ago, and called that the “big bang.” For mitochondrial DNA, geneticists measured the currently existing variance in humans around the world, and they estimated the mitochondrial DNA mutation rate, and running the genetic clock back in time gave a human mitochondrial DNA origin date of about 200,000 years ago—this is called the “Mitochondrial Eve,” and geographic details of the mitochondrial DNA variance point to that origin location as east-central Africa. Mitochondrial “Eve” is the most recent human woman from whom all living humans today have at least one unbroken matrilineal line. Eve was not alone though. There were many human women alive at the time who share ancestry to living people today, but for all of them other than Eve their descendant lineages contain at least one man (who did not pass the mitochondrial DNA). In fact nuclear DNA analyses indicate that human population never dropped below a few tens of thousands (e.g., Naoyuki Takahata, “Allelic Genealogy and Human Evolution,” in Molecular Biology and Evolution, January 1993, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 20–22). As is the big bang in astrophysics, the Mitochondrial Eve is considered nearly settled science in genetics. But controversies do remain, especially involving uncertainties in the DN A mutation rate (e.g., Christopher Wills, “When Did Eve Live? An Evolutionary Detective Story,” in Evolution, 1995, vol. 49, pp. 593–607). Similar studies of male Y-chromosomes place the most recent common male lineage ancestor, or “Y-Chromosomal Adam,” several tens of thousands of years more recent than Mitochondrial Eve (e.g., Yuehai Ke, et al., “African Origin of Modern Humans in East Asia: A Tale of 12,000 Y Chromosomes,” in Science, May 11, 2001, vol. 292, no. 5519, pp. 1151–53). Interestingly, statistical genealogical studies separate from genetics indicate that the most recent common ancestor of all people alive today was much more recent than Mitochondrial Eve, and Y-Chromosomal Adam, probably within the past few thousand years (e.g., Douglas L. T. Rohde, Steve Olson, and Joseph T. Chang, “Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans,” Nature, 30 Sept. 2004, vol. 431, pp. 562–65). Such a more recent common ancestor is consistent with the 200,000 year ago Mitochondrial Eve who was the most recent unbroken matrilineal ancestor.

  In one of the BBC episodes, the presenter, Alice Roberts, who is also a lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bristol, explains that a “complex-looking DNA-based ‘family tree’ shows how twenty-firstcentury Europeans, Australians and the rest can all be traced back to the same black African population.”13 Roberts further explains, with refreshing candor, that “‘population’ . . . is the word we should be using instead of ‘race.’ I wouldn’t use the word ‘race.’ Biologically, it doesn’t make sense. It’s a bizarre mismatch of concepts: culture, history. . . . Genetically, a white Scandinavian and someone from sub-Saharan Africa are very similar. In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees. It makes you realize that all the historical attitudes towards different races are scientifically meaningless.”14

  The genetic evidence, bolstered by more recent refinements,15 lends support to the Out of Africa Eve hypotheses for human migration, as opposed to the Multi-Regional hypothesis. In a book accompanying the BBC show, Roberts cites the work of the Oxford professor Stephen Oppenheimer, who describes the Out of Africa Eve story of humankind as going something like this:

  Homo Sapiens, modern humans, lived ca. 160,000 BC with the earliest mt-DNA and Y-chromosome ancestors found in East Africa. Four groups of hunter-gatherers travelled out southwest towards the Congo and west to the Ivory Coast, south towards the Cape of Good Hope, and northeast towards the Nile. Around 125,000 BC one group moved northwards down the Nile and into the Levant, but due to a climatic upheaval around 90,000 BC this group died out. A global freeze turned the Levant and North Africa into extreme desert. Around 85,000 BC another group crossed the entrance of the Red Sea in the south and into the Arabian Peninsula to reach the Indian sub-continent. They then spread to Indonesia and reached southern China by 75,000 BC. By ca. 65,000 BC they had spread to Borneo and Australia. Warmer climatic condition around 50,000 BC allowed a group to move again northwards through the Levant, cross the Bosporus and reach Europe. By 25,000 BC the ancestors of the Native Americans crossed the Bearing land bridge into Alaska and then spread into North America. By 10,500 BC they had spread also into South America. Between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago the Levant group moved back into the now-green Sahara.16

  We can note that what remains to be explained is anomalous evidence for the later parts of that story, such as the fact that archaeological evidence for dating the earliest South Americans keeps moving back in time, which indicates that they may have crossed the oceans by boats, for example. In addition, Roberts’s story is a mixture of the genetic, archaeological, and anthropological evidences, all of which are subject to new results and improvements. Yet some version of the basic Out-of-Africa-Eve view—that all humans alive today share one female ancest
or from Africa who lived roughly two hundred thousand years ago—is the currently prevailing notion among scientists. It is possible, then, that while this human journey was going on, the early modern humans of east Africa moved northward into Chad and settled in the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands. From there, perhaps around 9000 BCE, they started moving north again into the then inviting, green Egyptian Sahara, probably going first to the Gilf Kebir and Uwainat mountain region, then slowly spreading east and northeast toward the Nile. Another group moved westward from central Africa into the green Tenere Sahara of Niger as well as into the fertile Aïr Mountains farther west. It is possible that around 8000 BCE these black-skinned people in the Egyptian Sahara encountered an incoming Mediterranean group that had returned to North Africa from Europe via the Levant. This may perhaps explain why Romuald Schild and Fred Wendorf of the CPE found in the skeletal remains at the prehistoric cemetery of Gebel Ramlah near Nabta Playa two racial groups, one made up of sub-Saharan Black pastoralists and the other of Mediterranean or North African ethnology.17 Then, starting around 5000 BCE, as the Sahara became drier, these people began moving out of the desertified regions. Finally, by 3500 BCE, the desert became superarid and forced them to migrate eastward into the Nile Valley. If this is true—and it does very much appear to be the case—then the origins of the ancient Egyptians are rooted in a black-skinned race of sub-Saharan pastoralists that had themselves likely come from the Tibesti-Ennedi highlands and, going further back in time, had their source in eastern Africa. In other words, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of a black-skinned African origin for the Egyptian civilization.

  Yet is it possible to prove this via some sort of direct measurements?

  IT IS ALL IN THE MELANIN

  A great advocate of the African origins model as well as a believer in the Black African origins of the ancient Egyptians was the Senegalese anthropologist and radiocarbon physicist Cheikh Anta Diop. Hailed by many as one of the greatest African historians, Diop was studying for a physics doctorate in Paris in 1951 when he caused a huge stir at the university because his Ph.D. thesis on the Black African origins of ancient Egypt was rejected as unsuitable by his assessors. Not being easily discouraged, Diop boldly labored for nine more years to make the evidence in his thesis so airtight that, when he resubmitted the thesis again, this time it was grudgingly accepted. Hardened by those struggles and the bias he encountered against the African origins idea, Diop went further and published his thesis under the title Nations Nègres et Culture, and very soon he became a national hero and the major defender of the African origins theory. In his native country of Senegal, Diop founded the Radiocarbon Laboratory at the University of Dakar, became its first director, and used this cutting-edge technology to continue his research on the ethnic origins of the Egyptian civilization. Diop’s argument was simple and straightforward: it was possible to know the skin color of an ancient corpse by microscopic analysis of the melanin content in the body. His critics countered by saying that this method was not foolproof and that possible contamination of the embalming unguents and the deterioration of the corpse over the centuries made the result dubious, but these objections were in turn addressed by Diop. In 1974 Diop presented his findings to a large number of professional Egyptologists and anthropologists at the People of Ancient Egypt symposium in Cairo organized by UNESCO World Heritage. He was largely ignored. Diop died in 1986, leaving behind numerous publications as well as recorded interviews on radio and television. Following is a concise overview of Diop’s thesis.18

  Figure 5.1. Cheikh Anta Diop.

  DIOP AND THE CAUSE OF HIS STRUGGLES

  Diop starts by recounting that in 1971 the Kenyan anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey, in his final report at the Seventh Pan-African Congress of Prehistory at Addis Ababa, proved that more than one hundred fifty thousand years ago humans that were morphologically similar to us were living in central Africa around the great lakes that feed the Nile. Diop explains how this starling discovery opened a reappraisal of the ethnology of the ancient Egyptians and humankind as a whole. Leakey even thought he had found the very spot where the adventure of modern man had begun: the beautiful, snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, traditionally known as the Mountains of the Moon and discovered by Henry Morton Stanley in 1885. These mountains stand between Lake Albert and Lake Edward and are the highest source of the Nile River. Rwenzori means “rainmakers,” a name inspired by the almost permanent rain clouds that cover the peaks of these mysterious mountains. According to Leakey, humans dispersed from here to inhabit the rest of Africa and, eventually, the whole planet. The implication was that modern humans, being from a warm and humid climate that caused the natural melanin in their pigmentation to darken, were originally black-skinned Africans. It was, therefore, from this Black stock that the other races of humans were formed. Other than migrating southward, eastward, and westward, these original humans could also go northward to two main regions: the Nile Valley and the vast, then green Sahara.

  Starting from the late Paleolithic age the entire Nile Valley, from southern Sudan to northern Egypt, was populated by a Negroid people. Similarly, the northwest region of Africa that is today the Sahara was also populated by these same Negroid people. Diop rejected the claim by some anthropologists that ancient human skulls from Nagada in Lower Egypt and Abydos and El Amra in Upper Egypt exhibit not only Negroid but also Germanic features. He pointed out that similar skulls from well-known Black people such as the Ethiopians and Dravidians also exhibit the same characteristics but are clearly not Germanic. Diop also pointed out that finding non-Negroid features in skulls does not necessarily mean that living individuals were white. In Egypt some 1,787 skulls, dating from the predynastic period to the present day, were examined and found to be 36 percent Negroid, 33 percent Mediterranean, 11 percent Cro-Magnon, and the rest uncertain but most probably also Negroid. This shows, says Diop, that the original and pure Black Negroid race that first inhabited Egypt eventually merged with a Mediterranean race to create the Egyptians that we know today.

  Diop also rejected Flinders Petrie’s method of using symbolic images from ancient palettes to classify predynastic and protodynastic Egyptians into six racial types: an aquiline type, which he equated to white-skinned Libyans; a plaited-beard type, which he equated to originating on the Red Sea; a sharp-nosed type, which he equated to coming from central Arabia; a tilted-nose type, which he equated to coming from Middle Egypt; and a jutting-beard type, which he equated to coming from Lower Egypt. Diop points out that even if we accept such simplistic classifications, current Egyptology textbooks at best ignore the issue of racial origins or, at worst, flatly assert that the ancient Egyptians were white, leaving the lay reader with the false impression that such assertions are based on solid research—which, of course, they are not. Thus generations of readers have been misled to the false belief that the ancient Egyptian civilization owes little or nothing to Africa. Diop accuses Egyptologists of going “around the difficulty today by speaking of red-skinned and black-skinned whites without their sense of common logic being in the least upset.”19 He argues that in ancient times, the Greeks referred to all of Africa as Libya, which was a misnomer ab initio, because Africa contains many other peoples besides the so-called Libyans, who belong among the whites of the northern or Mediterranean periphery. Diop was justifiably repulsed by a textbook intended for middle and secondary school that explained that “a Black is distinguished less by the color of his skin than by his features: thick lips, flattened nose . . .”20 Diop points out that many of the reliefs and murals from predynastic and early dynastic times in Egypt show

  . . . the native-born blacks subjugating the foreign intruders into the valley . . . wherever the autochthonous racial type is represented with any degree of clearness, it is evidently Negroid. Nowhere are the Indo-European and Semitic elements shown even as ordinary freemen serving a local chief, but invariably as conquered foreigners. The rare portrayals found are
always shown with the distinctive marks of captivity, hands tied behind the back or strained over the shoulders. A protodynastic figurine represents an Indo-European prisoner with a long plait on his knees, with his hands bound tight to his body. The characteristics of the object itself show that it was intended as the foot of a piece of furniture and represented a conquered race.21

  Diop argues that the two variants of the Black race—the straight-haired Dravidians in Asia and the Nubians and Tebu, and the kinky-haired humans from the Equatorial regions—are found in the modern Egyptian population. Diop’s silver bullet, however, was the proven scientific method that can determine skin-color by the analysis of the melanin content in mummies from ancient Egyptians—and he insists that, contrary to the words of Egyptologists, it was entirely possible to determine the melanin content of ancient mummies by microscopic analysis in the laboratory. Melanin, or, more precisely, eumelanin, is a naturally produced polymer responsible for skin pigmentation. It is insoluble and can be preserved for millions of years, such as in the skins of fossilized creatures. Diop claimed that it can be measured in the skin of Egyptian mummies. Even though Egyptologists lament that the skin of mummies is tainted by embalming material and thus is no longer susceptible to such analysis, Diop rejected this by showing that although the outer epidermis is where the melanin is usually found, melanocytes are particles deeper in the skin where they are not destroyed by the mummification process. From samples of common Egyptian mummies from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Diop was able to show high melanin levels that are not found in white-skinned people. Diop wanted to apply the same analysis to royal mummies kept in Egypt, but the Egyptian authorities refused to give him any samples—not even the few millimeters of skin tissue that are required for such analysis.