RACE AND HISTORY: ORIGIN OF HUMANITY AND RACIAL DIFFERENTATION

By Cheikh Anta Diop

From Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology [HERE] [PDF] [PDF]

("Piltdown Man", the entirely fabricated falsehood, which ideology needed in order to support the thesis of the pre-Sapiens. It is made up of a juxtoposition of the skull of a modern man with high forehead and the jawbone of a monkey whoses canines can be seen.)

The research conducted in humanistic paleontology, particularly by the late Dr. Louis Leakey, has helped to place the birthplace of humanity in East Africa's Great Lakes region, around the Omo Valley.

Two ramifications that have not been sufficiently emphasized until now have come to light as a result of this research:

1. Humankind born around the Great Lakes region, almost on the Equator, is necessarily pigmented and Black; the Gloger Law calls for warm-blooded animals to be pigmented in a hot and humid climate.

2. All the other races derive from the Black race by a more or less direct filiation, and the other continents were populated from Africa at the Homo erectus and Homo sapiens stages, 150,000 years ago. The old theories that used to state that Blacks came from somewhere else are now invalid.

The first Black who went out to populate the rest of the world exited Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar, the Isthmus of Suez, and maybe through Sicily and Southern Italy.¹ The existence of a cave and parietal African art of the Upper Paleolithic period has confirmed this point of view (figs. 1, 2, 3).

The Djebel Ouenat carvings in Libya were dated as those of the Upper Paleolithic Age, according to Abbe Henri Breuil. In Egypt, the most ancient carvings are of the Upper Paleolithic period. In Ethiopia, near the Dire Dawa site, the paintings discovered in the Porcupine Cavern are of the type found in Egypt and in Libya. According to Leakey, the most ancient art form, in East Africa, is from the Upper Paleolithic period. The presence of the Stillbayen in districts rich in paints (west shores of Lake Victoria, Eyassi, and Central Tanganyika) attest to their antiquity. The archaeological layers containing colored pallets and other coloring materials descend to about five meters. In Swaziland, the men of the Upper Paleolithic Age mined iron 30,000 years ago in order to extract the red ore.² It is the most ancient mine in the world.

It is the advent of absolute chronology, meaning the radioactive dating methods, particularly that of Potassium-Argon, that allowed science to make great progress and thereby disparage the dogmatism that prevailed not long ago in this domain. In fact, the stratigraphical methods did not offer a clear-cut choice between the scholars' differing views. Thus, as pertaining to the main issue, it has been shown that the first inhabitant of Europe was a migrating Black: the Grimaldi Man. But a prominent authority, the late French scholar Raymond Vaufrey, had decreed that Africa was backward. From then on, to the eyes of the scholar, the pre-historical facts of Africa were made to appear more recent in order for them to explain a prior antiquity of Europe. Obviously, neither the Gri­maldi Man nor the Combe-Capelle Man, both being Black, could have been indigenous to Europe. However, a chronological difficulty related to the limits of the stratigraphical methods would not allow that these men originate from Africa.

Racial differentiation took place in Europe, probably in southern France and in Spain, at the end of the last Wurm glaciation, between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago (fig. 4). We understand now, because of the above-cited facts, why the first inhabitant of Europe was the Grimaldi Black man,³ who was responsible for the first lithical industry of the European Upper Paleolithic period called Aurignacian industry. Some believed they saw in the Lower Perigordian a strictly European industry anterior to the previous one, whose creator would have been truly indigenous to Europe, as op­posed to the Grimaldi Black invader. This refers to the Combe-Capelle Man. It has been forgotten that the latter is as typical a Black as the Grimaldi Man himself and that both individuals belong to the same an-thropological type. This is the reason why the Lower Perigordian and the Aurignacian were first viewed as forming a sole and same industry. It is not possible to give here all the reasons that led to the making of these later distinctions. We refer you to our article cited above⁴ and to the following discussion.

The Grimaldi Negroids have left their numerous traces all over Europe and Asia, from the Iberian Peninsula to Lake Baykal in Siberia, passing through France, Austria, the Crimea, and the Basin of Don, etc. In these last two regions, the late Soviet Professor Mikhail Gerasimov, a scholar of rare objectivity, identified the Negroid type from skulls found in the Middle Mousterian period. Marcellin Boule and Henri-Victor Vallois insist on the fact that the localizing layers of the Grimaldians are always in direct contact with those of the Mousterian period in which the last Neanderthal lived; in other words, there is no other variety of Homo sapiens that precedes the Grimaldi Negroid in Europe or in Asia.

If one bases one's judgment on morphology, the first White appeared only around 20,000 years ago: the Cro-Magnon Man. He is probably the result of a mutation from the Grimaldi Negroid due to an existence of 20,000 years in the excessively cold climate of Europe at the end of the last glaciation.

The Basques, who live today in the Franco-Cantabrian region where the Cro-Magnon was born, would be his descendants; in any case there are many of them in the southern region of France.

The Chancelade Man, who would be the prototype of the Yellow race, appeared in the Reindeer period, about 15,000 years ago in the Magda-lenian Age. Is he a mongrel, born in a cold climate, from both stocks of the last Grimaldi in Europe and the new Cro-Magnon?

In any case, considering his dolichocephalic trait, he could only have been a Paleosiberian and not a true Yellow man (like the Chinese or the Japanese), because the latter is a brachycephalus in general, and we know that this morphological trait did not exist in the Upper Paleolithic Age; the mesocephalic trait appeared during the Mesolithic Age (around 10,000 years ago) and the brachycephalic trait much later.

The brachycephalic races—Yellow, Semites—appeared only around the Mesolithic Age, probably following great migratory currents and inter­breeding.

Thus, humanity was born in Africa and differentiated itself into several races in Europe, where the climate was sufficiently cold at the end of the Wurmian glaciation.

If the human being had been born in Europe, it would have been first white and then it would have negrified (darkened) under the Equator, with the appearance of the formation of melanin at the level of the epidermis, protecting the organism against the ultraviolet rays.

Therefore, this is not a value judgment: there is no particular glory about the cradle of humanity being in Africa, because it is just an accident. If the physical conditions of the planet had been otherwise, the origin of humanity would have been different.

Hence the interest of this expose resides solely in the necessity to show, with the most possible scientific rigor, the unfolding of the facts relative to the human past, in order to restore to them all their meaning and also to extricate from them the foundation of both science and civilization.

One can thus measure the greatness of the damage perpetrated by ideo­logies that knowingly falsify their data.

In light of the above-mentioned facts, it seems normal that Africa, which did not see the birth of the Cro-Magnon and Chancelade men, did not know their respective industries: the Solutrean and the Magdalenian. In­stead, Africa had an Aurignacian industry (Egypt, Kenya, etc.) whose age would have to be reexamined in light of the new dating techniques.

But as one would expect, physical anthropology, using the latest findings of genetics, molecular biology, and linear analysis, denies race and admits only the reality of differing populations. It is sophisticated science strongly coated with ideology! But when dealing with the transmission of a hereditary defect as in the case of sickle-cell anemia, the notion of race reappears: sickle-cell anemia, genetically speaking, strikes only Black people, says the same science that denies race. In the case of thalassemia, another hereditary defect that afflicts the Alpine race, or the White Mediterraneans, physical anthropology asserts that this disease attacks only the inhabitants of the Mediterranean periphery.

Race does not exist! Is it to say that nothing allows me to distinguish myself from a Swede, and that, a Zulu can prove to Botha (Prime Minister of the White minority government of South Africa) that they both are of the same genetic stock, and that consequently, at the genotypical level, they are almost twins, even if accidentally their phenotypes, meaning their physical appearances, are different?

Certainly, the dilution of the human species' genes during prehistoric times is very important; but from there to deny race, in the sense that it impacts on history and on social relations, meaning at the phenotypical level, which is of interest solely to the historian and to the sociologist, is a step that the daily facts of life prohibit anyone from taking.

Why does a certain physical anthropology use this scholarly manner to duck the questions? Is it loathe to rigorously derive all the implications of the monogenetic origin of humanity and, in the same vein, to take into consideration the real development of the appearance of the races? But an avant-garde West has already begun to courageously spread these ideas; and it was a White American who wrote: "I proceeded to explain that the first human beings were Black, and that light-skinned people developed later, by natural selection, to survive in temperate climates; it made us all feel much closer."⁵

The Paleolithic industry has been attested to in the Nile Valley. It there­fore appears that this valley was necessarily populated solely by Blacks from the origin of humanity up to the appearance of the other races (20,000 to 15,000 years ago). Prior to some infiltrations at the end of the fourth millenium, Whites were absent from Egypt, and it practically remained that way until 1300 B.C., the period of the great invasions from the peoples of the sea under the XlXth Dynasty, not taking into account the Hyksos's invasions.⁶

The genetic table of the races represented in the tomb of Ramses III (twelfth century B.C.) shows that the Egyptians perceived themselves as Blacks (fig. 17). In fact, the Egyptian artist does not hesitate to represent the genetic type of the Egyptian as a typical Black, a Nubian; Karl Lepsius, a White scholar from Germany who made this discovery, was surprised and wrote: "Where we expected to see an Egyptian, we are presented with an authentic Negro."⁷ This ruins all of the tendentious studies of ideol­ogists and demonstrates that the Egyptians did not establish any ethnic difference between themselves and other Africans; they belonged to the same ethnic universe.

What then happened, from an anthropological standpoint, after the appearance of the Cro-Magnon in Europe? This question will be debated for a long time to come. But there is sufficient reason to suppose that the Alpine race is indigenous to Europe and therefore the descendant of the Cro-Magnon, whose survivors are the Basques. Thus, the Basques's lan­guage could very well be the oldest in Europe.

With the abatement of the cold toward the end of the Ice Age (about 10,000 years ago), a group of these Cro-Magnons moved to the North. This stock would give rise to the Scandinavian and the Germanic branches.

A first group detached itself from the northern branch at a yet unde­termined time, but surely at a time posterior to 10,000 years ago. This group occupied the eastern part of Europe, and then descended all the way to Scythia, at the outskirts of the Meridional cradle: the Slavs.

Other branches probably descended the Rhine and the Danube Rivers to Caucasia and the Black Sea; from thence would originate the secondary migrations of the Celts, the Iberians, and the other Indo-European tribes who did not under any circumstance come from the heart of Asia. One therefore sees how this illusion was created.

Around 2200 B.C., the Greeks separated themselves from the northern branch, and in a north-south migration, arrived in Hellas.

The Latins, much later perhaps, occupied Italy where they found the descendants of the Alpine race (Ombrians) mixed probably with the Si­cilians, the Scytheans, and the Pelasgians who must have been of a type close to that of the pre-Latins.

In 1421 B.C., the explosion of the Santorini Island of the Cyclades had migratory consequences that have been neglected and not studied until now. This event may explain the great migration of the Nordics toward India, whence the name Indo-European or Indo-Aryan? (Sec p. 102, as well as my work: I'Unite culturelle de I'Afrique Noire, Presence Africaine, 1959).

A fraction of the group that migrated toward India, and who had to pass between the Caspian and Black Seas, must have necessarily lived near the Greeks, as witnessed by the study of their mores and customs (see p. 122, and I'Unite culturelle, op. cit.).

Even in modern times, Goethe will sing of this irresistible pull toward the south of France on northern Europeans.

Do you know the land where the lemon tree blooms.

Where the golden oranges in the somber foliage shines, A soft wind in the blue sky blows,

The myrtle is always erect and still and the laurel standing. Do you know it? Over there! Over there I must take you there, oh! my love.⁸

The last migrations of the Nordics are those of the Vikings in the Middle Ages. Thule, Iceland, and the Polar Circle are the mythical lands of the ancestors of the gods Ossian, Wotan, etc.

The Saxons separated themselves from the trunk of continental Ger­many in order to populate England. Thus the Nordics and the Germans were born in the North following the on-site adaptation of the Cro-Mag­non. They never came from Asia or from Caucasia; what happened was just the opposite, and the secondary gyratorial migrations that started from these regions complicated the facts and gave the impression, at times, of an initial movement from western Asia.

The England of the Megalithic period felt the impact of a strong Negroid Egyptian-Phoenician influence. In fact, the first Phoenician and Sidonian navigations of the Bronze Age arc contemporaneous with the XVIIIth Egyptian Dynasty (see p. 95); the Phoenicians, subjects and brokers of the Egyptians, fetched tin from the Sorlinguan Islands, meaning from England. Today, long and deep mining runnels have been found. They are so deep that they extend all the way down under the sea. It was in this period that a pre-Christian African vocabulary came into what was to become the English language: ancient Saxon. The population of the island was then very minimal, and this facilitated the penetration of Meridional culture: they numbered less than three million up to the One Hundred Years War.

It is interesting to note that according to Marija Gimbutas⁹ there existed an ancient civilization referred to as "of ancient Europe," which came directly from the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic periods, and which was characterized by a sedentary life, agriculture, a cult of the mother goddess, the fecundator of life, and other feminine divinities—a matriar­chal, egalitarian, urbane, and peaceful society. It is said to have lasted for three millenia, from 6500 to 3500 B.C., and it never knew war: therefore a society which, in every aspect, brings to mind the sedentary, agrarian, and matrilineal African societies.

This civilization developed in central and southeastern Europe, in the Balkans along the Danube River and its tributaries with their fertile valleys so suited to agriculture. It gave birth, at different periods, to the cultural cycles known under the names of: Karanovo (Bulgaria), Stracevo (Hungary), Sesklo (Greece), Cucuteni (Romania), Vinca (north of Macedonia).

This civilization is said to have been destroyed by the nomadic proto-Indo-Europeans (called the "Kurgams" by Gimbutas), who came from the Eurasiatic Russian steppes between the Caspian and the Black Seas. These very crude people had a culture that was characterized by nomadism, patriarchy, the veneration of the warrior deities, the domestication of the horse, an armament until then unknown in ancient Europe. The newcom­ers literally erased the ancient European civilization originated by the Cro-Magnoids who were left in the South (the Alpines and others) and by the last Negroids who were still¹⁰ present as far as Switzerland. There would have been three Kurgan invasions spaced between 3400 and 2900 B.C., the last twelve waves reaching the borders of the Baltic across the basin of the Danube. The excavation of the burial mounds, left by the invaders, and the carbon 14 dating furnished the precious information about this stratification of the civilizations of Europe.

These facts give evidence of a break in continuity. There was not, as Swiss philosopher Johann Bachofen supposed, internal passage from ma­triarchy to patriarchy during an evolution of the same society due to the simple play of endogenous factors. Rather it was a patriarchal, nomadic group that surprised a sedentary society and introduced patriarchy and all its corollary practices by force. This shows also that neither matriarchy nor patriarchy hinges on race but stems from the material conditions of life, as we have always maintained. This does not minimize the fact that patriarchy became solidly established in the Indo-European societies at the end of the Iron Age, with the arrival of the Dorians in Greece. This occurred in Rome, Persia, Arian India, Greece, etc.; and it is inconceivable to project a matriarchal past onto the very people who were the vehicles of patriarchy, particularly the Dorians. All evidence suggests that these were people who went from hunting to nomadic life without ever expe­riencing the sedentary phase. It was only afterward, with the conquest of the agricultural regions, that they became sedentary.

However, let us formulate some reservations about Gimbutas's thesis. As she acknowledges it herself, the culture that made ridged pottery, which developed from the one that made spherical amphora at the beginning of the third millenium B.C., is considered to be the first Indo-European culture typical of the North: "Germans, Celts, Illyrians, Baltics, and perhaps the Slavs."¹¹ It is not absolutely certain that the hypothetical Kurgan invaders, to whom she attributes this transformation in northern Europe, from mak­ing funnel-shaped goblets to making spherical amphora, were truly Indo-Europeans or proto-Indo-Europeans. It should be pointed out here that the invaded area, principally that of the Balkans, contains the most distant European branch and is quite different from the Nordic type, often re­vealing Negroid features, reminiscent of the Grimaldi type, or of the Asiatic traits resulting from the Asiatic invasions of which the Huns and the Hungarians were the last. In fact, Gimbutas writes:

The analysis of the skeletons in the cemeteries of Budakalasz (famous for the fout-wheel chariot in clay miniature)¹² and in Alsonemedia, near Budapest, has revealed the presence of populations connected to the steppes type¹³ as well as to the Mediterranean type.

Gimbutas believes that there existed already the beginning of writing consisting of a corpus of more than two hundred linear and hieroglyphic signs in the Vinca and the Karanovo cultures. "This writing precedes by three thousand years the Minoan linear and seems to have a certain kinship with it."¹⁵

In reality, however, they are merely symbolic drawings that in no way-present the coherence of genuine writing; otherwise it would have been the first writing in the world, and one cannot understand then why Crete and the Aegean, located in the area spared from the destructive invasion of the "Kurgans," would not have known writing three thousand years earlier. Thus there is no credibility to this thesis. Crete, in spite of its so-called cultural heritage, did not come out of protohistory and would become acquainted with writing only under colonization by the XVIIIth Egyptian Dynasty (see chapter 3). Crete owes this writing to Egypt as evidenced by the following facts:

It is particularly noteworthy that on the linear tablets of Pilos, in con­tinental Greece, during the Mycenaean epoch, there are two metrological signs that reveal the typical Egyptian influence: the talent, a measure of weight equivalent to 29 kg, is represented by the ideogram of the Egyptian balance . Also the measure of capacity equivalent to a quarter of a liter, the kotyla, is represented by another Egyptian ideogram (did not print) basket = a semicircle, etc.¹⁶ Likewise, the genitive form of the name of Dionysus, replica of Osiris, has been found on these tablets. Finally, the Aegean civilization, instead of migrating from north to south as one would have expected, moved rather from the extreme south toward the north of Greece, which had remained semibarbaric even during the time of Thucydides (see p. 162 and figs. 18, 19, 20).

Raymond Furon reminds us that Chartes Autran has particularly insisted on the Dravidians's role in the dissemination of the pre-Aryan myths in the West.¹⁷

The former predominance of the Black civilization around the Medi­terranean region is attested to by the unexpected existence of the pre-Hellenic Black virgins and goddesses, such as "the black Demeter of Phi-galia in Arcadia, the black Aphrodite of Arcadia and Corinth, the black virgin of Saint Victor of Marseilles, and the black virgin of Chartres, who once was honored as Our-Lady-under-the-Earth."¹⁸

Lastly, Marcellin Boule and Henri-Victor Vallois, citing Schreiner,¹⁹ in­sist on the fact that Homo nordicus is of recent stock, who resulted from interbreeding that occurred south of Denmark at the beginning of the Neolithic Age, between a local element consisting of the descendants of Upper Paleolithic Man and a group of invaders who came from the South; a diverse dolichocephaly with, up to a certain point, slight Neolithic bra-chycephalic traits.²⁰

Moreover, these authors think that the mesocephaly of Ofnet evolved into the world's first brachycephaly during the Neolithic period, at a time when the last of them wete neithet present in Russia, the Near East, nor in North Africa. There were fewer still during the Upper Paleolithic Age which was marked by the presence of dolichocephaly and mesocephaly.²¹

The third "Kurgan" ("Jamna" in Soviet terminology) invasion occurred around 2900 B.C. and "is attested to by the hundreds of tombs in Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Central Hungary. These tombs, down to the tiniest details, resemble the Kurgan tombs of the lower Dnepr and those of the lower Don called 'Jamna' (tombs in a shaft, in the Russian lan­guage)."²²

These invasions could very well have contributed in a significant way to the formation of the Slav branch or to its division into two groups: the Slavs of the North (Russians, Polish) and the Slavs of the South (the Balkan peoples).

It is important to emphasize the fact that these "Kurgan" people of the lower Dnepr and lower Don migrated recently to this region, probably at the beginning of the Neolithic Age. There is no evidence of their presence in the Upper Paleolithic Age. It is only after the abatement of the cold weather, at the end of the last Wurm Glaciation, that the Cro-Magnoids were able to advance farther to the East and occupy these regions, and to set out again toward the West, after an adaptation to the conditions of nomadic life, thus giving the signal to the so-called Kurgan invasions.

On the other hand, in spite of Gimbutas's suppositions, ancient Europe did not know writing and did not transmit to posterity any evidence that it did—not a single readable sign. Also, the existence of matriarchy in this ancient society, though probable, remains purely a hypothesis that cannot be demonstrated today owing to a lack of documents.

This ancient culture founded on agriculture was completely destroyed and replaced by a patriarchal nomadic culture that came from the outside, the same one that Europe finally transmitted to history beginning with the Dorians, twelve hundred years before Christ.

The cult of the Black virgins, which the Church finally sanctified in modern times, derived directly from the cult of Isis, which preceded Chris­tianity in the notthern Mediterranean.²³ We lack scientific proof to connect them to the Aurignacian Venuses. But their existence confirms the southern origin of civilization.

Finally, Gimbutas could have assigned rough values to the carbon 14 dates next to the calibrated, or corrected, values according to highly tech­nical procedures, but which are still contested. Calibration, according to the rough age found, can make any age younger or older at will, so much so that, for now, many laboratories limit themselves to supplying non-calibrated dates.