The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      Into this highly speculative and controversial debate, Stephen Oppenheimer (2003) has introduced a set of new possibilities. According to his genetic research, much of the population of North Africa, including the northern Nile Valley, stems from a return to Africa, enforced by the last Ice Age, of populations from the Levant some 30 000 years ago. As he puts it, ‘Genetic palaeontology [now] brings clarity to a field of near-medieval confusion’ (347). He sums up as follows:

      North Africa has been populated by recent southward migrations of typical European and Levantine lines. The oldest indigenous North African mtDNA line, sometimes referred to as the Berber motif, is dated to have arrived from the Levant about 30 000 years ago…. About one-eighth of maternal gene lines in North Africa come from more recent migrations from sub-Saharan Africa, and over half are recent movements south from Europe…. All this adds up to a view of both Europe and North Africa as recipients of ancient migrations from further east (63).

      Elsewhere he suggests that the Levantine or Berber motif may well date back even earlier, to 40 000 years ago (139). These possibilities differ entirely from and posit a much earlier date than those enshrined in the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ of Sir Flinders Petrie and others (discussed in Chapter 1), according to which Nile Valley civilisation was founded by an eastern ‘Dynastic race’. Oppenheimer’s findings do, however, confirm that Neolithic Nile Valley cultures were the product of complex demographic dynamics and migrations in an area relatively isolated from the rest of Africa, but impinged upon, over a very long period, by the world of the Near East. This also explains why, as the Brace team working in Cambridge had already found, the pre-Dynastic skeletal remains of the Naqada population reveal more affinity with modern Somalis and even Europeans than with sub-Saharan Africans.

      Oppenheimer’s work on the genetic patterns among north-east African populations is not unique. He points out that ‘geneticists are now in a race to study Ethiopians, some of whom may be descended from the source population of that single [out-of-Africa] exodus’ (67) that would populate the whole earth – but would also, of course, leave behind in Africa large human groups that may have had little further impact on the development of world populations until relatively recent times.

      More recently, James Shreeve has suggested that the ‘group of hunter-gatherers, perhaps just a few hundred strong’ (2006, 62) that left Africa as recently as 50 000 years ago to give rise to all of the rest of non-African extant humanity, may have their most direct living African counterparts among the Khoisanoid peoples of southern Africa. These people, in turn, along with the Hadzabe of eastern Africa, are ‘the remnants of a once continuous population’ of hunter-gatherer communities who once inhabited Africa from the Cape to the Nile Valley, and who have now largely disappeared (Wells, 2006, 145–9).

      In South Africa itself, palaeontologists who have re-examined a skull found in the 1950s near the Eastern Cape village of Hofmeyer have concluded that it is the remains of a 36 000-year-old individual who was of the same type as the African migrants who left Africa 30 000 to 40 000 years ago to colonise Europe and Asia (Gosling, 2007). ‘He would not [have looked] like modern Africans or like modern Europeans, or like modern Khoisan people’ but his skull ‘was found to have a very close affinity with the fossil skulls of Europeans of the Upper Palaeolithic’, claims one member of the team, Alan Morris. For the present study, such findings reconfirm that the identities of the ancient populations of northeast Africa, including Neolithic Egyptians, cannot be predicated on that of any modern African peoples, but must be regarded as having been part of a very ancient nexus of Upper Palaeolithic populations: ‘African’ indeed, yet markedly different from any modern Africans.

      Also relevant here is the work of Bryan Sykes (2001) and his Oxford team on the thirty-three great mitochondrial ‘clans’ to which the whole human race belongs, research that might in due course indicate more clearly how ancient Egyptians related to other African peoples. What we already know is that of these thirty-three clans, thirteen (forty per cent) are largely native to Africa even though the continent has only thirteen per cent of the world’s population. Indeed, according to Spencer Wells, ‘current genetic data indicate that indigenous people belonging to [the LO group – one of the oldest] are found exclusively in Africa’ (2006, 176). Such findings confirm that Homo sapiens has been present in Africa much longer than elsewhere – ‘there has been time for new clans to form and become distinctive and recognizably different from one another’ (276) – but surely have other implications as well.

      Although African genetic sequences show much greater diversity than those now endemic in Europe or Asia, apparently members of only one of these thirteen clans emigrated from Africa in the crucial exodus of 60 000–80 000 years ago (Oppenheimer argues it was 80 000 years ago; Shreeve and Morris favour dates as recently as 40 000 years ago) and their descendants have peopled the rest of the world (Wells, 2006, 277).

      The survival, back in Africa, of thirteen still-identifiable clans might well suggest that far from Africans constituting ‘a homogeneous pure black race’ (Shavit, 2001, 146), of whom the Egyptians were an unproblematic part, the prototypical peoples of Africa actually diversified far earlier and may have kept apart for far longer than their coevals in the rest of the world. Large sections of Africa’s indigenous populations may be only remotely related to the African Pleistocene peoples from among whom came the crucial ‘out of Africa’ migration. Oppenheimer’s findings show that the hunter-gatherer peoples who once inhabited the whole eastern part of Africa from north to south and who, as we have seen, may have provided the root stock of non-African humanity, probably became distinctive from their West African counterparts as long as 140 000–190 000 years ago (Oppenheimer, 2003, 40 and Appendix I). In other words, there is a greater genetic difference between the ancient hunter-gatherer populations of eastern and southern Africa and the ‘broad African’ populations of West Africa than between any other human group on earth.

      It has clearly become unsatisfactory to subsume such substantially separate identities under a single pan-African rubric of ‘Negroid’, as J. Ki-Zerbo does in his ‘Editorial Note’ to the first volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa (1981, 276–279), and which S.O.Y. Keita finds an unacceptable ‘product of philosophical idealism’ (1992, 247). To argue that Africa is inhabited by only ‘two major “racial” groups … living on either side of the Sahara’, the ‘Arab-Berber group’ and the ‘Negro group’, and, furthermore, to advocate ‘the basic genetic unity of [all] peoples south of the Sahara … settled over a very vast area stretching from South Africa as far as the northern part of the Sahara’ (Ki-Zerbo 268–269), may be politically astute, but is so generalised as to be meaningless, quite apart from flying in the face of the genetic evidence. It also tells us nothing about ancient Egyptians, who lived neither south nor north of the Sahara.

      Africa has for aeons been inhabited by people who range from smaller, light-skinned, gracile-featured hunter-gatherer peoples to the very different, more robust, black-skinned, heavily featured Negroid peoples; to assign them all to a ‘basic genetic unity’ is no more illuminating than to consign, say, the French and the Chinese to the same gene pool.