El Castillo Rock Art in Perspective

Alice C. Linsley



The debate over whether the cave paintings in Spain and France were done by "modern humans" or "Neanderthals" has sprung up again. As usual, the media filters the data through a Darwinian sieve and the public is left in confusion.

The BBC news reports that the oldest cave painting is a red sphere at El Castillo. In fact there are many red spheres or dots on the walls at El Castillo.  The spherical motif is probably the oldest produced by humans and likely represents the sun, moon, stars and constellations. The image below could represent lunar phases. Compare the two images below.

Prehistoric antlar bone found in Southwest France

Other caves include the images of hands and animals. About 25 handprints, made by blowing red ochre dust over a hand pressed against the wall, date to about 37,300 years old. An image of a bison overlays the hands and was painted later. Other cave paintings include horses, though these were painted somewhat later.

The El Castillo cave paintings date to when human populations moved from Africa into Europe about 41,000 to 45,000 years ago. By comparison, the oldest known cave paintings at Gilf Kebir in the Sahara date to about 6000 BC.  Before the Sahara became arid, a sizeable community lived on this vast sandstone plateau near the Egyptian-Libyan border, about 400 miles from the Nile. When the climate changed, people migrated north into Europe and east to the Nile Valley.

Rock paintings in the Sudan, dating to 3000 BC have been exposed to the elements, unlike the paintings at El Castillo and France's Chauvet cave (32,000 and 37,000 years). The Sudan rock paintings indicate fishing, such as evidenced at the Khormusan sites of ancient Nubia (65,000 and 55,000 years) where an abundance of fish and wild game bones were found.

It is likely that humans were making such paintings in Africa, but the art has not survived or yet been discovered. The continuing discovery of African monuments such as Eredo and many ancient pyramids contributes to the picture of archaic human industry and imagination. The vertical sided ditches of Eredo go around the area for 100 miles and rise 70 feet. The recently discovered pyramids of Zinder (Niger) are believed to date to the time of the pyramids of Egypt.

Aboriginal rock art at Narwal Gabarnmang in northern Australia dates to 28,000 years old, but a stone axe found at the site is 35,000 years old. University of Southern Queensland archaeologist Bryce Barker says there is evidence that the cave had first been in human use about 45,000 years ago.

Narwal Gabarnmang rock shelter

Carolyn Moynihan, deputy editor of MercatorNet, has written:

"Exactly how humanity expressed itself is less important in the end than the fact that there is a human mind and soul behind the decorated tools or rock paintings. Writing about the bad press “cavemen” were getting nearly a century ago (in his 1921 short story, "The Grisly Folk," H G Wells had portrayed them as savage and barbaric creatures who deserved their fate of extinction) G K Chesterton observed that, deep as the explorer had to go to find the pictures of reindeer drawn on cave walls by ancient man, he would have to go a long way further to find a picture of man drawn by a reindeer."

Arguing about whether the El Castillo cave paintings were done by "modern humans" or Neanderthals is a waste of time and energy. Neanderthals were human and they bred with other human populations. The Neanderthal genome has been sequenced. Early comparisons indicate that humans and Neanderthals are practically identical at the protein level.


Related reading: 3000 BC Sudan Rock Paintings; Getting the Facts About Human Origins; DNA Studies and Ancient Rock Paintings of Horses

Was Earth Repopulated After Noah's Flood?

Alice C. Linsley


Noah lived in the region of Lake Chad (Borno/Benue - "Land of Noah") approximately 5500-4500 B.C, when the Sahara experienced a wet period. Humans had already dispersed globally by 12,000 B.C. 

Some of those dispersed populations were from earlier migrations out of Africa. There have been multiple migrations out of Africa, probably as early as 500,000 years ago. 

Abraham was a descendant of the Kushite kingdom builder Nimrod who established his territory in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. This explains why in the Bible we first meet Abraham in Mesopotamia.

8000-year dugout found in the Sahara

About 4000 years before Noah people were using dugouts to navigate the rivers of the Green Sahara. This is attested by the discovery of an 8000-year-old black Mohagany dugout in Dufuna in the Upper Yobe valley along the Komadugu Guna River in Northern Nigeria. This region was much wetter at the time that Noah and his sons ruled there.

The oldest known zoological collection was discovered during excavations at Nekhen on the Nile in 2009. This royal menagerie that dates to 3500 B.C. and included hippos, hartebeest, elephants, baboons and wildcats. The story of the Proto-Saharan ruler Noah preserving a collection of animals is based on historical reality.

Nekhen is the oldest known site of Horite Hebrew worship (4200 B.C.). Noah probably knew of this place.

What was happening before Noah?

The evidence of archaic human industry, religion, ritual burial, and domesticity in Africa, Arabia and China creates a more accurate picture of the earlier populations.

On the Arabian Peninsula, the Qafzeh population was using tools 125,000 years ago at Jebel Faya and burying their dead in red ochre.

Humans were making reed mattresses 77,000 years ago in South Africa. That is where the oldest mattress— made from compacted grasses and leafy plants— was found at the Sibudu Cave site in KwaZulu-Natal. In this same region a stone carving of a python has been found that dates to 70,000 years.

There is the evidence of mining 80,000 to 100,000 years ago. These major mining operations in southern Africa included quarries and tunnels. It is estimated that a million kilos of red ocher ore were excavated from several mines. At one mine half a million stone-digging tools were found. The red ocher was ground to power and was used globally to bury rulers. Anthropologists agree that the red ocher symbolized blood. Apparently, it was connected to the people’s hope that the ruler might rise from the dead and lead his faithful people to immortality.

The Pengtoushan culture thrived along the Yangtze River between BC. 7500–6100, and the Yangshao culture flourished along the central Yellow River between BC. 5000 and 3000. Yangshao nobles wore silk garments. 

Cemetaries were established which reveal ritual burial. Paul Sereno unearthed 10,000-year skeletons at Gobero in Niger. These were buried on the edge of a paleolake on the northwestern rim of the Chad Basin. The Gobero site is the earliest known cemetery in the Sahara and the skeletons found there indicated that some were at least 6 feet tall.

Gobero skeleton (G3B8) measures 6 feet 6 inches
Photo (c) Mike Hettwer, courtesy Project Exploration

At the time of the Gobero populations (9700-4400 years ago), humans were dispersed globally, and during the time of Noah these populations were not destroyed. 

There is no evidence pf a worldwide flood that led to extinction of humans and animals. Human settlements in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Near East were along major water systems and prone to flooding. Flood stories often appear in ancient texts. A late source (Deuteronomist Historian) used the Noah story to promote his theology of God's wrath upon sinful humanity. 

Noah's flood was a large regional flood. The term "eretz" which appears in the Genesis flood stories can mean earth, land, or territory. The Lake Chad region was Noah's territory and is the only place on earth claimed to be Noah's homeland by the local populations. The local Kanuri people refer to Lake Chad as "Buhar Nuhu", meaning Sea of Noah.

Noah's three sons were Hebrew clan chiefs whose descendants intermarried (caste endogamy). Those descendants dispersed widely and carried their beliefs wherever they lived. However, they did not repopulate the earth after a catastrophic worldwide flood.

Related reading: The Extent of Noah's Flood; Noah's Descendants; The Animals on Noah's Ark; Abraham's Faith Lives in Christianity; Understanding the Science of Biblical Anthropology; Discovering the Historical Noah

Potts' Variability Hypothesis Has Biblical Support

Alice C. Linsley



Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts is the director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program and curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. His research pieces together a record of Earth’s environmental change and human adaptation to environmental instability.

In this NOVA interview Dr. Pott's explains his "climate variability hypothesis" which he sees as a significant factor in human adaptability, settlement and migration. His idea has Biblical support.

Dr. Rick Potts

Dr. Potts said:

Climate change had always been on people's minds when it came to human evolution. The idea that was around for a long time is that the establishment of a savanna environment, the grassy environment with a few trees, was critical to human evolution early on, and that and the Ice Age later on presented the challenging environment in which humans evolved.

But when I began the work here at Olorgesailie, we kept seeing layer after layer of environmental change, from soils to volcanic ashes to a lake to a drought when the lake completely evaporated. We saw this through 700,000 years, and I began to think, well, maybe it's not the particular environment of a savanna that was important, but the tendency of the environment to change, to vary in very dramatic ways. And we saw that the large grazing animals of the savanna—elephants, baboons, pigs, zebras, all of whom ate grass—disappeared in the time period when worldwide climate began to vary the most.

So it dawned on me: Rick, you're an anthropologist. Maybe this has something to do with human evolution, and it's not the survival of the fittest in any one environment but the survival of the more versatile, the more general and flexible creatures that would really persist over time. This gave me a new insight into human evolution. The origin of stone tools, the expansion of the brain, and the complexity of social life that we see with the emergence of our own species may actually be a response not to just the dry savanna or the cold Ice Age but to the wide and dramatic variability of climate over time.

In some cases the landscape change occurred within a few thousand years. But this is all within a larger cycle of changing—Earth's orbit around the sun, and changes from wet to dry in tropical Africa, and, later in time, changes that were on [a scale of] 100,000 years between ice ages and interglacial warmth.

Olorgesailie inspired our idea that climate variability was an important driving force in human evolution. But we had to look outside of Olorgesailie to many other early human sites to really test the idea. What we have found is that the most prolonged periods of climate variability early on corresponded with the origin of stone tools and of eating meat, and the origin of our own genus, Homo. Then, later on, another prolonged period of climate variability, very dramatic, corresponded with the origin of modern human behavior and our own species.

(Read more here.)

The key points of Pott's hypothesis are evident.  Life on Earth is sustained by water. Climate has an impact of the availability of water. Factors that influence water accumulation in lakes and rivers are Earth's climate cycles and plate tectonics. When water sources disappear, humans and aminals must seek other sources. Where abundant water sources exist, there is greater evidence of human habitation.




Life Depends on Water

A close reading of Genesis reveals that climate is certainly a factor in archaic human settlement and migration. Humans settled near major bodies of water. This is where they hunted large game and buthered them with stone hand tools.  During rainy periods, lakes swelled and during dry periods, lakes disappeared.  Climate cycles caused old dry basins to fill with water. This swelling and shrinking of water systems is evident from satellite photos taken of Earth's great rivers and lakes.

Neolithic peoples in the Sahara enjoyed abundant water.  The Nile connected to the Chadic and Niger water systems through a series of shallow lakes in the Sahara. This explains the common plant and animal species is found in all three river valleys. The now dry Botswanan lake was once a sea. Some of Africa's earliest human populations lived on the edges of this great lake, as evidenced by the thousands of stone tools found there. These include maceheads that date between 80,000 and 100,000 years.

Between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago all of the region between Lake Chad and the Nile was wet. The climate had changed, ushering in years of persistent, heavy rains. A briefer period of rain lasted between 3000 and 1900 B.C. This is the the time of Noah's flood. Noah was a Proto-Saharan ruler in region of Lake Chad. People living in this area, called "Bor-No" (Land of Noah), claim that this is Noah's homeland.

Lake Chad has been shrinking for centuries, but today rains are returning to the Sahara. West Africa is receiving abundant convective rainfall. At the close of "Earth's Great Year" in the summer of 1998, air and water temperatures peaked and this has affected rainfall in some of Earth's most arid regions.

Tropical temperatures (latitude 20N - 20S)

In 2010, Pakistan saw catastrophic flooding from the Indus River. These NASA photos show the striking contrast within a single year.

NASA image captured in 2009

NASA image captured in 2010

Geologic Factors

Tectonics also played a role. Rifting and continental extension creates water systems and inland seaways such as the Humer Seaway in North America.

About 150,000 years ago there was a major uplift of the Angolan ridge in equatorial Africa. This meant a permanent supply of water flowing to the Upper Nile and prompted migration to that area. Lakes formed in the basins, large enough to support fish, crocodile and hippopotamus. Early hunters camped along the lakes, as evidenced by heaps of domestic refuse at many sites along ancient lakes in Niger, Chad and Kenya.

Lake Chad filled and merged with the Mega-Chad Sea, creating a body of water comparable in size of modern Sudan. The overflow spilled southwest into the Benue Trough and flowed to the Atlantic. The Nile was transformed from a slow stream into a roaring river with mile-deep gorges. This was the beginning of the wet period that would turn the Sahara into vast grasslands able to support elephants, antelopes, gazelles, ostriches, giraffes, and hyenas.




River Civilizations Emerged

This extended wet period led to the establishment of a Nilotic civilization which appears to have climaxed in dynastic Egypt and in the Kushite expansion into Mesopotamia (Gen. 10:8-12). The Kushite expansion lead to the river-based Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations. These civilizations were dependent upon river commerce and the rulers controlled and taxed that commerce.

To understand the Kushite expansion we must consider a factor beyond climate and river commerce, namely, the custom of sent-away royal sons, a feature of human adaptation that Potts has not considered. The marriage and ascendancy pattern of the Proto-Saharan and Nilotic rulers drove expansion and migration out of Africa through the custom of sending away firstborn sons who were expected to establish territories for themselves.




Sent-Away Sons

Genesis 2:24 speaks of how a man is to move away after marriage. This refers to sent-away sons of the ruling lines among Abraham's ancestors. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall become one flesh.” The married son was expected to leave his parents and to establish a new household.  Most Westerners tend not to respect grown men who stay home, whether married or not. Stay-at-home sons often compete with their fathers or become "momma's boys." Jacob's stay-at-home son was Reuben and Reuben slept with his father's concubine, Bilhah (Gen. 35:22; 49:4). David's son Absalom did the same thing. Absalom ordered that a tent be set up on the palace roof where everyone could see it (ii Sam. 16:2). There Absalom went in and had sex with his father's concubines. This action represented an attempt to usurp the ruler's authority.

An anthropologist reading Genesis 2:24 finds evidence of the establishment of a new household geographically separate from the husband’s family. This is called “neolocal residence.”  However, analysis of the marriage and ascendancy pattern of Abraham’s Horite people indicates that the neolocal pattern does not apply to the firstborn sons of the patriarch’s wives. It applies only to sent-away sons who did not ascend to the thrones of their fathers or maternal grandfathers.  Most sons of concubines also were sent away and often served as vassals of the firstborn sons of wives.

Another feature of the Horite ruler-priest marriage and ascendency structure is alluded to in Genesis 2:24 which speaks of “cleaving to the wife.”  This indicates matrilocal residence, an arrangement where the newly married couple lives with or in close proximity to the bride’s family. This pertains to the firstborn son of the patriarch’s second (cousin or niece) wife. This son was the heir to his maternal grandfather, after whom he was named, and he lived with or near his mother’s people. So Abraham's firstborn son by his second wife belonged to the household of Joktan, Keturah's father, after whom he was named.

Patrilocal residence pertained only to firstborn sons of the half-sister wife. This seems strange given the insistence of Bible scholars that ancient Hebrew society was patriarchal. This is why Isaac remained in Abraham's territory and why Abraham gave gifts to his other sons and sent them away from Isaac (Gen. 25:6).

Genesis 2:24 pertains to sons who lived away from their biological fathers. This includes “sent-away sons” and the firstborn son of the patriarch’s second wife. Jacob's case is especially interesting. He was not Isaac's firstborn son and though he attempted to rob that birthright from Esau, Jacob established his residence with his mother's people. This suggests that Jacob and Esau may not have been twins. They may have been Isaac's firstborn sons by different wives. Esau was the firstborn of Isaac's first wife who would have been Isaac's half-sister. Jacob would have been the firstborn son of Isaac's second wife. As the second wife was either a cousin or niece, as was Rebecca to Isaac, Jacob would have been Rebecca's firstborn son. As such he would belong to the household of his maternal grandfather, Bethuel. However, this doesn't mean that Jacob was heir to Bethuel's throne in Padan-Aram. Bethuel's heir appears to have been Laban.

Sent-away sons is a prominent theme in Genesis. Some see the story of Adam's expulsion from the garden as the first example.  However, Adam's historicity cannot be proven.  among verifiably historical figures we see this pattern with Cain who was banished for killing his brother. we find it at the end of Genesis in the account of Joseph who was sold into Egyptian captivity by his brothers.

The pattern continues in Exodus where Moses is forced to leave Egypt after killing a fellow Egyptian.  He travels to his Midianite kin and marries a patrilineal cousin, Zipporah. This suggests that Isha, Amram's cousin wife, was a Midianite bride. The Midianites were descendants of Abraham by his cousin wife Keturah.

Other sent-away sons include Ishmael and Yishbak, both sons of Abraham. The name Yishbak means “sent away.”


Related reading: Genesis and Climate Change; Climate Cycles Indicate a Dynamic Earth; Climate and Noah's Flood; When the Sahara Was Wet; Water Systems Connected Nile and Central Africa;
Sub-Saharan DNA of Modern Jews; Abraham's Sons

Philip Ochieng: Kushite Flight from Canaan

Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan contemporary of President Obama's father, relates how the Kalenjin, a Kushite people, once resided in Egypt and Canaan and fled before their oppressors. They claim to have fled oppression in Egyptian held lands and wandered for 40 years in the wildernesses of Sudan and northwestern Kenya where they encountered God at the sacred mountain El-gon (Mount of the Most High). There is linguistic evidence to support this. For example, the Kalenjin capital is Kericho which is Jericho. Read more of Ochieng's views on the Kalenjin here.

The Kalenjin were a warrior caste in ancient Egypt. They have been identified with the Midianites. Midian is a Kalenjin clan of Baringo district of Kenya. Kalenjin were identified by clan divisions, namely Sebei, Sabaot, Miot and Midian until modern times. Here we have a suggestion of a Sheba-Midian-Egyptian confederation. This may explain the confusion in Genesis 37 where we are told that Joseph was sold to a caravan of Ishmaelite/Egyptian merchants (verse 25) and Midianite merchants (verse 28).

The linguistic connection between ancient Egypt and the Kalenjin is evidenced in the correspondance of many common words. The ancient Egyptian word for country was kmt, which corresponds to the Kalenjin word kemet. In both languages ntr designates divinity. The Kalenjin were a hill country people who dwelt in the region of their sacred mountain "El-gon" in the Tororo (n-trr) Hills of eastern Uganda. From there they migrated to Egypt, where they stayed for thousands of years. Some migrated back to Kenya and Uganda. Others moved into Canaan and Mesopotamia.

The Kalenjin, like the Egyptians, regarded the sun as the emblem of the Creator. Their word Asiis refers to both God and the sun. This is also an ancient Egyptian name for the Creator and is found among other African tribes who originated in the Nile Valley. The Asante of Ghana are the people (nte) of As.

The Kalenjin appear to be one of many groups that moved from the Nile Valley into Canaan and Mesopotamia. This Kushite migration is referenced in Genesis 10 and confirmed by historical records of Sargon the Great, who is likely Nimrod, the son of Kush.

Today, it is estimated that 44% of the Kalinjin are Christian.


Related reading:  Nilo-Saharan and Saharo-Nubian Populations; The Urheimat of the Canaanite Y; The Migration of Abraham's Ancestors; Abraham's Kushite Ancestors; Sacred Mountains

A Kindling of Ancient Memory

A Kindling of Ancient Memory (A' beothachadh na cuimhne aosda)

Alice C. Linsley


I've been corresponding with a descendant of the Ainu/Anu people who migrated thousands of years ago to Newfoundland and Labrador and to the eastern coast of Canada. My correspondent's native name is Sea’Key (the ’ is a little click made with the tongue.) His name means White Salmon with a Heart of Gold. He has been very generous with his time, sharing many accounts of his people's history.

He writes, "We are called MicMac now but early we were called the Beothique by the French and Beothuck by the English. Our people are said to be extinct, but we just left when the shooting started. A few 100 French did not wipe out 10,000’s of natives. It is said we migrated in 2 waves to Nova Scotia and Labrador."

MicMac or Mi’kmaq means friend. It may be derived from an early word Nikmaq, meaning kin-friend, but most Micmac (Mikmaq) refer to themselves as L’nuk, meaning the people.

The early name of the territory of Sea'Key's people was Khan O Dan, or Can a dan, which became "Canadian" to the French. Sea'Kay reports that according to the oral tradition of his people, they came in two waves from the Middle East to Scandinavia, then to Greenland and to the Hudson Bay area of Eastern Canada. This places him in Haplogroup X2b5, which traces the maternal line (Mitochondrial DNA).

This is a different route of migration than that taken by other Old World peoples coming to North America across Eurasia and the Bering Strait. If Sea'Key is correct that his clans are in mtDNA haplogroup X, there no no genetic trail across Eurasia. The dispersion of Haplogroup X is shown below. The greatest concentrations are indicated by the darker shade. MtDNA traces lineage by the mitochondria, received from mothers.

The heaviest concentration of mtDNA haplogroup X is in Eastern Canada which is where Sea’Kay lives. The estimate is upwards of 55% in some tribes and averages at around 25%. The next highest concentration, about 40%, is found in the Druze of the Middle East.

Only 7% of the Dene (Navajo) are in Haplogroup X. Their language has been connected to Ket, a Yeniseic language spoken by a very small Siberian population. However, Haplogroup X is virtually non-existent in Siberia, the land route to North America proposed by some anthropologists. According to Sea'Key, the MicMac did not come that way. They came along the coastal route through the British Isles to Finland and Greenland and on to Labrador and the eastern seaboard of Canada.

The genetic sequences of Haplogroup X diverged from Haplogroup N which originated in the region of the Lower Nile. Haplogroup X diverged further about 30,000 years ago with two sub-groups X1 and X2 now identified. Overall Haplogroup X accounts for about 2% of the population of Europe, the Near East, and North Africa.

Sub-group X1 is restricted to North and East Africa, and also the Near East. Sub-group X2 appears to have undergone population expansion and dispersal after the last glacial maximum, between 21,000 and 18,000 years ago. Sub-group X1 is more strongly present in the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean Europe. There are concentrations of sub-group X2 in Georgia (8%), the Orkney Islands (7%) and among the Israeli Druze (27%), most of whom live in Galilee.


The Paternal Line: Y-DNA

The Ainu of Japan appear to have a point of origin in Africa before 70,000 years ago. The Asia-Africa connection is found in Y-DNA Haplogroup DE. DE is unique because it is distributed in several geographically distinct clusters. Immediate subclade, Haplogroup D, is normally found only in eastern Asia, and the other immediate subclade, Haplogroup E, is common in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.


Common symbols and scripts

Micmac symbols suggest a point of origin in the Nile Valley. Studies of the Ainu Micmac hieroglyphics makes it clear that their ancestors traveled across the great oceans.

As Sea'Key called to my attention, there is also a correlation between the old Hebrew alphabet and the Ainu alphabet in Japan. Both appear to be based on a common older writing system.


According to the Greenland Saga, Sea'Kay's ancestors used bows and arrows. These weapons characterized the Ainu of the Nile whose land was called Ta-Seti which means "land of the bow."  There is a relation to the name of the ruler Seth and to the name of the sixteenth division of priests based in Nazareth, the division of Hapi-tsets.

Nyland (2001) found that many names of places and common objects in Hebrew are closely related to the Saharan proto-languages, the languages spoken by Abraham's Kushite ancestors.

In ancient Egyptian tera-ntr refers to a ruler-priest and among the Ainu tera means priest. The Ainu word for water is aka, which corresponds to asta, the Old Nubian word for water.


Movement out of Africa

The Ainu migrations are not shown on the Bradshaw Foundation maps of migration out of East Africa. However, the Ainu are at the center of Cavalli-Szforza's Genetic Distance Chart, which is what would be expected of an archaic population.

The mating structure of the Ainu rulers appears to be similar to the structure of the Horites who were also red, according to Genesis 36.  Abraham's father is associated with the Nilotic Annu and he was a Horite. The dispersion of the Ainu can be explained in part by their marriage and ascendancy pattern whereby younger sons were sent away to establish territories for themselves.

The Horites named in Genesis 36 called their land Edom, which means red. David, one of their descendants, is said to have had a red skin tone. The red skin tone was enhanced by exposure to the sun. The red tone represented the ruler as the servant of Ra, whose emblem was the sun. The queen made herself white to represent the moon.

The Ainu appear among the ancient Kushites who were explorers and kingdom builders. Their migration out of the Nile region has been confirmed through DNA and migration studies. Though we first meet Abraham in Mesopotamia (Gen. 12), he is a descendant of Nimrod, the son of Kush (Gen. 10:8), who built a kingdom the length of the Euphrates.

Among the Kushites there was a caste of ruler-priests known as Horites. They are called "Horites" because they were devotees of Hor (Horus in Greek). The oldest temples dedicated to Horus have been located in modern-day Sudan at Nekhen. From here the Horites spread their religion across the ancient Afro-Asiatic Dominion. This extended from present-day Benin to India, China and Cambodia.  There is little doubt that ancient Nilotic peoples, including the Annu, were masterful seamen and traveled widely. It is also evident that they didn't all migrate the same direction or at the same time.

Kushites, Egyptians and other Nilotic peoples varied in appearance. Eye colors included blue, gray, green and brown, and some men wore full beards while others were beardless. The typical Egyptian and the Beja had a reddish skin tone. Nubians ranged from black to red. Red and black Nubians are shown on ancient Egyptian monuments such as Ramesses' Great Temple at As.

Detail from a Ippolito Rosellini painting 

done during the Franco-Italian Expedition to Egypt in 1828

Africans exhibit great genetic diversity even today.

This is how Sea’Key describes his people: "We have beards and green eyes and we are very tall, between 6’ and 6’6”." Here is a photo of one of his ancestors (shown left).

The Ainu were the first settlers of Japan. They were said to appear more Caucasian than Asian. In literature they are often referred to as the "hairy Ainu."

On the right is an image of an Ainu elder from Hokkaido Japan. Compare to the photo of one Sea'Kay's ancestor. Note the similar robes and almost identical headdresses. Note also the reddish skin tone of these Ainu elders. 

It appears that the Ainu moved out of the Nile Valley in multiple waves and migrated in different directions. They were seafarers, explorers, warriors and kingdom builders. There are Ainu in China.

The Ainu were among the aboriginal peoples of the Nile Valley and the rulers of many of the river shrines. One of their cities was the prestigious shrine city call iunu - meaning "pillared place" and known as "On" in the Bible. The Greeks called it City of the Sun (Heliopolis). The pyramids at Giza, Saqqara and Abusir were aligned to the great obelisk (pillar) at Heliopolis.

The Ainu are also called Annu and Hanu.

Related reading:  Solving the Ainu Mystery; The Nile-Japan Ainu Connection; The Kushite-Kushan Connection; Abraham's Ainu Ancestors; Distribution of Y-Chromosome Among North American Natives; Afro-Asiatics in North America Before Columbus; Genetic Evidence for Two Founding Populations of the Americas; The High Places of the Archaic World; New Study Refutes Theory of How Humans Populated North America