Somewhere in Africa

Somewhere in Africa

(The Mitochondrial Eve)

I.

From somewhere in East Africa

Came one woman

First.

From her ancient flesh

& spirit she

Created

Not accidental mutants,

Not offspring of some now

Extinct monkey.

One mother

Who held in her womb

All glorious genetic oceans

Of human earth

All lines converge within her:

The diversity of nations, lineage

Of kings, the destiny

Of time.

II.

From this one mother

Flows all human

History:

The vague nagging memory

Of a beauteous garden

Where she once

Walked

& spoke as a friend.

Her own children

Intended to heal all time,

To flourish in hard, sweat

Labored lands,

Become stained by blood

Of son upon son, sacrificed too

Soon, as a Lamb out

Of season.

Her heart’s travail, a sharp sword,

Both curse & mercy, a bitter

Illness & a cure

Divine.

Despite a serpent’s arrogance

& the naked pride

Of propagated

Blame,

Guided always

By the outpouring memory,

The conscious

Care

Guiding cosmos,

Merciful, forever moving

Towards life returned,

Completed.

III.

Original strands of mitochondrial DNA

Pass unbroken in providential

Planned order,

Sent as secret genetic coding

Through red-soil sons

Of Noah’s

Sons:

Kingdom makers,

Race shapers, most ancient

Line of ruler-priests,

Fathers

Of each hued people;

Made of one forgotten kin

From one maternal

Blood.

From before time, an unforgotten mother,

Saved in time by her own Creator;

Firstborn; Pre-existent; both

Made & Unmade;

Fully Human;

Divine;

Her own distant son, the Lamb

Come at last, born, scorned

& Crucified, risen again

To take her very

Hand.

In full Love,

He finally knits her fall

Tying her back to the strong

Threads of heaven.

Placing

Her deepest longings,

Returning them safe again

To the Holy garden

Scheme

Where she now lives:

            Ancient

                        Honored

                                    Fallen

                                                & Redeemed.

Matushka Elizabeth Perdomo

Other poems by Matushka Elizabeth Perdomo

Anthropologic Study of True Myths

Poem for Georgia O'Keeffe

Tewa Feast Day

Hill Country Highway

The Tool Makers of Kathu

A handaxe pictured as it was found.

Image from Walker et al. 2013 report: A second phase 2 archaeological data recovery
at the site of Kathu Townlands of Erf5116.

How many artifacts were found? In just a few meter-square sample pits over a several acres, archaeologists collected 10s of thousands of stone tools and products of tool making. The archaeologists estimated that there are on average 900 artifacts per 100x100x10 cm volume of material in this area with much of the area up to 2 meters deep in artifact rich soils. This high concentration of artifacts along with available source rock in outcrops nearby suggests that long ago this [Kathu, South Africa] was a tool making center.

Read more here.


Excavated Stratum 4a at the Kathu complex is dated to 500,000 years Before Present. Beige-white sand and a large assemblage of handaxes were found at both strata 4a and 4b. Large mammal remains have been identified at both strata. Stratum 4b also contains a large sample of elephant tooth plates similar to those found at Olorgesailie in Kenya, in levels predating 800,000 years BP.

Related reading: Africa is Archaeologically Rich; Sudan is Archaeologically Rich; A Scientific Timeline of Genesis; 500,000 Year Engraved Shell

The Fertile Crescent and the Cradle of Civilization

Alice C. Linsley

Breasted's Fertile Crescent

Historians have long used the term "cradle of civilization" to speak of Mesopotamia. Today the terms "fertile crescent" and "cradle of civilization" are synonymous in many minds. For anthropologists this poses a problem because "civilization" looks different among the Nilo-Saharans and the Mesopotamians when examined in greater detail. The ancient Nilo-Saharans and Mesopotamians had a different way of life, a different conception of the Creator and a different cosmology. The Nilo-Saharans were the first to practice circumcision and animal sacrifice, and the divine name YHWY originated in the Upper Nile. The expectation of a righteous ruler who would lead his people to immortality originated among the Nilo-Saharans. This is why they took such great care in the burial of their rulers.

Reporting on his second expedition to Abydos (1896-1897), Abbe Émile Amélineau had this to say about Abraham's Anu ancestors: "These Anu were agricultural people, raising cattle on a large scale along the Nile, shutting themselves up in walled cities for defensive purposes. To this people we can attribute, without fear of error, the most ancient Egyptian books, The Book of the Dead and the Texts of the Pyramids, consequently, all the myths or religious teachings. I would add almost all the philosophical systems then known and still called Egyptian. They evidently knew the crafts necessary for any civilization and were familiar with the tools those trades required. They knew how to use metals, at least elementary metals. They made the earliest attempts at writing, for the whole Egyptian tradition attributes this art to Thoth, the great Hermes an Anu like Osiris, who is called Onian in Chapter XV of The Book of the Dead and in the Texts of the Pyramids.” Abydos and Heliopolis (Biblical On) were Ainu shrine cities of the Fertile Crescent.

"Fertile Crescent" refers to part of the ancient Near East that has been considered to be the principal center for the emergence of agriculture, villages, and cities. The term was coined by James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), a scholar of ancient Egypt and director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, in his 1916 textbook, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World.

Mesopotamia was assumed to be the “cradle of civilization” because of two developments that occurred there: the rise of the city and the invention of writing. Between 3000-2200 B.C, the principal Mesopotamian cities were Lagash, Iraq with about 60,000 inhabitants, Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan, with about 40,000 inhabitants, and Mari, Syria, with 50,000 inhabitants. At that same time Nekhen (Hierakonpolis) was the most important settlement along the Nile, with an estimated population of 20,000. It was a bustling city that stretched for over 2 miles along the edge of the floodplain. Recent discoveries at Nekhen continue to push back the dating of early civilizations. On May 6, 2014 Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim announced the discovery of a Pre-Dynastic tomb that dates to about 500 years before King Narmer of 1st Dynasty.

Renée Friedman, who has direct knowledge of the excavations at Nekhen, has written that the "evidence of industrial production, temples, masks, mummies, and funerary architecture as early as 3500 B.C. is placing Hierakonpolis at the forefront of traditions and practices that would come to typify Egyptian culture centuries later. These discoveries may have knocked Narmer and his palette off their historical pedestal, but they confirm the central role the city played in the long development of Egyptian civilization. It is little wonder that for millennia the deified early kings of Hierakonpolis, called the Souls of Nekhen, were honored guests at the coronations and funerals of all pharaohs."

Nekhen was a principal city of Breasted's Fertile Crescent.

Long before this (9700-4400 years ago), the Gobero populations were living between along the major water systems of Niger. The early Holocene occupants at Gobero (7700–6200 B.C.) were mainly sedentary peoples with lakeside funerary sites that include the earliest recorded cemetery in the Sahara. Surely, ritual burial sites as large as that found at Gobero should be considered marks of human civilization.

The cradle of civilization is indeed Breasted's fertile crescent, a much greater expanse of land than Mesopotamia alone. There were agricultural and cattle-herding settlements in the Nile Valley during the last Glacial Maximum and the terminal Pleistocene (20,000 to 8500 B.C.). The Nile Valley and the green Sahara are part of the cradle of civilization. The crescent was populated by peoples who had a common religious and linguistic heritage, but these developed differently outside of Africa.


Correcting Distortions

Some Bible scholars have distorted the anthropological picture by ignoring Abraham's Nilo-Saharan ancestors as they are identified in Genesis 4-10. Jewish writers, for example, generally begin the history of the Jews with the calling of Abraham. While Abraham did live in Mesopotamia, his ancestors came from Africa. One was the Kushite kingdom builder Nimrod (Gen. 10). 

In the mid to late 20^th century Old Testament studies benefited from archaeological discoveries in the Near East and from linguistic studies of ancient Near Eastern languages such as Akkadian, Elamite and Sumerian. Connections were made between ancient Near Eastern religious practices and those of Abraham and his ancestors. Today scholars continue to labor those connections though there is overwhelming evidence that practices such as animal sacrifice and circumcision began in the Nile Valley, not in Mesopotamia. For example, William W. Hallo, a former Yale professor, insists that the practice of animal sacrifice originated in ancient Mesopotamia. He seems to be unaware that priests sacrificed animals at the Horite shrine city of Nekhen as early as 4000 B.C. 

It was commonly asserted that the Gilgamesh Epic was the basis for the Biblical story of the flood. Much was made of the parallels between the two accounts, but generally the differences, which are significant, were overlooked or ignored. More recently, the "Ark Tablet" of only twenty lines was translated by British Museum scholar Irving Finkel. It is an Old Babylonian account in which the deity instructs the ruler Atrahasis to build and waterproof a circular boat or coracle. The tablet dates to 1900-1700 B.C. and therefore dates to a time about 500 years after the Biblical Noah.

As far as the invention of writing, Breasted included the Nile Valley because writing was already in an advanced state among the Nilotic and Proto-Saharan peoples before the 4th millennium B.C.

Nilotic scribe
(c. 2494 to 2345 BC)

In Abraham's time there were about 750 hieroglyphs (priest symbols). Only about 500 signs were commonly used. However, in the time of Menes there may have been as many as 1000. Archaeology Magazine reported (1999) that the earliest Egyptian glyphs date to 3400 BC, the time of Menes, which challenges "the commonly held belief that early logographs, pictographic symbols representing a specific place, object, or quantity, first evolved into more complex phonetic symbols in Mesopotamia."

The rock paintings of the Sudan and Arabia, and the lexemes that appear in the Nilotic, Dedanite and Thamudic scripts indicate considerable uniformity in written communication over a vast region. We recognize Y/I/J, O, X, T and W among the oldest of the lexemes.

Further, DNA studies have demonstrated that modern humans first emerged in Africa and that these populations moved out of Africa, taking with them their languages and their religious practices. Linguistic studies provide evidence that the oldest units of spoken language (phonemes) originated in Africa and the farther from Africa that peoples migrated the greater the loss of the original phonemes. Even today, Africa has the greatest genetic and linguistic diversity of any place in the world.


Related reading: The Origin of Circumcision, Where Did Animal Sacrifice Originate?; The Urheimat of the Canaanite Y; Scholarly Prejudice?; Newly Discovered Pyramid Predates Noah; The Nubian Context of YHWH; Boat Petroglyphs of Egypt's Central Desert; Why Nekhen is Anthropologically Significant

Africa is Archaeologically Rich

Alice C. Linsley

The oldest human artifacts have been found in Africa. Two regions in particular have yielded archaeological riches: Sudan and southern Africa. Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt, in places like Nuri and Bijrawiyah, though they are smaller and not as old. In the town of Sedeinga in northern Sudan, 35 small pyramids have been excavated in the past few years. Twin pyramids and a sphinx have also been found in Niger, suggesting a pyramid building culture that extending from the Nile to the Niger River Basin at a time when the Saharan was wetter.

Other important artifacts of Sudan include the oldest known painted tomb (Tomb 100) with plaster walls. It dates to between 3500 and 3200 BC. Pillared chapels also have been discovered.

The ancient shrine city of Nekhen (4500 BC) has yielded numerous important artifacts, including evidence of sun veneration, circumcision, a caste of priests and animal sacrifice.

The oldest known menagerie that dates to ca. 3500 BC. The royal collection included leopards, hippos, hartebeest, elephants, baboons and crocodiles. As this is Noah's homeland, there appears to be historical basis to the story of his preserving a collection of animals.

Badarian flint knives (shown left) found in Sudan date to between 4000 and 3200 BC. They were for ritual use, including circumcision.


Older Artifacts

Credit: Chip Clark 

Smithsonian Institution

Much older artifacts have been found in sub-Sahara Africa and in southern Africa. In Central Africa barbed points, like the 90,000 - 80,000 years old harpoon point (shown right), were used to spear prehistoric catfish weighing as much as 150 lb (68 kg). Hundreds of bone harpoons have been found at the lake site of Ishango and are evidence of an aquatic civilization across eastern and northern Africa during the wetter climate of the early to mid-Holocene.

In KwaZulu-Natal, at the southern tip of Africa, 77,000 year old mattresses were made from reeds and rushes. The bedding mats found at the Sibudu Cave site range over a period of 39,000 years. Researchers believe the inhabitants of the cave added a "top sheet" to the bedding made of insect-repelling greenery.

Land of the Python?

The carving of a huge python out of a stone wall in Botswana dates to about 70,000 year ago and is the earliest evidence of the veneration of the python. It is suggestive of a very ancient context for the serpent of Genesis 3. In Nigerian (Igbo) tradition the cosmic serpent is associated with Christ, and in speaking of his death, Jesus referred to the story of the serpent being lifted up in the wilderness (Num. 21:4-9).

The Mofu holy man (Cameroon) mixes python fat with the blood of a sacrificed animal when offering prayers for rain. Rounded rain stones are placed in a stone basin. Then dry grasses are added, followed by a handfull of brilliant green python fat and then the red blood. The holy man mixes all together with his hands while he prays for rain. When the holy man has finished praying, he instructs his assistant to wash the stones carefully before they are returned to their hiding place. (For more on python rituals in Africa go here.)

Jose Bulang of the Philippines has been tracing his ancestors back to Africa using DNA studies, linguistics and oral tradition. He has written: "My father told me that according to story as told him by his father, his first ancestor who arrived at Dauis, Panglao, Bohol was a big man and long haired who had a big python pet who he used to play with in the sea when he is taking a bath. My father would say that such python is useful in sea travel because the python when placed in the forward side of the boat will always direct his nostril towards the winds and can detect approaching typhon or water turbulence, being restless. And also the snake eats only once and only during full moon that it is useful when navigating for a long period and no star can be seen as guide. This made me realize that the travelers that time were using this Nahash (Ahas in Philippine dialect) as a travel instrument in the river or on the seas."


Eggs, Stones and Pigments

Ostrich eggs were used to carry water and were decorated. A large cache of ostrich eggshells engraved with geometric designs demonstrates symbolic communication among African hunter-gatherers. The decorated ostrich eggs date to ca. 65,000 years. Later such eggshells were placed in the graves of children in Sudan.

Stone tools (shown below) have been recovered from Blombos Cave, South Africa. These bifacial points were made about 75,000 years ago. 

Scale bar: 0.4 inches or 1cm
Credit: Christopher Henshilwood
University of the Witwatersrand

Using bones found at Pinnacle Point Cave in South Africa, archaeologist Corey O’Driscoll identified projectile impact marks which are between 91,000 and 98,000 years old, the oldest direct evidence for the use of projectile weapons. 

Pinnacle Point cave

Human occupation of Pinnacle Point began about 162,000 years ago. The oldest level reveals a fairly sophisticated stone technology in which silcrete stone was heat-treated. Silcrete is a fine-grained stone brought from the South African coast. This is the oldest known example of such technology.

Large pieces of red ochre have been found at Pinnacle Point and at other sites in southern Africa. The pieces were either ground or scraped to produce a pigment for painting the body and for use in burials. The burial of rulers in red ochre was a universal practice among Late Stone Age peoples.

Related reading: Boat Petroglyphs in Egypt's Central Eastern Desert; Orientations of Nilo-Saharan Monuments; Sudan is Archaeologically Rich, Mining Blood; The Role of Climate on African Stone Age Technology: Ostrich Eggshells: Paleolithic "Easter" Eggs?

Afar Rift provides valuable information

Lavas from the Afar Depression in Ethiopia, where three tectonic plates are spreading apart, have given scientists a new insight into how ocean basins form.

Erta Ale lava lake in the Afar region

The Afar region is geologically unique, as it is the only place in the world where two continents are at the advanced stage of pulling away from each other. Geology tells us that when tectonic plates pull apart like this, the continental crusts usually gets thinner causing a depression to form between them. This often gets filled with a sea or, if the continents break apart altogether, a new ocean basin. By studying this so-called rifting process in the present, geologists hope to better understand how other ocean basins, like the North Atlantic, formed.

The Afar rift is home to numerous volcanoes and the magma the feeds these plays an important role in causing the crust to rift apart. UK and US researchers wanted to understand how and where the magma that causes the rifting in Afar is formed.

Read it all here.

Climate Change and Human Innovation

Changes in climate during the Stone Age forced our ancestors to develop new technologies, say scientists.

The research, published today in Nature Communications' looked at sediment cores drilled from the seafloor off the coast of South Africa. The tubes of rock gave the scientists an insight into the area's climate over the past 100,000 years.

They found periods of abrupt cooling occurred over very short time scales, with temperatures sometimes dropping as much as 15oC over a few decades. And, in contrast to the northern hemisphere and monsoon areas which got much drier, South Africa became much wetter.

'During these abrupt events, changes in ocean circulation meant there was less energy and warmth transported to the northern hemisphere and this allowed more heat to stay in the Southern hemisphere and pushed the warmth and rainfall further south, and that is what we then see in southeast Africa,' says Dr Martin Ziegler of Cardiff University who led the study. 'Where large parts of the globe got drier and ecosystems became less favourable, southeast Africa got warmer and wetter, providing conditions that were probably more hospitable for early humans.'

Once they had found this pattern of South Africa getting wetter during these cold events, the team went on to compare the timing against the archaeological record.

'When we compared our climate record to the archaeological record it was clear that periods of innovation in early humans always occurred during the warmer and wetter periods,' says Ziegler. 'Around 80-60,000 years ago we find certain industries in the archaeological record, like more sophisticated tools, the first evidence of symbols and the use of jewellery.'

Read it all here.

The now dry Botswanan lake basin was once a sea. It filled with water from the Angolan Highlands. Some of Africa's earliest human populations lived on the edges of this great lake, evidenced by thousands of stone tools found there. The tools include mace heads dating to between 80,000 and 100,000 years.

Related reading:  Boat Petroglyphs in Egypt's Central Eastern Desert; Noah's Homeland in Historical Perspective; African Projectiles 90,000 Years Old; When the Sahara Was Wet

More East Africa-Asia Connections

Alice C. Linsley

The peoples and languages of Madagascar, Borneo, and Sulawesi in Indonesia appear to have linguistic connections to populations in East Africa. The African–Indonesian connections have been confirmed by numerous genetic, linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological studies. The connections indicate migration and mixing of populations across the Indian Ocean, called "an Afro-Asiatic Mediterranean" in this study. The seasonal monsoon winds made movement and trade possible across great distances with boats hopping from island to island.

Findings published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, show that half of the genetic lineages of Madagascar derive from settlers from Borneo to the east, and the other half from East Africa. Archaeological evidence indicates that people were moving in and out of East Africa, Madagascar, Borneo and Sulawesi well before 1200 years ago. Evidently some travelers settled in these islands and contributed to the genetic makeup of their populations.

Young worker in Madagascar

According to Dr Matthew Hurles, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the language of Madagascar, called Malagasy, has its closest linguistic relative in the Ma'anyan language of southern Borneo.

Malagasy peoples have a 50:50 Indonesian and East African ancestry. A team, from Cambridge, Oxford and Leicester, used Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA to test how similar the Malagasy were to populations around the Indian Ocean. The set of non-African Y chromosomes found in the Malagasy was much more similar to the set of lineages found in Borneo than in any other population. A 'Centre of Gravity' was estimated for every mitochondrial DNA to suggest a likely geographical origin for each.

"The Centres of Gravity fell in the islands of southeast Asia or in sub-Saharan Africa," explained Dr Peter Forster, from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, one of the co-authors. "The evidence from these two independent bits of DNA supports the linguistic evidence in suggesting that a migrating population made their way 4500 miles across the Indian Ocean from Borneo." Read more here.

Sulawesians and Madagascans exhibit the same range of physical appearance, including African, Arabian, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese. They may be genetically related to the Dravidians, if the linguistic connections have a biological basis. Sulawe appears to be related to ancient Egyptian, Dravidian, and East African words for rice.

The term "Sulawesi" might be related to written rice records. If those who were moving from island to island were merchants, they would have recorded their transactions. Sulawe resembles the Egyptian word for writing ssw; and the Mande sewe; and the Dravidian ha-verasu (referring to written record of rice sales).

Linguistic connections are further evident in term for slash and burn cultivation used in Sulawesi and East Africa. The word trematrema is used in Northeast Betsimisaraa to refer to a one-to-three-year old slashed-and-burnt field. It is related to the Swahili word tema, ‘to cut’, and the redoubled form tematema, ‘to slash, to chop. This technique is used also by Sulawesians who practice "dry rice" planting.

Rice grain formed the basis of weight measurement from East Africa to Sulawesi. On Madagascar, the weight of one grain of rice is called vary and corresponds to the Swahili wari and to the Dravidian verasu. The Hebrew word for rice is orez and Arabic ruz and these share the RZ root with Dravidian. The Dravidian word reflects the written records of commercial weights.

There are two species of cultivated rice in the world: African rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian rice (Oryza sativa). African rice was domesticated from the wild ancestor Oryza barthii (Oryza brevilugata) by peoples living in the Benue-Niger floodplain about 3,000 years ago. The two strains of Asian rice are Oryza japonica and Oryza indica, identified with Japan and India.

Rice terraces in Madagascar

A Royal Society report edited by Murray P. Cox states, "The settlement of Madagascar is one of the most unusual, and least understood, episodes in human prehistory. Madagascar was one of the last landmasses to be reached by people, and despite the island's location just off the east coast of Africa, evidence from genetics, language and culture all attests that it was settled jointly by Africans, and more surprisingly, Indonesians. Nevertheless, extremely little is known about the settlement process itself. Here, we report broad geographical screening of Malagasy and Indonesian genetic variation, from which we infer a statistically robust coalescent model of the island's initial settlement. Maximum-likelihood estimates favour a scenario in which Madagascar was settled approximately 1200 years ago by a very small group of women (approx. 30), most of Indonesian descent (approx. 93%). This highly restricted founding population raises the possibility that Madagascar was settled not as a large-scale planned colonization event from Indonesia, but rather through a small, perhaps even unintended, transoceanic crossing."

Recently rock paintings dating to about 40,000 years have been found in caves at Maros in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Other migrations out of the Nile Valley

The Nilotic Ainu also crossed great distances arriving in Northern Japan and continuing on to the Marianas which had human settlements 3,500 years ago. These long-distance migrations involved crossing the Indian Ocean. The Ainu, in mtDNA haplogroup X, also traveled overland to Finland, as shown in the chart below.

The Canadian Ainu (Micmac) report that their ancestors came to Canada via Finland, Greenland and Labrador.

Related reading:  The Nile-Japan Ainu Connection; Coin Confirms Medieval China-East Africa Trade; The Afro-Asiatic Dominion; The Kushite-Kushan Connection; Abraham's Ainu Ancestors

Coin Confirms Medieval China-East Africa Trade

Ancient Chinese Coin Found on Kenyan Island by Field Museum Expedition


A joint expedition of scientists led by Chapurukha M. Kusimba of The Field Museum and Sloan R. Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago has unearthed a 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda that shows trade existed between China and east Africa decades before European explorers set sail and changed the map of the world.

The coin, a small disk of copper and silver with a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt, is called “Yongle Tongbao” and was issued by Emperor Yongle who reigned from 1403-1425 AD during the Ming Dynasty. The emperor’s name is written on the coin, making it easy to date. Emperor Yongle, who started construction of China’s Forbidden City, was interested in political and trade missions to the lands that ring the Indian Ocean and sent Admiral Zheng He, also known as Cheng Ho, to explore those shores.

“Zheng He was, in many ways, the Christopher Columbus of China,” said Dr. Kusimba, Curator of African Anthropology at The Field Museum. “It’s wonderful to have a coin that may ultimately prove he came to Kenya,” he added.

Read it all here.

Coins Useful in Tracking Ancient Trade Routes

Alice C. Linsley

Human remains and other artifacts were found on the Kenyan island that predate the 600-year old coin.
According to researchers, the coin is further confirmation that trade took place between Africa and China as late as the 15th century A.D.

The Kushites moved out of Africa between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago. They were great kingdom builders who established their centers of commerce on the major water systems. Kushite populations still inhabit southwestern China. They are called Kushan-Yuezhi or Gueis-Huang. The Kushan capital was Hucao at the lower Wakhsh (Oxus) and the Darya-i Pandj (Ochus) river valley towards Aï Khanum.

Another Kushite group is the Ainu of China, described as a "caste of circumcisers." They number approximately 6,500 people. Most live scattered over northwest China in the counties of Hetian, Luopu, Moyu, Shache, Yingjisha, and Shulekuche, near the ancient oasis city of Kashgar. They keep sheep and goats.

In 1944, Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg, stationed on an island to man a radar station, found a trove of 1000 year coins on an island off northern Australia. The coins came from the former Kilwa Sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania. Kilwa was a trade port with links to India and Asia between the 13th and 16th century. In 1331-1332, Ibn Battouta stayed in Kilwa and described the it as one of the most beautiful cities of the world.

The coins were minted in sub-Saharan Africa.

The trade with gold, silver, pearls, perfumes, Arabian stone ware, Persian ceramics and Chinese porcelain made Kilwa one of the most influential ports in East Africa.

Related reading:  The Kushite-Kushan Connection; The Nile-Japan Ainu Connection; The Afro-Asiatic Dominion; The Kushite Marriage and Ascendancy Pattern Drove Kushite Expansion Out of Africa