- Joined
- Oct 20, 2019
Africa is huge. You can literally fit North and South America in it and still have room for Europe, by land mass. The lumping together of all the Sub-Saharan peoples in it as one group called "Black" is the second dumbest piece of ethno-geographic theorizing there has ever been. (The first is thinking the Ancient Egyptians were Black).
I was actually going to leave this post with the above micro-rant but actually now we're on the subject of East Africans verses other African groups, here's a fun anthropological fact that there's a lot of evidence for. East African people are at the very least partially descended from groups that left Africa for the near East and then back-migrated into Africa again replacing or displacing their ancestral groups. And that makes perfect sense when thought about. We know humans migrated out of Africa but people simplistically think of this in terms of arrows on a map pointing outwards. But those who established successful societies in the near East weren't following some big blue line on the ground. When they spread they didn't just spread forwards but back the way they came as well. These successful groups went back and reclaimed lands they'd left behind sometimes. We can see this from DNA evidence. So whilst some who left Africa continued on and eventually became paler skinned (got to get that sweet Vitamin D in the winter time), others drifted back and stayed dark skinned but were genetically and culturally different to their ancestors.
Last edited:
