4000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
The bones of Egypt's founders match Nubia and the Horn
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The cemeteries at El Badari and Naqada hold the people who founded Egypt, and their remains have been measured. Cranial and dental features in those fourth millennium BCE burials show no debt to Levantine populations. Their closest parallels lie among the long-resident peoples of northeastern Africa, Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa above all. Those buried there descend from inhabitants of these parts of Africa going back many millennia. This is the most material evidence available, the bodies themselves, and it is not ambiguous. Any theory of Egyptian origins that opens with a founding migration out of Asia has to explain why the founders' own skeletons place them in the Nile valley and the Horn. Egypt was made by Africans who had been living in Africa for a very long time. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the instinct that emptied Egypt of Africans is the one that later emptied Saint-Domingue of the people who built it.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.