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Cheikh Anta Diop

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Book Cover The African origins of civilization

Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December, 1923–7 February, 1986) is a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, which places emphasis on the human race's origins and on the study of pre-colonial African culture and its connectedness to the rest of the peoples of the world. He has been considered one of the greatest African historians of the 20th century by some, and a racialist scientist by others. On 7 February 1986, Diop, who by now was regarded by many as the modern pharaoh of African studies, died in his sleep in Dakar. Diop was survived by a wife and three sons.

Early Life and Career

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Cheikh Anta Diop was born in Diourbel, Senegal. His early education was in a traditional Islamic School. At the age of 23, he went to Paris in 1946 to become a physicist. He remained there for 15 years, studying physics under Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie’s son-in-law, and ultimately translating parts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof. In the 1940s, the study of African history was dominated by Europeans who considered Africans people without a past. Diop also mastered studies of African history, Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and sociology as he armed himself for the task of setting the historical record straight.

Research

In 1951, Diop submitted a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Paris where he argued that ancient Egypt had in fact been a Black African culture. The thesis was rejected, but over the next nine years, Diop reworked the thesis, adding stronger evidentiary support, and in 1960, he succeeded in the defense of his thesis and was awarded the Ph.D. degree. Five years earlier, the thesis had been published in the popular press as a book titled Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture), proving very successful and making him one of the most controversial historians of his time. He eventually earned 5 PhDs.

After 1960, Diop went back to Senegal and continued writing. A radiocarbon laboratory was established with the University of Dakar (which was later named Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar after his death), and Diop was made its head. He had said, “In practice it is possible to determine directly the skin color and, hence, the ethnic affiliations of the ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory; I doubt if the sagacity of the researchers who have studied the question has overlooked the possibility.” One of his important works published in journals is the dosage test—a technique developed by Diop to determine the melanin content of the Egyptian mummies. This technique was later adopted by the U.S. forensic department to determine the racial identity of badly burnt accident victims.

In 1974, Cheikh Anta Diop participated in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo, where he presented his theories to other specialists in Egyptology. He also wrote the chapter about the origins of the Egyptians in the UNESCO General History of Africa.

Life works

Diop's first work translated into English, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, was published in 1974, revealing his views to a much greater audience. In this work, he claimed that archaeological and anthropological evidence supports his Afrocentric view of the Pharaohs being of Negroid origin. While many scholars draw heavily from his groundbreaking work, the Western academic world as a whole does not accept Diop's theories. However, they continue to raise important questions about the cultural bias inherent in scientific research.

The very latest discoveries by the Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet at the site of Kerma shed some light on the theories of Diop. Even if the Afrocentric view may be as flawed as another race-centric view, and even if there are many mistakes in the work of Diop, one has to acknowledge the core of its oeuvre—that European archaeologists before and after the Decolonization have understated and continue to understate the extent and possibility of Black civilizations.

The European Africanists schools (all tendencies mixed) were unanimous in rejecting, more often without examining, the fundamental theses of Cheikh Anta Diop relating to the cultural unity of Africa to the migrations that, taking their source from the original Neolithic basin, had ended up in the present peopling of the continent to the continuity of the national historical past of Africans.

Assessment of Diop's thought

Diop's thought has remained controversial in a number of places as noted above, nevertheless over 20 years after his death in 1986, it is possible to see some movement (if not always agreement) in the academy closer to many of his ideas. This convergence is summarized below.

Biased scholarship on Africa

Diop's charges on this point have largely proven false. When he wrote in the 1950s, 1960s and somewhat in the early 1970s, the field of African scholarship was heavily influenced by racial analysis epitomized in the works of Carleton Coon who used racial rankings of inferiority and superiority, accurate definitions of true Blacks, and correct allocation of various Africans with advanced cultures to Caucasian clusters. Coon's work was mirrored in the Hamitic Hypothesis, which held that most advanced progress or cultural development was due to the invasions of mysterious Caucasoid Hamites, and the Dynastic Race Theory of Egypt, which asserted that a mass migration of Caucasoid peoples were needed to create the Egyptian kingships—slower-witted Negro tribes being unable to do the job. All these theories and approaches have since been proven untrue by modern physical anthropologists. Diop's early condemnation of this bias in his 1954 work Nations Negres et Culture,' has thus been discredited by later scholarship.

Genetic variability of the African people

Diop consistently held that Africans could not be pigeonholed into a rigid type somewhere south of the Sahara, but varied widely in skin color, facial shape, hair type, height, and a number of additional factors, just like other normal human populations. In his Evolution of the Negro world in Presence Africaine (1964), Diop castigates European scholars who posited a separate evolution of various types of humankind, and denied the African origin of homo sapiens.

"But it is only the most gratuitous theory that considers the Dinka, the Nouer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids. What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognizing as white-only the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular—the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese? Just as the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries must be considered as two extreme poles of the same anthropological reality, so should the Negroes of East and West Africa be considered as the two extremes in the reality of the Negro world. To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nouer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude that maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race."

Decades later, Diop's work on this point is supported by a number of scholars mapping human genes using modern DNA analysis, which shows that most of human genetic variation (some 85–90%) occurs within localized population groups, and that race only can account for 6–10% of the variation. Arbitrarily classifying Masai, Ethiopians, Shillouk, Nubians, etc., as Caucasian is thus problematic, since all these peoples are northeast African populations and show normal variation well within the 85–90% specified by DNA analysis. Modern physical anthropologists also question splitting of peoples into racial zones, holding that such splitting is arbitrary insertion of data into pre-determined pigeonholes and the selective grouping of samples. Diop's objections to how data on African peoples is being manipulated is thus reflected in the work of several modern scholars, using modern DNA analysis.

Egypt within the African context

Diop's arguments placing Egypt in the cultural and genetic context of Africa was met with near universal condemnation and rejection when he first proposed them. Nevertheless, towards the 1980s, a number of mainstream scholars had moved closer to his position. Scholars like Bruce Trigger condemned the often shaky scholarship on northeast African peoples like the Egyptians, declaring that the peoples of the region were all Africans, and decrying the "bizarre and dangerous myths" of previously biased scholarship, "marred by a confusion of race, language, and culture and by an accompanying racism." Trigger's approach has been seconded by Egyptologist Frank Yurco, who sees the Egyptians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Somalians, etc as one localized Nile valley population, that need not be arbitrarily split into racial clusters. Re-analyses of the work of other researchers such as Czech anthropologist E. Strouhal, demonstrate a number of cultural and material linkages between Egypt and the Saharan and Sudanic African cultures to the south.

The Egyptians as a Black population

This is one of Diop's most controversial claims chiefly centering around the definition of who is a true Black person. Diop insisted on a broad interpretation similar to that used with European populations, and accused his opponents of using the narrowest possible definition of "Blacks" in order to separate out various African groups like Nubians into a European or Caucasoid racial zone. He also claimed hypocrisy in that opponents dismissed the race of the Egyptians as unimportant, but on the other hand, did not hesitate to introduce race under new guises, such as the use of terminology like "Mediterranean" or "Middle Eastern," or statistical classification of all not meeting the "true" Black stereotype as some other race. Diop's meticulous preparation and fierce defense of his concepts at the Cairo UNESCO symposium on "The peopling of ancient Egypt and the deciphering of the Meroitic script," in 1974, exposed the inconsistencies and contradictions in how African data was handled. This exposure remains a hallmark of Diop's contribution. As one scholar at the 1974 symposium put it:

"While acknowledging that the ancient Egyptian population was mixed, a fact confirmed by all the anthropological analyses, writers nevertheless speak of an Egyptian race, linking it to a well-defined human type, the white, Hamitic branch, also called Caucasoid, Mediterranean, Europid or Eurafricanid. There is a contradiction here: all the anthropologists agree in stressing the sizable proportion of the Negroid element—almost a third and sometimes more—in the ethnic mixture of the ancient Egyptian population, but nobody has yet defined what is meant by the term 'Negroid', nor has any explanation been proffered as to how this Negroid element, by mingling with a Mediterranean component often present in smaller proportions, could be assimilated into a purely Caucasoid race."
A majority of academics disavow the term black for the Egyptians but there is no consensus on substitute terminology. Some modern studies use DNA to define racial classifications, while others condemn this practice as selective filling of pre-defined, stereotypical categories.
Diop's concept was of a fundamentally Black population that incorporated new elements over time, rather than mixed-race populations crossing arbitrarily assigned racial zones. Many academics reject the term black, however, or use it in the sense of a sub-Saharan type but as was previously noted, there is no consensus on substitute terminology. One approach that has bridged the gap between Diop and his critics is the non-racial bio-evolutionary approach. This approach is associated with scholars who question the validity of race as a biological concept. This view sees the Egyptians as (a) simply another Nile valley population or (b) part of a continuum of population gradation or variation among humans that is based on indigenous development rather than use racial clusters or the concept of admixtures. Under this approach, racial categories such as "Blacks" or "Caucasoids" are discarded in favor of localized populations showing a range of physical variation. This way of viewing the data rejects Diop's insistence on Blackness, but at the same time acknowledges the inconsistency with which data on African peoples are manipulated and categorized.

The influence of Egypt

Diop never asserted, as some claim, that all of Africa follows an Egyptian cultural model. Instead he claims Egypt as an influential part of a "southern cradle" of civilization, an indigeous development based on the Nile Valley. While Diop holds that the Greeks learned from a superior Egyptian civilization, he does not argue that Greek culture is simply a derivative of Egypt. Instead he views the Greeks as forming part of a "northern cradle", distinctively growing out of certain climatic and cultural conditions. His thought is thus not the "Stolen Legacy" argument of writers like George James or the "Black Athena" notions of Martin Bernal. Diop focuses on Africa, not Greece, contrary to the preoccupation of other Afrocentrists. Writers such as Frank Snowden and Mary Lefkowitz have argued that it is dubious to assign the complexity of Greek culture in any significant way to Egypt. It should be noted however that Diop made few such claims.

Cultural unity of African peoples as part of a "southern cradle

Diop attempted to demonstrate that the African peoples shared certain commonalities, including language roots and other cultural elements like regicide, circumcision, totems, etc. These he held, formed part of a tapestry that laid the basis for African cultural unity, that could assist in throwing off colonialism. His cultural theory attempted to show that Egypt was part of the African environment as opposed to incorporating it into Mediterranean or Middle Eastern venues. These concepts are laid out in Diop's "TOWARDS THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE: ESSAYS IN CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT, 1946-1960."

Most anthropologists see commonalities in African culture but only in a very broad, generic sense, intimately linked with economic systems, etc. There are common patterns such as circumcision, matriarchy etc, but whether these are part of a unique "Southern cradle" of peoples, versus the more grasping, patriarchal flavored "Northern cradle" are deemed problematic. Many cultures the world over show similar developments.

Languages demonstrating African cultural unity

In defence of his unity thesis, Diop also argued that the languages of Nile Valley peoples also demonstrated a broad commonality and unity organic to the ancient peoples, as opposed to scholarly claims of their introduction via Caucasoid or outside "Hamitic races" speaking Hamito-Semitic languages. He further extended this by demonstrating the relationships between Ancient Egyptian, modern Coptic of Egypt and Wolof, a Senegalese language of West Africa, with the latter two having their origin in the former.

"The evidence of this connection(between Egyptian and other African languages) was so overwhelming that Unesco scholars, who had apposed the suggestion that there was a profound and intimate connection between ancient Egyptian and African language and culture, were forced to retreat from their earlier positions...On the subject of Egyptian culture : "Professor Vercutter remarked that, in his view, Egypt was African in its way of writing, in its culture and in its way of thinking"...In regards to linguistics it is stated in the UNESCO report that "this item, in contrast to those previously discussed, revealed a large measure of agreement among the participants. The report by Professors Diop and Obenga were regarded as being very constructive"...The genetic, that is, the non-accidental relationship between Egyptian and the African languages was recognized: "Professor Sauneron noted that the method which had been used was of considerable interest, since it could not be purely fortuitous that there was a similarity between the third person singular suffixed pronouns in Egyptian and in Wolof...In the general conclusion to the UNESCO report it was stated that: "Although the preparatory working paper sent out by Unesco gave particulars of what was desired, none of the participants prepared communications comparable with the painstakingly researched contributions of Professors Cheikh Anta Diop and Obenga. Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).

Challenges

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Decades later, Diop's view that black variation can not be pigeon-holed as "sub-Saharan" is strongly challenged by those who argue that the Sahara desert was indeed a major barrier that isolated the populations of sub-Saharan Africa into a unique clearly distinguishable genetic cluster that is separate from populations of North Africa and that many of the populations of East Africa cluster with North Africans because of caucasoid admixture.


Cavalli-Sforza et al. transformed the distance matrix to a correlation matrix consisting of 861 correlation coefficients among the forty-two populations, so they could apply principal components (PC) analysis on their genetic data...PC analysis is a wholly objective mathematical procedure. It requires no decisions or judgments on anyone's part and yields identical results for everyone who does the calculations correctly...The important point is that if various populations were fairly homogeneous in genetic composition, differing no more genetically than could be attributable only to random variation, a PC analysis would not be able to cluster the populations into a number of groups according to their genetic propinquity. In fact, a PC analysis shows that most of the forty-two populations fall very distinctly into the quadrants formed by using the first and second principal component as axes...They form quite widely separated clusters of the various populations that resemble the "classic" major racial groups-Caucasoids in the upper right, Negroids in the lower right, North East Asians in the upper left, and South East Asians (including South Chinese) and Pacific Islanders in the lower left...I have tried other objective methods of clustering on the same data (varimax rotation of the principal components, common factor analysis, and hierarchical cluster analysis). All of these types of analysis yield essentially the same picture and identify the same major racial groupings.

Jensen is not alone in concluding that sub-Saharan Africans form a distinguishable genetic cluster. Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists from the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. They looked at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, and were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians (who Blumenbach called the yellow race); inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. A similar finding was made by Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University. According to the New York Times:

These five geographically isolated groups, in Dr. Risch's description, are sub-Saharan Africans; Caucasians, including people from Europe, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East; Asians, including people from China, Japan, the Philippines and Siberia; Pacific Islanders; and Native Americans.

Diop's belief that all the skull and facial variation in East Africa was part of the natural black diversity has also been contradicted by studies showing modern-day Ethiopians in the Horn of Africa have been found to generally cluster as an intermediate cluster between sub-Saharan Africans and Middle-Easterners (Risch, Tang et al. 2002), reflecting the nation's proximity to Asia and the Middle East. A number of matrilineal genetic studies have detected almost equal sub-Saharan and western Eurasian lineages among the population examined (Kivisild et al. 2004)

Criticism of the racial clusters approach

  • Arbitrary sorting of categories-

Jensen, who is an educational psychologist with no background in genetics or anthropology, has in turn been challenged by a number of other scholars (Keita and Kittles, Armelagos, et al.) for using pre-defined, arbitrary categories to cluster or assign various African peoples like the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and others into Caucasoid or "mixed" categories. Typical of this is Cavalli-Sforza's Extra-European Caucasoid grouping. What is at issue is not the fact that sub-Saharan populations share certain common traits, but (a) the narrow definition of such peoples using the Sahara as a rigid dividing line, (b)the separation of such populations from related peoples like Ethiopians, Nubians, Somalians, et. al, which are assigned to a "Caucasoid" grouping, usually under different labels (Eastern Hamite, Eurasian, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, etc). Such definitions and groupings critics maintain, often publicly disavow the importance of race, but in practice, continue to use racial groupings established in advance, and then sort data as much as possible into these pre-defined categories, rather than let the data speak for themselves. When pre-sorting is not used, different results appear than those obtained by Jensen, et al..

  • Racial self-identification and continent-wide DNA clustering- The research of Risch (see above) is sometimes referenced in defense of categorizations by race, but some writers note that Risch, like Lewotinin (1972) and other scholars, could only find race to account for 10-15% of human genetic variability. Other follow-up studies yields even more conservative results. Rather than confirm racial categorization methods of Jensen, the work of Risch centers on persons who self-identify with or claim membership in a particular race. This self-identification often corresponds with DNA markers as to continent of ancestry, and is sometimes useful in medical treatments, but it says little about the sub-Saharan barrier or other African populations such as Ethiopians, Nubians, Egyptians or Somalians. The research of Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard is sometimes referenced in relation to sub-Saharan groupings, But Rosenberg's and Pritchard's research also centers on persons who self-identify with a particular group, and clusters data based on vast geographic ranges and spaces, such as Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas. Such broad continental-scale clustering says little about closely related Nilotic and Saharan populations (Nubians, Egyptians, Somalians, Ethiopians, Sudanese, etc) much closer to each other geographically, and sharing a number of common genetic, material and cultural elements. These are precisely the populations and regions most at issue in the writings of Diop. The Rosenberg/Pritchard studies also confirm what other scientists have found: that "90 percent of human genetic variation occurs within a population living on a given continent, whereas about 10 percent of the variation distinguishes continental populations." It was this internal variation, particularly the Nilotic zone of peoples, that drew most of Diop's attention.
  • Critique of the Saharan barrier thesis- Critics assert that notions of the Sahara as a dominant barrier in isolating sub-Saharan populations are both falwed and simplistic in broad historical context, given the constant movement of people over time, the fluctuations of climate over time (the Sahara was once very fertile), and the substantial representation of "sub Saharan" traits in the Nile Valley among people like the Badari. The entire region shows a basic unity based on both the Nile and Sahara, and cannot be arbitrarily diced up into pre-assigned racial zones. As Egyptologist Frank Yurco notes:
"Climatic cycles acted as a pump, alternately attracting African peoples onto the Sahara, then expelling them as the aridity returned (Keita 1990). Specialists in predynastic archaeology have recently proposed that the last climate-driven expulsion impelled the Saharans...into the Nile Valley ca. 5000-4500 BCE, where they intermingled with indigenous hunter-fisher-gatherer people already there (Hassan 1989; Wetterstorm 1993). Such was the origin of the distinct Egyptian populace, with its mix of agriculture/pastoralism and hunting/fishing. The resulting Badarian people, who developed the earliest Predynastic Egyptian culture, already exhibited the mix of North African and Sub-Saharan physical traits that have typified Egyptians ever since (Hassan 1985, Yurco 1989; Trigger 1978; Keita 1990; Brace et al. 1993)... Language research suggests that this Saharan-Nilotic population became speakers of the Afro-Asiatic languages... Semitic was evidently spoken by Saharans who crossed the Red Sea into Arabia and became ancestors of the Semitic speakers there, possibly around 7000 BC... In summary we may say that Egypt was a distinct North African culture rooted in the Nile Valley and on the Sahara."
  • Use of classification schemes to separate past and present Nile Valley populations from the rest of Africa. Criticism of the separation of Nile Valley inhabitants from those further south as arbitrary has further been supported by analysis of both past and current peoples. This research has examined the ancient Badarian group, finding not only cultural and material linkages with those further south but physical correlations as well, including a southern modal cranial metric phentoype indicative of the Tropical African in the well-known Badarian group. Such tropical elements were thus in place from the earliest beginnings of Egyptian civilization, not isolated somewhere South behind the Saharan barrier. This is considered to be an indigenous development based on microevolutionary principles (climate adaption, drift and selection) and not the movement of large numbers of outside peoples into Egypt.

As regards living peoples, the pattern of complexity repeats itself, calling into question the merging and splitting methods of Jensen, et al. Research in this area challenges the groupings used as (a) not reflecting today's genetic diversity in Africa, or (b) an inconsistent way to determine the racial characteristics of the Ancient Egyptians. Studies of some inhabitants of Gurna, a population with an ancient cultural history, in Upper Egypt, illustrate the point. In a 2004 study, 58 native inhabitants from upper Egypt were sampled for mtDNA. The conclusion was that some of the oldest native populations in Egypt can trace part of their genetic ancestral heritage to East Africa. Selectively lumping such peoples into arbitrary Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Caucasoid categories because they do not meet the narrow definition of a "true" type, or selectively defining certain traits like aquiline features as Eurasian or Caucasoid, ignores the complexity of the DNA data on the ground. Critics note that similar narrow definitions are not attempted with groups often classified as Caucasoid.

Our results suggest that the Gurna population has conserved the trace of an ancestral genetic structure from an ancestral East African population, characterized by a high M1 haplogroup frequency. The current structure of the Egyptian population may be the result of further influence of neighbouring populations on this ancestral population

  • Critique of mixed race theories. Mixed race theories have also been challenged in relation to African genetic diversity, with some scholars holding that they too often rely on a stereotypical conception of pure or distinct races that then go on to intermingle. However such conceptions are inconsistently applied when it comes to African peoples, where typically, a "true negro" is identified and defined as narrowly as possible, but no similar attempt is made to define a "true white". (Brown and Armelagos 2001) Under the "true negro" approach, all else not meeting the stereotypical classification is attributed to mixture with outside sources, or split off and assigned to Caucasoid clusters. These methods it is argued, downplay normal geographic variation and genetic diversity found in many human populations and have distorted a true picture of African peoples.
Keita and Kittles (1999) argue that modern DNA analysis points to the need for more emphasis on clinal variation and gradations that are more than adequate to explain differences between peoples rather than pre-conceived racial clusters. Variation need not be the result of a "mix" from categories such as Negroid or Caucasoid, but may be simply a contiuum of peoples in that region from skin color, to facial features, to hair, to height. The present of aquiline features for example, may not be necessarily a result of race mixture with Caucasoids, but simply another local population variant in situ. On a bigger scale, the debate reflects the growing movement to minimize race as a biological construct in analyzing the origins of human populations.
Scholars such as Alan Templeton have also challenged the notion of mixed populations, holding that race as a biological concept is dubious and that only a minor percentage of human variability can be accounted for by distinct "races." They argue that modern DNA analysis presents a more accurate alternative, that of simply local population variants, gradations or continuums in human difference like skin color or facial shape or hair, rather than rigid categories. The notion of "mixed races" it is asserted, is built on the flawed assumptions of old racial models.
"Genetic surveys and the analysis of DNA haplotype trees show that human "races" are not distinct lineages, and that this is not due to recent admixture; human "races" are not and never were "pure." Instead, human evolution has been and is characterized by many locally differentiated populations coexisting at any given time, but with sufficient genetic contact to make all of humanity a single lineage sharing a common evolutionary fate.."(Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective, Alan R. Templeton. American Anthropologist, 1998)
  • Low importance of race as an element in genetic variability- Other researchers such as Lewontin (1972) point out that the genetic affinities attributable to race only make up 6-10% of variant analysis. This is a threshold well below that used to analyze lineages in other species, leading many researches to question the validity of race as a biological construct. (Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review, Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, 2001, Evolutionary Anthropology, 10:34-40) Lewontin's analysis has been validated and replicated by numerous other studies, using a wide range of different analytical methods- (Latter 1980, Nei and Roychoudhury 1982, Ryaman 1983, Dean 1994, Barbujani 1997). Other similar work using mtDNA analysis shows a larger variance within designated racial categories than outside (Excoffier 1992). Work such as Miller (1997) has found greater racial difference by focusing on specific loci, but these are compartively rare (2 out of 17, and 4 out of 109 in re-analyses by other researchers), and are well within the range of other factors such as genetic drift and clinal variation. Restudies of loci data (Lewotin, Barbajuni, Latter, et. al as noted above)yield even more conservative estimates of race as a factor in genetic variability. On the basis of this data, some scholars (Owens and King 1999) hold that skin color, hair and facial features and other factors are more attributable to climate selective factors rather than stereotypic racial differences.
  • Conflicting results using the racial categorization approach- Contradictory results in research using the pre-defined categories have also been noted by some scholars. Liberman and Jackson (1995), and Brown and Armelagos(2001) note that many studies "select the small proportion of genetic variability that is roughly apportionable by race to plot out dendrograms of essentially false categorizations of human variability. To accomplish this, these studies use apriori categorizations of human variability that are based on the inaccurate belief that classical racial categorization schemes delineate a series of isolated breeding populations.."
An example of contradictory results are seen in the work of such researches as Bowcock, Bowcock, Sforza, et. al, 1994. "Despite a research design that should have maximized the degree to which the researchers were able to classify individuals by racial category, the results are something less than "high resolution" with respect to this goal. For example, 88% of individuals were classified as coming from the right continent, while only 46% were classified as coming from the right region within each continent. Notably, 0% success was achieved in classifying East Asian populations to their region or origin. These results occurred despite the fact that Bowcock and co-workers entered their genetic information into a program that already used the a priori racial categories they were trying to replicate."
  • Questions about the methodologies used by the racial categorization approach- As an example of what they see to be flawed methodology, some writers cite Cavalli-Sforza's advocacy of defining "core populations" (discrete, less admixed groupings, i.e. "races) and their evolution and migration. Followers of this approach (Horai 1995) use DNA analysis to postulate racial divergence times, when discrete populations supposedly began to from "core" peoples into spreading populations throughout Africa, Europe, Asia and elsewhere. As regards Africa, the entire mtDNA sequence was applied to the core groups or populations to determine such divergences. Samples used in measurement were (a) 10 individuals from Japan, whose gene data was amalgamated into a consensus to represent Asians, (b) a cluster of broad-based Europeanized data called the Cambridge sequence, and (c) one African individual from Uganda who was used to represent all African peoples. On this basis, entire geographic regions were conceptualized as authentic.
Some writers posit another alternative to human variability distinct from Cavalli-Sforza's core population concept. This is based on the Single Origin Hypothesis, of all modern humanity emanating from Africa. Rather than the use of racial categories such as Extra-European Caucasoid, they advocate a localized population variant approach, which sees the fundamental range of peoples and types in a place, not as discrete core races migrating from one place to another, or blending with other distinct core races, but as simply local variants of an existing indigenous population. Hence Egyptian populations for example can be considered variants of peoples in the Niolitic region, including Nubians and Ethiopians. Such populations vary in skin color, hair , facial shape, etc and also share common cultural blending and features with others.
  • Call for less emphasis on racial clustering and pre-sorting- In the light of these contradictions and modern DNA analysis as discussed above, several scholars have called for a wider view of African genetic diversity, similar to that followed with European populations. Populations like those in the Nile Valley can have a wide range of variation, hold Kittles and Keita in The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence as opposed to pigeonholing them into apriori groupings. As Brown and Armelagos (2001) put it: "In light of this, the low proportion of genetic variance across racial groupings strongly suggests a re-examination of the race concept. It no longer makes sense to adhere to arbitrary racial categories, or to expect that the next genetic study will provide the key to racial classifications."
  • Diop and the African context - In summary, modern anthropological and DNA scholarship repeats and confirms many of the criticisms made by Diop as regards to arbitrary classifications and splitting of African peoples, and confirms the genetic linkages of Nile Valley peoples with other African groups, including East Africa, the Sahara, and the Sudan. This modern research also confirms older analyses, such as that by Strouhal noted above,(Strouhal, E., 1971, ‘Evidence of the early penetration of Negroes into prehistoric Egypt’, Journal of African History, 12: 1-9). Strouhal's skeletal work is also supported by modern scholars such as S. Keita (Studies of Ancient Crania from Northern Africa). This same modern scholarship however in turn challenges aspects of Diop's work, particularly his notions of a worldwide black phenotype.
Perhaps Diops's greatest achievement is his insistence in placing Nile Valley peoples in their local and African context, drawing a picture of a stable, ancient population deriving much of its genetic inheritance from that context, as opposed to attempts to split, cluster, subdivide, define and regroup them into other contexts. Such a vision of inherent unity and continuity, ironically, is also supported in part by modern mainstream Egyptologists such as Frank Yurco:
"The peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of East African Ethiopia and Somalia are now generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with widely ranging physical features (complexions light to dark, various hair and craniofacial types) but with powerful common cultural traits, including cattle pastoralist traditions (Trigger 1978; Bard, Snowden, this volume)."(F. Yurco "An Egyptological Review", 1996)

References

  1. Carelton Coon, "Races of Mankind, 1962
  2. Evolution of the Negro world' in Presence Africaine (1964)
  3. Patterns of Human Diversity, within and among Continents, Inferred from Biallelic DNA Polymorphisms, Barbujani, et al, (Geonome Research, Vol. 12, Issue 4, pp. 602-612), April 2002
  4. Leiberman and Jackson 1995 "Race and Three Models of Human Origins" in American Anthropologist 97(2) pp. 231-242
  5. Bruce Trigger, 'Nubian, Negro, Black, Nilotic?', in Sylvia Hochfield and Elizabeth Riefstahl (eds), Africa in Antiquity: the arts of Nubia and the Sudan, Vol. 1 (New York, Brooklyn Museum, 1978).
  6. Frank Yurco, "An Egyptological Review", 1996 -in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 1996, The University of North Carolina Press, pp. 62-100
  7. Strouhal, E., 1971, ‘Evidence of the early penetration of Negroes into prehistoric Egypt’, Journal of African History, 12: 1-9)
  8. (24) Jean Vercoutter at the 1974 UNESCO conference. Quoted in Shomarka Keita, 'Communications', American Historical Review (October 1992), pp. 1355-6.
  9. Frank M. Snowden, Jr., 'Bernal's "Blacks," Herodotus, and the other classical evidence', Arethusa (Vol. 22, 1989); Before Colour Prejudice: the ancient view of blacks (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983)
  10. Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective, Alan R. Templeton. American Anthropologist, 1998, 100:632-650; The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
  11. <Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review, Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, 2001, Evolutionary Anthropology, 10:34-40 Web file:http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant275/reader/apportionment.pdf
  12. Diop, op. cit
  13. Mary Lefkotitz, Not Out of Africa
  14. "TOWARDS THE AFRICAN RENAISSANCE: ESSAYS IN CULTURE AND DEVELOPMENT, 1946-1960." Trans. Egbuna P. Modum. London: The Estate of Cheikh Anta Diop and Karnak House, 1996.
  15. Philip L Stein and Bruce M Rowe, Physical Anthropology, (McGraw-Hill, 2002, pp. 54-326
  16. Diop, op. cit. "Civilization or Barbarism.."
  19. Keita and Kittles, op. cit. The The Persistence of Racial Thinking,
  20. Rick Kittles, and S. O. Y. Keita, "Interpreting African Genetic Diversity", African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2,1999, p. 1-5
  21. Kittles and Keita, op. cit.
  22. Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, "Does Race Exist?" Scientific American: November 2003
  23. Frank Yurco, "An Egyptological Review", 1996 -in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 1996, The University of North Carolina Press, p. 62-100
  24. Keita, "Further studies of crania", op. cit.; Hiernaux J (1975) The People of Africa. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; Hassan FA (1988) The predynastic of Egypt. J. World Prehist. 2: 135-185
  25. Stevanovitch A, Gilles A, Bouzaid E, Kefi R, Paris F, Gayraud RP, Spadoni JL, El-Chenawi F, Beraud-Colomb E., "Mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in a sedentary population from Egypt," Annals of Human Genetics, 2004 Jan;68(Pt 1):23-39.
  26. Brown and Armelagos. op. cit. Apportionment of Racial Diversity; Keita and Kittles, The Persistence, op. cit.
  27. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=14748828
  28. Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review, Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, 2001, Evolutionary Anthropology, 10:34-40)
  29. Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective, Alan R. Templeton. American Anthropologist, 1998, 100:632-650; The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
  30. Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective, Alan R. Templeton. American Anthropologist, 1998, 100:632-650
  31. Lewontin R. 1972. The Apportionment of Human Diversity, Evol Biol 6:381–398
  32. Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review, Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, 2001, Evolutionary Anthropology, 10:34-40 webfile:http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/ant275/reader/apportionment.pdf
  33. Apportionment, op. cit.
  34. Apportionment, op. cit.
  35. Apportionment.. op. cit.
  36. The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
  37. Kittle and Keita, op. cit.
  38. Rick Kitties, and S. O. Y. Keita, "Interpreting African Genetic Diversity", African Archaeological Review, Vol. 16, No. 2,1999, p. 1-5
  39. The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence, S. O. Y. Keita, Rick A. Kittles, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 534-544
  40. Brown and Armelagos, "Apportionment of Racial Diversity.." op. cit.
  41. [http://www.search.com/reference/Badarian Strouhal, E., 1971, ‘Evidence of the early penetration of Negroes into prehistoric Egypt’, Journal of African History, 12: 1-9)
  42. Keita, op. cit. "Studies of Ancient Crania.."
  43. Frank Yurco, "An Egyptological Review", 1996 -in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 1996, The University of North Carolina Press, p. 62-100

Bibliography

English translations:

  • The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
  • Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology
  • Precolonial Black Africa
  • Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State
  • The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity
  • Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Development, 1946-1960
  • The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script

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