PART 3
In this segment the attention will be turned to the birthplace of humanity. You will see what the parents of mankind looked like, and you will also learn something about the Black skin. You will see that far from being an aberration, an abnormality as the minstrels’ period believed, the Black skin is man before mutation and other biological processes set in.
Missing were these images; you never saw any of them in what was presented to you like Nkuma, Garvey, Malcolm X or Namumba, for example.
These are strong brilliant images which our children need to know about but didn’t, so let’s correct the picture and show the good news.
The good news is that if we were to try to tell the story of African’s people, and therefore the story of African-American or Black people, we would have to begin at the beginning of human time on the face of the earth, because at that time there was only one people on the face of the earth and they were all Africans.
For the first four million of five million years of hominid existence on the face of the earth, people were all located only on the continent of Africa and they were basically the same biological stock. There was no other continent that was populated.
This is what palaeontologists and others who study this material tell us, and as Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop has shown, there were six types of hominids that ultimately developed on the continent of Africa. Only three developed there, two types of Australopithecus which will be shown later on. Homo habilis, Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Those were the ones that developed first on the continent of Africa, the last three left the continent to populate the rest of the world, while Homo Sapiens Sapiens who we are, were the ones that started in Africa but branched out to become the race of what we now call the races of mankind.
Therefore, not only is Africa’s story, the story of the people that we now call Africans and Black people, but Africa’s story is also the human story in its original form. So the cradle of humanity is the part that we want to take a look at.
Stephen Gould, a Harvard professor who wrote the book, “The Mismeasure of Man”, wrote an essay questioning why is it that anthropologists, palaeontologists and others began to look so hard for the origins of humankind in Asia, and then spent a long time looking for it in Europe. Of course you couldn’t get bones old enough in Europe to explain human evolution, so they had another choice, which was to go either to the Asian continent or to the African continent.
Almost in the face of overwhelming evidence for years until recently, the commitment was to make certain that the human origin was found not in Africa but in Asia. However, in the last few years, the case is almost closed as there is no data to support the origin of humans anywhere else in the world. So as Gould said in this article, the first man stood on his feet in Africa, not in Asia.
There is a distortion in the way that information is presented about the physical world that parallels the distortion that information is presented about everything else in the world, as is shown in the next example.
If you take the map of the world, the type that you use when you take a flat map that is supposed to represent a round surface like the one on the right called a Mercator projection, you have to distort the actual features on the ground in order to represent a globe on a flat surface.
If you take the left map which is called the Peters projection, (published in 1885), you have less distortion of the ground features. When you spread out the globe on a flat piece of paper, you should be able to draw a map like the one on the left, the difference being that the one on the left has Africa in relationship to Europe in much greater size. In reality Africa really is much, much larger than Europe about 14 times larger, but looking at the map on the right, Europe looks almost as big as Africa.
Peters projection
Mercator projection
You say that’s a small thing, but if someone is that distorted on geological features that can be clearly plotted, you can imagine what happens when you begin to play with words and images. The map on the left has been adopted by UNESCO.
The United Nations general educational organization sponsored the development of the Peters Projection – the map on the left. The map on the right of course is the one that everyone prefers to use in the schools to continue mis-educating both Black children and white children, so white children go out with an exaggerated impression of just the physical size of their land.
So how does the term minority figure into all of this?
The term minority is a weird example of perceptual distortion because the people they call minorities are not. Black people are the majority in the world, especially if you count the most recent African Blacks anywhere in the world.
In the first place you couldn’t count them only on the continent of Africa. There are about a couple 100 million people on the continent of Africa, 60 million are in Brazil which is the largest Africoid population outside the continent of Africa right now, and 33 million in the United States. If you go to India, there is a large African population in India called Dravidians. There are also African populations that are spread out through the pacific and so forth, so when you add all those up how do they come out to be a minority?
It’s only in the sense of the United States boundaries that you can say that this is an ethnic minority group, but it’s not minor in the sense that it’s small or unimportant, only to the extent that African-Americans and Blacks fail to connect themselves to their own cultural and historical identities.
As the world becomes more global minded what do you think the implication will be for minorities?
It depends on whether or not people are able to clearly see who they are. For example, if a West Indian thinks of himself as beginning with slavery - which is basically when the West Indies was largely populated with Black folk - and he doesn’t see his antecedents, neither can he see his connections to African-Americans. So if he just sees himself as a Barbadian or a West Indian, or if an African-American says the most you can say about me is that I am a Negro or a Black, then he doesn’t see his connection to the Afro-Brazilian for example.
Modern insanity arises therefore when one disconnects oneself from natural kinds of alliances; from one’s historical and cultural antecedents.
So let’s continue to correct the picture. According to geologists, Africa was the centre of the world’s land masses 175 million years ago as seen on this map of the world on the left. They explained that by continental drifts the continents begin to form, but Africa still remained at the centre of the land masses.
That picture on the right was about 50 million year ago, but it was not until about 5 million years ago that we begin to get hominids on the planet, which is relatively recent in time terms that you had human like creatures -that’s what hominids mean.
This particular November 1985 issue of National Geographic is very special, because it is one of the first times that they have summed up information that leads you to two inescapable conclusions that are very important. One of the things they said can be summed up by this conclusion, “Today Africa is recognized as the very cradle of the human race”. In other words, it’s overwhelmingly clear that all human beings on the face of the earth today originally were Africans. This was stated by the National Geographic, a publication that is well respected.
There is a second conclusion that’s also hidden in the article which was captured here. “Skin colour was probable dark, an evolutionary adaptation to the tropical sun.” Well we all know that the “probably” is an understatement, that skin colour had to be dark, as there is no history of a white tropical population anywhere in the world.
In fact, what we see and call colour in human beings is merely the biological adaptation of people to the kinds of climatic and food conditions that they have, so Africans, in order to live in the heat with the penetrating rays of the sun must be pigmented, otherwise they would become unhealthy or die.
That same pigmentation for example would be a disadvantage at the North Pole where whites, in order to live at the North Pole or in the northern climate during the geological periods of the ice age, would have found a way to adapt so they could get vitamin D from the sun through a reduction in pigment. Those who reduced their pigment lived, but those who maintained it didn’t do so well. If you were to shift those populations around, then they would each be in the wrong environment biologically, until such time as they could hopefully find a way to adapt.
We know that Glogers law in biology cited by Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop said that in the tropics, warm blooded animals secrete pigment - melanin, which is a sort of protective colouration that allows energy from the sun to be literally transformed and absorbed without creating any harmful effect on Black people. So we know that these early species had to be indeed Black.
In a non-racist world, people might say so what?
In a non-racist world we probably wouldn’t need this type of material. The problem goes back to those manipulations of images and the dissemination of false information like what was said about Black people by the “world’s great” historians like Toynbee for example; “Black people are the only group of people on the face of the earth that never created a civilization”.
Hegel said that Africa is no part of human history, that anything we see in Africa that’s historical belongs to the Asiatic or European world, that what we see in Africa as historical is located in Egypt and doesn’t belong to Africa, that what we know of Africa belongs to the underdeveloped period still on the threshold of human history.
Once again here you see the assault on the Black mind, the Black intelligence and Black history, what is the reason for this? Initially you said that they looked towards Europe as the source or the origin of mankind. Then they decided to go to Asia after they found no evidence in Europe, so why was it that Asia was more acceptable than Black?
Asia was closer to white in colour; moreover, by that time you would realize that these studies of the origins of humankind are really studies that have taken place after the slavery period. You therefore had 400 years of trying to justify the enslavement of the African population, so now it’s the children of the enslavers who have spent this time protecting the justification sometimes subliminally, without even realizing this is what they were doing. They had inherited an opinion about Black people which they continue to try to justify through scientific means, but this wasn’t true of Asia because they were not an enslaved population.
It is important not only to draw your attention to this picture which shows Richard Leakey on the right, who is one of the leaders in the expedition to uncover the bones of hominids in East Africa where they are most plentiful, but there is also on the left, Kimoy Kimu.
It is important to give credit to these Africans who find the bones, because most people show the Leakey’s but never show the people who find the bones, and Kimoy is one of the greatest finders of old bones. It is said that he has an uncanny knack for finding bones in those places where it looks like there is nothing but rocks. There are others such as those on the hominid gang, that is, Africans who themselves are uncovering the bones of their ancestors, but the credit usually does not go to them, so that’s why it was necessary to have this picture with both Kimoy and Leakey together, or Kimoy and his assistant.
Let’s look at what they are finding. Look at the map of Africa and note that the middle of East Africa is where most of the major finds occur.
It is in the East and South African part that you get all of the bones of early man for the first couple million years of this 5 million year period.
They don’t appear anywhere else in the world. In fact, they never leave the continent until 1 million years ago when one group of them left the continent and went to Asia.
Those were the Australopithecus Gracile, Australopithecus robustus, Homo Habilis. Those three species never left the continent of Africa and are found only on the continent of Africa. That brings us up to about 2 million years ago.
Australopithecus Gracile
Australopithecus robustus
Homo Habilis
Then there was Homo erectus who got off the continent of Africa. You would have found them in Asia about 1 million years ago, but you would not find them in Europe until about 500,000 years ago, at which point you are getting Neanderthal.
Then finally about 130,000 years ago, you find Homo Sapiens Sapiens, that is, modern man / woman, which was found on the continent of Africa.
Homo erectus
Neanderthal
Homo Sapiens Sapiens
They all can be taken back fairly reliably using different types of dating techniques to at least 110,000 (some say 150,000) years ago in Africa, and it’s that group of people who, like all the other five, left down the Nile river heading down north to the land bridge to Asia. Then about half a million years ago, they eventually came into the European continent. Note that North or South America does not even figure into this equation at all until about 12 or 13,000 years ago.
Now let’s look at what happens when you put skin and bones on and try to recreate what they looked like from the bones. This image is taken from Time Magazine showing Richard Leakey with Homo habilis, one of species that never left Africa. But look at what Homo habilis looked like; it had to be pigmented and dark skinned.
So this is an example of what happens through forensic methods when there is an attempt to add the skin, where a skeleton is taken, and with fine measurements determining what the facial features would have looked like if it had on the skin.
This is important because of the argument that was made suggesting that God created man in about four different places as separate creations. This was the European creation, the Asian creation and the African creation. This is the polygenetic theory which no longer has any support for it. There is only the monogenetic theory, that is, we come from one source, and that African Eve is the source of humankind.
This is a picture of Piltdown Man. What happened here was that after these bones kept being dug up in Africa and showing more clearly an African origin every day, one day they found Piltdown man in Europe.
This Piltdown man outside of England was supposed to be about 250,000 years old, and it turned out for 30 years that the scientific establishment accepted this as true when in fact it was a total hoax. Piltdown Man was nothing more than a human skull with an orangutan’s jaw that had been treated with chemicals and buried in the ground to make it appear as if it were about 250,000 years old.
Now you can read about Piltdown Man in The World Book Encyclopaedia, which showed that the whole establishment was fooled or apparently wanted to believe in this hoax, because it would have given Europe its own independent antiquity, independent of Asia and of Africa, but it has been shown to be a total lie.
What has been stated is that Africa is the cradle of humankind and this took place over a period of about 5 million years. Not only was Africa the cradle of the human species, it was also the cradle of civilization itself. In other words, Black African people created the world’s first civilization.
Africa is not only the home of hominids or all six of the human types, but is itself the cradle of civilization. What’s important for Black people is that the world’s first and earliest civilization, for which there are fairly complete records, was a Black African civilization or the Egyptian or Kemetic civilization, which you will see from the images. But that civilization is itself the child of an even older civilization by its own admission. It looked to the south for its source of inspiration. It looked to Ethiopia which is called Cush (Kush), the African name for Ethiopia. The word Ethiopia is a Greek word which describes the people south of Egypt.
So from the beginning of what we call civilization, it moved down the Nile, the 4,000 mile highway from the heart of the African continent down which the builders of civilization travelled, coming from the middle of the heart of Africa, the same place where all the beginnings of the hominids start, building first in Cush, and then from Cush building Kemet, and from Kemet out through Asia into Babylonia, and finally into the rest of the world.
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