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I recently had a discussion about Black Egypt on another message board in which one poster argued that the ancient Egyptians had to be of sub-Saharan origin because of the Nile Valley's connection to the Sudan, and he made the following point:
quote:As people migrate, they often left pieces of the old tribe behind. New ones were made, and the old ones forgotten as time passes. Migrations would tend to be one-way- moving back would bring the new tribe into conflict with the old. Thus people would spread outwards.
I don't think it likely that the ancestors to the egyptians would cross a desert twice to come back and settle along the Nile, where there was undoubtedly somebody already living from the great migrations.
It's a great point to consider when evaluating Eurocentric claims about prehistoric back-migrations into Africa because it asks the question of what would get Paleolithic people to move into an area where other people were already living. I can see such a scenario occurring only under two circumstances:
1) If some kind of severe environmental change forced one group of people to move out of their homeland.
2) If there was a technological gap between the hypothetical migrants and the pre-existing populations.
I doubt either of these would have had much effect on Upper Paleolithic migrations because 1) the Upper Paleolithic pretty much all happened within the same glacial period and b) because pretty much everyone back then lived in the freaking Stone Age; the only technological disparities that would have existed would have been those between modern humans as a whole and archaic hominins (e.g. Neanderthals). Any Paleolithic back-migrants into Africa from Eurasia would have had to contend with a lot of territorial natives who were more or less their technological equals.
Posts: 7125 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: what would get Paleolithic people to move into an area where other people were already living.
this is at a time when it was populated by scattered villages, most of the land was unpopulated
Posts: 43012 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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