Prehistory of the Horn of Africa

The prehistory of the Horn of Africa dates millions of years back where Lucy, an australopithecine, was found in the Afar depression, Ethiopia. The Horn of Africa has also been a gateway to and from Eurasia in ancient times due to the narrow Bab-el-Mandeb strait, which likely had lower sea levels in ancient times which could have been crossed over using rafts made by early humans.[1] The region has also had a long history of genetic, cultural and linguistic exchange with Eurasians in its past due to its location, and has been the ground of many important events throughout the history of humanity.[2] The Horn of Africa namely the Afar triangle, is considered the birthplace of mankind according to existing archaeological and fossil evidence.[3][4][5][6]

Lower Paleolithic

Mankinds first walking ancestors were found in the horn dated to 3.9–2.9 million years ago, named Lucy who a Australopithecus afarensis.

Middle Paleolithic

Over millions of years, archaic humans would evolve into homo sapiens and would likely be born and evolve in the horn of Africa. One of the earliest remains of a human was found here named Herto Man dated to 160,000 - to 154,000-year-old. The horn was likely used as a gateway to Eurasia by early humans roughly 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, according to the Southern Dispersal theory.[7] The East Africans who migrated out of Africa were likely a population as low 150 to 1,000 people out of the 2,000 to 5,000 individuals living in Africa at the time. After crossing the red sea, they would later from Arabia following a coastal route travelling east to Persia within a few thousand years. From India, they would have spread to Southeast Asia ("Sundaland") and Australia. The later descendants of those migrations eventually colonizing the rest of Eurasia, the remainder of Oceania, and the Americas.[1] Peolithic people of the Horn also migrated from the Horn of Africa to west Africa and hypothetically mixed[8][9] with some type of archaic human to create modern day West Africans.[10]

Neolithic

During Neolithic times, the Horn of Africa saw a huge expansion from North Sudan into the horn. The people expanding into the horn were Afro-Asiatic pastoralists who introduced the Cushitic languages, pastoralism and Eurasian genes into Sub-Saharan Africa. The horn of Africa prior to this expansion was likely inhabited by hunter-gatherers similar to the Mota skeleton excavated in Ethiopia who carried haplogroup E1b1a2, this haplogroup is carried in high percentages by the Omotic people of Ethiopia.[11] These Cushitic speaking pastoralists also migrated from the Horn of Africa south into Kenya and Tanzania, even reaching as far south as South Africa before the Bantu farmers and Europeans arrived there.[12] They also mixed with and introduced Eurasian genes into the native San people.[13]

References
  1. Phillip Endicott; Mait Metspalu; Toomas Kivisild (2007), The Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia: Inter-disciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics, Springer Netherlands, doi:10.1007/1-4020-5562-5_10, ISBN 978-1-4020-5561-4, ... The concept of a coastal migration was already envisioned in 1962 by the ...
  2. Fattovich, Rodolfo (1975). Pre-Aksumite Civilization of Ethiopia. Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Volumes 5-7. p. 73. Retrieved 6 February 2017.
  3. Cavalazzi, B.; Barbieri, R.; Gómez, F.; Capaccioni, B.; Olsson-Francis, K.; Pondrelli, M.; Rossi, A.P.; Hickman-Lewis, K.; Agangi, A.; Gasparotto, G.; Glamoclija, M. (2019-04-01). "The Dallol Geothermal Area, Northern Afar (Ethiopia)—An Exceptional Planetary Field Analog on Earth". Astrobiology. 19 (4): 553–578. doi:10.1089/ast.2018.1926. ISSN 1531-1074. PMC 6459281. PMID 30653331.
  4. Maslin, Mark (2017-01-18). The Cradle of Humanity: How the changing landscape of Africa made us so smart. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-100971-6.
  5. Sahle, Yonatan; Hutchings, W. Karl; Braun, David R.; Sealy, Judith C.; Morgan, Leah E.; Negash, Agazi; Atnafu, Balemwal (2013-11-13). "Earliest Stone-Tipped Projectiles from the Ethiopian Rift Date to >279,000 Years Ago". PLOS ONE. 8 (11): e78092. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...878092S. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078092. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 3827237. PMID 24236011.
  6. Cavalazzi, B.; Barbieri, R.; Gómez, F.; Capaccioni, B.; Olsson-Francis, K.; Pondrelli, M.; Rossi, A.P.; Hickman-Lewis, K.; Agangi, A.; Gasparotto, G.; Glamoclija, M. (2019-04-01). "The Dallol Geothermal Area, Northern Afar (Ethiopia)—An Exceptional Planetary Field Analog on Earth". Astrobiology. 19 (4): 553–578. Bibcode:2019AsBio..19..553C. doi:10.1089/ast.2018.1926. ISSN 1531-1074. PMC 6459281. PMID 30653331.
  7. "Southern Dispersal Route: When Did Early Modern Humans Leave Africa?".
  8. Capelli, Cristian; Montinaro, Francesco. "Genetics and Southern African History". Oxford University. Oxford University Research Archive.
  9. Montinaro, Francesco; Capelli, Cristian (2018). "The evolutionary history of Southern Africa". Current Opinion in Genetics & Development. Oxford University Research Archive. 53: 157–164. doi:10.1016/j.gde.2018.11.003. PMID 30522870.
  10. "Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations".
  11. C.A., Plaster (2011-09-28). Variation in Y chromosome, mitochondrial DNA and labels of identity on Ethiopia. discovery.ucl.ac.uk (Doctoral). Retrieved 2018-06-27.
  12. Pickrell, J. K.; Patterson, N.; Loh, P.-R.; Lipson, M.; Berger, B.; Stoneking, M.; Pakendorf, B.; Reich, D. (2014-02-18). "Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (7): 2632–2637. doi:10.1073/pnas.1313787111. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 3932865. PMID 24550290.
  13. Blench, Roger (2009). "Was there an Interchange between Cushitic Pastoralists and Khoesan Speakers in the Prehistory of Southern Africa and how Can this be Detected?". In Möhlig, Wilhelm J.G.; Seidel, Frank; Seifert, Marc (eds.). Language contact, language change and history based on language sources in Africa. Köln: Köppe. ISBN 3-89645-093-X. OCLC 492091262.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.