Africans along the Red Sea

 

Reported

May 5, 2000

 

A new study shows ancient Africans (called blacks by some) began living along a coast as much as 10,000 years earlier than previously known and suggests they may have left Africa's Red Sea coast rather than going up Africa's Nile River valley as is traditionally assumed.

 

The conclusions come from what scientists say is the earliest well-dated example of an oyster bar: a fossil reef on Africa's Red Sea coast where Africans apparently waded out to collect oysters, clams and crabs some 125,000 years ago.

 

The site, in Eritrea, contains stone tools along with shells but no remains from whoever made the tools. The tools' makers were probably early anatomically modern humans, said Robert Walter of the Center for Scientific Investigation and Higher Education in Ensenada, Mexico.

 

He led the study published in today's issue of the journal Nature. The tools include small stone blades and hand-size, teardrop-shaped stones with sharpened edges. The early Africans may have used the tools to remove shellfish from boulders and to crack or pry open shells.

 

Researchers also found fossils of large land mammals such as elephants, rhinos and hippos. The ancient Africans may have trapped the animals against the sea and butchered them there, Walter said. A site in South Africa also shows signs that ancient Africans lived along a coast and harvested shellfish.

 

The researchers noted evidence that this site is 10,000 years younger than the Eritrea site. But in
interviews, other experts put the difference at about 5,000 years. So the Eritrea site is not markedly older, they said. In either case, the two sites show that coastal living spread rapidly in Africa, though it probably didn't begin at the Eritrea site, Walter said.

 

Since that site falls within the dimly understood period when anatomically modern humans arose, the work suggests that coastal sites could reveal new information about the early days of the species, he said.

 

Walter said he suspects the species arose inland and then migrated to the coasts, perhaps driven by climate changes that dried up rivers and lakes. Eventually their coastal settlements may have spread out so much that some settlers left Africa at the northern or southern edge of the Red Sea, using an ancient land bridge, he said.

 

Sally McBrearty, an archaeologist at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, said she isn't convinced that humans were harvesting shellfish at the Eritrea site. Just finding stone tools with shells is not enough for that conclusion, she said. It is not clear whether the Africans really left the tools there when the shellfish were alive, she said.

 

"That's a very exciting aspect that expands our thinking," Dr. Christopher Stringer noted, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Homo sapiens must have traveled from Africa to Australia by 60,000 years ago, as ancient human burials there show.

 

Migrating along the coast might have provided an easy alternative to trekking inland, through wildly varying environments of desert, savannah, mountains and so on. "It doesn't mean they were migrating, but it certainly would provide an easy way for them to migrate," he said.

 

"If you can live on the coast in the Red Sea, you can live on the coast in Arabia and in India."

 

But none of this is very surprising, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, of Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Few anthropologists would argue that the coastal route is any less likely than an inland one.

 

The indigenous Africans, out of Africa idea is boosted by the fact that the oldest known bones of Homo sapiens are found only in Africa, from about 115,000 years ago. These same indigenous African species isn't found outside of Africa until roughly 90,000 to 100,000 years ago, in western Asia, in the area now known as Israel.

Give us your thoughts and opinions!

 

| NEWSLETTERS | KINGDOM |

 

| KINGDOM | ABOUT US | BOOKS | SCULPTURES | MUSIC |

| SHOPPING CART | CUSTOMER SERVICE | 
| GLOSSARY OF TERMS | OPEN OUR EYES | NEWSLETTERS |

| BEYOND WORDS | YOUR EYES |

| KNOWLEDGE LINKS | NEW BEGINNINGS | WHAT'S GOING ON |

 

©A.B.N. Enterprises, 1999-2008, all rights reserved. The words

African By Nature are registered trademarks of A.B.N. Enterprises.

Copyright