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Bari🐍 said:
Cushites: Northeastern Africa: Stone Age Origins to Iron Age

Paleontological research has placed humanity’s earliest known ancestor, Australopithecus Afarensis (popularly known as “Lucy”), in the Horn of Africa more than a million years ago. Thus, the region of Northeast Africa, which includes the Horn of Africa, may have been the earliest cradle of humanity (Brandt 1992).

Early Homo sapiens are thought to have replaced hominids about 125,000 years ago in the Horn of Africa. Considerably later, at 25,000 years ago, a particular type of Stone Age industry with characteristic blades and flint tools developed in northern Somalia around the city of Hargeisa (Brandt 1992, p.29), but nothing is known about who made those artifacts. Likewise, there is no information on the identity of the Stone Age inhabitants of the Horn even during the later Stone Age, some 12,000 years ago. Thus, early archaeology does not offer us any information that is ethnic group specific in its early stages. In short, we cannot speak of Cushitic groups or Semitic groups in the region yet, but only of early human groups.

In the north, data “ranging from Acheulian sites to Neolithic rock art” was found in the twentieth century by a few searches. Some of the sites indicated successive occupations with radiocarbon dates between 18,000 and 40,000 years ago (Brandt, Brook, and Gresham 1983, pp.7, 14–15). However, search in that area still lags behind that done in parts of the continent, especially the Nile Valley and West Africa. In the midst of the hills and valleys of the north, between Erigavo in the mountains and Las Koreh on the Gulf of Aden, an archaeological survey of limited scope in 1980 revealed “a series of caves and rock-shelters, many of which revealed surface scatters of Middle to Later Stone Age artifacts and fossilized bone” (Brandt, Brook, and Gresham 1983, p.8).

Rock shelters at Karin Hagin, a natural mountain pass approximately 70 kilometers southwest of Bosaso, contain extensive rock paintings (Brandt, Brook, and Gresham 1983, p.16); the important feature is a type of cattle, today extinct in the Somalian areas, but found in Egypt, called jamuusa. The paintings also depict goats. These paintings bear interesting stylistic similarities the rock art of Ethiopia and northeastern Africa in general.

The Cushites, in the past mostly called Hamites, are an indigenous people of Northeast Africa, who are found today as far south as past the Equator in East Africa proper. Both the terms Cushite and Hamite have been drawn from the Christian Bible; however, the latter term has been mostly abandoned. European anthropologists, in their attempts to devise a multitude of races and sub-races in Africa, have long argued about the provenance of Cushites and have sometimes treated them as a mongrel race born out of Caucasoid or white immigrants from outside Africa and dark-skinned or Negroid Africans. Thus, unluckily, we have seen Cushites called Black Caucasoids or Europoids (Seligman 1930). The fact is that divisions on the human spectrum are not clear, and choosing any number of features to establish human typologies means ignoring some other features. Furthermore, such definitions reflect nothing more than the biases of those doing the classifications and run counter to the fact that all human groups have always been mixing first with the immediate neighbors and then with groups farther afield through intermediate groups. In other words, all human groups are mixed groups. Additionally, such classifications do little to advance our knowledge of human dispersal in general, and in partic-ular have led to erroneous assumptions about the prove- nance of the Cushitic peoples of Africa, as well as thegreatest ancient civilization that sprang in Northeast Africa, ancient Egypt.

For as long as recorded history is available for the region (perhaps as far back as 7,000 years ago, during the late Stone Age), the Cushites have been an indigenous people of Northeast Africa. Yet little is known about their ancient past. Perhaps one of the reasons lies in the fact that researchers and archaeologists have mostly concentrated their efforts on ancient Egypt and the Nile Valley in isolation, and to the detriment of a holistic picture of the whole region and its people.

Linguistics explains what other languages may be related to those spoken by today’s Cushites. Thus, we know that the languages of the Cushites are part of a larger family of languages currently known as the Afroasiatic “superfamily” of languages, which includes Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, Chadic, and Berber. Of these, the only group whose native speakers partly extend to Asia (through migration from the African side of the Red Sea) is the Semitic group. Thus, it is likely that the ancestors of the speakers of Afroasiatic languages originally inhabited northeastern Africa, especially on the Red Sea coasts, before spreading, with the Chadic group crossing into Western Sudan, while some Semitic groups crossed over the Bab el Mandab straits into the Arabian Peninsula.

After the Stone Age, and starting about 6,000 years ago, herding of domesticating animals became the main economic activity of the inhabitants of the low-land areas of the Horn along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In those early times, the mountains and coastal areas had a wetter climate, which facilitated animal husbandry (Brandt, Brook, and Gresham 1983, p.10). According to recent, limited research in northeastern and eastern Africa, domesticated cattle, wheat, and barley were being grown and raised in southern Egypt more than 8,000 years ago, while sheep and goats became domesticated about 7,500 years ago (Brandt 1992, p.30).

The different peoples of the region learned from one another, with those dwelling in the Nile Valley becoming agriculturalists and cattle herders-while those in the drier areas took up domestication of small stock such as goats and sheep. Groups in the highlands or plateau country, such as found in Ethiopia, adopted agriculture at about the same time. By the age of the Egyptian civilization, the populations of northeastern Africa were fairly well established along the Red Sea coast up to Egypt and down to Cape Guardui, in what is now Somalia.

While early Cushites have usually been described as essentially pastoralists, it is more likely that their activities depended on their environment; if the area was well watered, they practiced agriculture, whereas when the area was mostly dry they were pastoralists breeding sheep and goats. Early Cushites were also societies where certain trades were practiced by caste groups; for example, metallurgy and leatherworking were practiced by only certain groups. Likewise, the practice of war was the domain of the warrior class, while the practice of religion was the domain of the priests. This same division of trades has survived up to our times.

Early Cushites left behind materials that await further research and study; among those are monumental shrines in the Horn of Africa. The best known of these is a series of monumental graves and raised cairns situated in northern Somalia, which extend to southern Ethiopia up to the Dawa River, where the ancestors of the Oromo settled. These monumental graves are unknown in the areas not associated with early Cushitic settlement.

The building of these monumental graves points to a highly organized and ritualized religion. This is more so because we know that pre-Islamic and pre-Christian Cushites were fairly monotheistic and believed in one sky god, Waaq. The ahan, or ceremony of grave building and burial, demanded that considerable efforts be put into it; it is still practiced among Somalis today
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When they say Cushites were in North east Africa 7000 they mean the Red Sea shores from southern Egypt to Eritrea. Our E-V32 lineage has presence in that region going back further than 7000 years.
 
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