Wikis
Quiz
Map
Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December, 1923 in Thieytou, Diourbel Region - 7 February, 1986 in Dakar) was an African historian, anthropologist, physicist, Egyptologist and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture.
Diop was born to a Muslim Wolof family in his native Senegal where he was educated 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.
Diop's education included African history, Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology, economics, and sociology.[1]
In 1951, Diop submitted a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Paris in which he argued that ancient Egypt had been a Black African culture. The thesis was rejected. Over the next nine years, Diop reworked the thesis, adding stronger evidentiary support. In 1960, he succeeded in the defense of his thesis and was awarded the Ph.D. degree.
In 1955, the thesis was published in the popular press as a book titled Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture). It made him one of the most controversial historians of his time.[2]
After 1960, Diop went back to Senegal and continued writing. The University of Dakar established a radiocarbon laboratory to aid in research of which Diop was named chairman. (After his death the university was named in his honor: Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar.) 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."[3]
Diop published his technique and methodology for a dosage test in scholarly journals. Diop used this technique to determine the melanin content of the Egyptian mummies. Forensic investigators later adopted this technique to determine the "racial identity" of badly burnt accident victims.[4]
Some critics have argued that Diop's melanin dosage test technique lacks sufficient evidence. They contend the test is inappropriate to apply to ancient Egyptian mummies, due to the effects of embalming and deterioration over time.[5]
In 1974, 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.[6]
Diop's first work translated into English, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, was published in 1974. It gained a much wider audience for his work. He proved that archaeological and anthropological evidence supported his view that Pharaohs were of Negroid origin. Some scholars draw heavily from Diop's groundbreaking work,[7], while others in the Western academic world do not accept all of Diop's theories.[8] Diop's work has posed important questions about the cultural bias inherent in scientific research.[9]
Diop showed above all that European archaeologists before and after the decolonization had understated and continued to understate the extent and possibility of Black civilizations.[citation needed]
The Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet's discoveries at the site of Kerma shed some light on the theories of Diop. They show close cultural links between Nubia and Ancient Egypt, though the relationship had been acknowledged for years.[10] This does not necessarily imply a genetic relationship, however. Mainstream Egyptologists such as F. Yurco note that among peoples outside Egypt, the Nubians were closest ethnically to the Egyptians, shared the same culture in the predynastic period, and used the same pharaonoic political structure.[11] He suggests that the peoples of the Nile Valley were one regionalized population, sharing a number of genetic and cultural traits.[12]
Diop argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African peoples that was more important than the varied development of different ethnic groups shown by differences among languages and cultures over time.[13]
Diop's statements on bias have largely proven true. When he wrote in the 1950s, 1960s and somewhat in the early 1970s, the field of African scholarship was heavily influenced by racial type analysis epitomized in the works of Carleton S. Coon. Coon used racial rankings of inferiority and superiority, defined "true Blacks" as only those of cultures south of the Sahara, and grouped some Africans with advanced cultures with Caucasian clusters.[14] Based on Coon's work, the Hamitic Hypothesis held that most advanced progress or cultural development in Africa was due to the invasions of mysterious Caucasoid Hamites. Similarly, the Dynastic Race Theory of Egypt asserted that a mass migration of Caucasoid peoples was needed to create the Egyptian kingships, as slower-witted Negro tribes were incapable.
Modern physical anthropologists, and linguists such as Joseph Greenberg, have discredited these theories and approaches, as well as Coon's racial types.[15] Diop's early condemnation of European bias in his 1954 work Nations Negres et Culture,[16] and in Evolution of the Negro World (See quote below) [17] has thus been supported by later scholarship.
A 2004 review of DNA research in African Archaeological Review supports some of the criticisms of Diop. It found that some European researchers had earlier tried to make Africans seem a special case, somehow different from the rest of the world's population flow and mix. This seemed to apply in matters both of evolution and gene pool makeup. The reviewers found that some researchers seemed to have shifted their categories and methods to maintain this 'special case' outlook.
Diop consistently held that Africans could not be pigeonholed into a rigid type that existed somewhere south of the Sahara, but they varied widely in skin color, facial shape, hair type, height, and a number of additional factors, just like other human populations. In his "Evolution of the Negro World" in Presence Africaine (1964), Diop castigated European scholars who posited a separate evolution of various types of humankind and denied the African origin of homo sapiens.[19]
| “ | 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 | ” |
Critics of Diop cite a 1993 study that found the ancient Egyptians to be more related to North African, Somalian, European, Nubian and, more remotely, Indian populations, than to Sub-Saharan Africans.[20]. Diop always maintained that Somalians, Nubians, Ethiopians and Egyptians were all part of a related range of African peoples in the Nilotic zone that also included peoples of the Sudan and parts of the Sahara. He said that their cultural, genetic and material links could not be defined away or separated into a regrouped set of racial clusters.[21] Critics of this study in turn hold that it achieves its results by manipulation of data clusters and analysis categories, casting a wide net to achieve generic, general statistical similarities with populations such as Europeans and Indians. At the same time, the statistical net is cast much more narrowly in the case of 'blacks', carefully defining them as an extreme type south of the Sahara and excluding related populations like Somalians, Nubians and Ethiopians,[22] as well as the ancient Badarians, a key indigenous group.[23]
It is held by Keita, et al. that when the data are looked at in toto without the clustering manipulation and selective exclusions above, then a more accurate and realistic picture emerges of African diversity. For example, ancient Egyptian matches with Indians and Europeans are generic in nature (due to the broad categories used for matching purposes with these populations) and are not due to gene flow. Ancient Egyptians such as the Badarians show greater statistical affinities to tropical African types and are not identical to Europeans.[24] As regards the key Badarian group, a 2005 study by anthropologist S. O. Y. Keita of Badarian crania in predynastic upper Egypt found that the predynastic Badarian series clusters much closer with the tropical African series than European samples. [25]
Diop's theory on variability is also supported by a number of scholars mapping human genes using modern DNA analysis. This has shown 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.[26] Modern physical anthropologists also question splitting of peoples into racial zones. They hold that such splitting is arbitrary insertion of data into pre-determined pigeonholes and the selective grouping of samples.[27] Diop's objections to how data on African peoples was being manipulated has thus been supported by the work of several modern scholars, using modern DNA analysis.[citation needed]
Diop's arguments to place Egypt in the cultural and genetic context of Africa met a wide range of condemnation and rejection.
Scholars such as Bruce Trigger condemned the often shaky scholarship on such northeast African peoples as the Egyptians. He declared that the peoples of the region were all Africans, and decried the "bizarre and dangerous myths" of previously biased scholarship, "marred by a confusion of race, language, and culture and by an accompanying racism."[28] Trigger's conclusions were supported by Egyptologist Frank Yurco, who viewed the Egyptians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Somalians, etc. as one localized Nile valley population. He did not believe that such a population needed to be arbitrarily split into tribal or racial clusters.[12]
One of Diop's most controversial issues centers on the definition of who is a true Black person. Diop insisted on a broad interpretation similar to that used in classifying European populations as white.
He accused his critics of having used the narrowest possible definition of "Blacks" in order to differentiate various African groups like Nubians into a European or Caucasoid racial zone. Under the "true negro" approach, Diop contended that those peoples who did not meet the stereotypical classification were attributed to mixture with outside peoples, or were split off and assigned to Caucasoid clusters.
He also claimed that opponents were hypocritical in stating that the race of Egyptians was not important to define, but they did not hesitate to introduce race under new guises. For instance, Diop suggested that the uses of terminology like "Mediterranean" or "Middle Eastern", or statistically classifying all who did not meet the "true" Black stereotype as some other race, were all attempts to use race to differentiate among African peoples.
Diop's presentation 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:[29]
| “ | 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 [i.e. biological] 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.[30] Some modern studies use DNA to define racial classifications, while others condemn this practice as selective filling of pre-defined, stereotypical categories.[31]
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 exclusively in the sense of a sub-Saharan type. 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. They consider 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 using racial clusters or the concept of admixtures.[32] 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 rejected Diop's insistence on Blackness, but at the same time it acknowledged the inconsistency with which data on African peoples were manipulated and categorized.
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.[33] 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 Mary Lefkowitz have argued that it is dubious to assign the complexity of Greek culture in any significant way to Egypt.[34] It should be noted however that Diop made few such claims.
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,":[35] and "The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity,"[36] These concepts can be summarized as follows:
Southern Cradle-Egyptian Model:
Northern Cradle-Greek Model:
Zones of Confluence: Meeting or mingling area for the two cradles above
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, gentler, more positive "Southern cradle" of peoples, versus a more grasping, patriarchal-flavored "Northern cradle" are considered problematic by many scholars, as is grouping the complexity of human cultures into two camps. Extremely warlike peoples, for example, the Zulu, appear frequently in the "Southern Cradle". Many cultures the world over show similar developments and a mixture of traits.[37]
Analyses of other scholars (Hiernaux 1975, Keita, 1990 et al.) eschew "southern" and "northern" camps and point to a narrower focus that demonstrates cultural, material and genetic connections between Egypt and other nearby African (Nubian, Saharan, and Sudanic) populations. These connections appear not only in linguistics, (see Languages demonstrating section below) but in cultural areas such as religion. As regards Egyptian religion for example, there appear to be more solid connections with the cultures of the Sudan and northeast Africa than Mesopotamia, according to mainstream research:[38]
Diop rejected white civilizer-flavored linguistic theories, such as that advanced by researcher Carl Meinhof, which held that an influx of Caucasoid- or Hamitic-speaking peoples entered Africa to dominate slower-witted negro tribes. More careful race-neutral scholarship after World War II, such as that of Greenberg, et al. largely supports Diop's rejection of the white civilizer approach.[39][40]
Diop further argued that the languages of Nile Valley peoples also demonstrated a broad commonality and unity organic to African peoples and attempted to demonstrate 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. (Diop: Parenté génétique de l’egyptien pharaonique et des langues négro-africaines).[41] Diop's work has been further expanded by Afrocentric scholar Ivan van Sertima.[42]
While modern linguistic studies have challenged Diop's Wolof language connection,[43], as regards the key Nile Valley peoples, they have moved away from earlier notions of a "Hamitic" race speaking Hamito-Semitic languages. They place the Egyptian language in a more localized context, centered around its general Saharan and Nilotic roots.(F. Yurco "An Egyptological Review", 1996)[44] Linguistic analysis (Diakanoff 1998) places the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages in northeast Africa, with older strands south of Egypt, and newer elements straddling the Nile Delta and Sinai.[45]
Ironically, while much modern linguistic research throws Diop's Wolof claim into question, it also demonstrates African connections that Diop missed. Modern research has found several African languages that share features with Egyptian, such as the Chadic languages of west and central Africa, the Cushitic languages of northeast Africa, and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea.[46]
While acknowledging the common genetic inheritance of all mankind and common evolutionary threads, Diop identified a black phenotype, stretching from India, to Australia to Africa, with physical similarities in terms of dark skin and a number of other characteristics. While a number of features such as dark skin are present in these far-flung populations, Afrocentric theories of rigid racial types have been criticized by contemporary scholars such as Shomarka Keita. He holds that modern blood and DNA analysis place Australian and Papuan groups closer to populations of mainland Asia, as compared with sub-Saharan "negroid" types.[47]
Academic detractors charge Diop with racism, based particularly on his claim that the ancient Egyptians were Black. Defenders maintain that Diop's critics routinely misrepresent his views, typically defining negroes as a 'true' type south of the Sahara to cast doubt on his work, since it is clear that many Egyptians would not meet this extreme stereotype.[48] Questions such as "Were the ancient Egyptians black?" are typically misrepresented and framed in these stereotypical terms, it is claimed, so as to quickly dismiss his work and avoid engaging it point by point.[49] Diop by contrast in his 'African Origin of Civilization,'[50] argues against the European stereotypical conception. He holds that the range of peoples and phenotypes under the designation "negre" included those with a wide range of physical variability, from light brown skin and aquiline noses to jet black skin and frizzy hair, well within the diversity of peoples of the Nilotic region. Diop also acknowledged that the ancient Egyptians absorbed "foreign" genes at various times in their history (the Hyskos for example) but held that this admixture did not change their essential ethnicity. [51]
Diop also appeared to express doubts about the concept of race. At a UNESCO colloquium in Athens in 1981, he asserted: "I don't like to use the notion of race (which does not exist)...We must not attach an obsessional importance to it. It is a hazard of the evolution."[52] This outlook was unlike many of the contemporary white writers he questioned. Indeed he eschewed racial chauvinism, arguing: 'We apologise for returning to notions of race, cultural heritage, linguistic relationship, historical connections between peoples, and so on. I attach no more importance to these questions than they actually deserve in modern twentieth-century societies.'[53]
Diop repudiated racism or supremacist theories, arguing for a more balanced view of African history than it was getting during his era.[54] Since he struggled against how racial classifications were used by the European academy in relation to African peoples, much of his work has a strong 'race-flavored' tint. A number of individuals such as US college professor Leonard Jeffries[55] have advanced a more chauvinist view, citing Diop's work.
Diop's fundamental criticism of scholarship on the African peoples was that classification schemes pigeonholed them into categories defined as narrowly as possible, while expanding definitions of Caucasoid groupings as broadly as possible. He held that this was both hypocrisy and bad scholarship, that ignored the wide range of indigenous variability of African peoples.[56]
This fundamental criticism applies to the Jensen approach, which uses a number of racial clustering techniqies. These techniques have in turn been challenged by more contemporary 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,[57] 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. A related practice to pre-sorting is front-loading of indices - i.e. selective packing of measurement categories with numerous minor indicators so that markers typically seen as Negroid (prognathism for example) are downplayed in final sampling results.[58] When pre-sorting and similar methods are not used, different results appear than those obtained by Jensen, et al.[59]
The research of Risch (see above) is sometimes referenced in defense of categorizations by race, but some writers note that Risch, like Lewontin (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.[60] 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."[61] It was this internal variation, particularly the Nilotic zone of peoples, that drew most of Diop's attention.
Diop referenced self-identification in a broad, general way as part of his argument that the ancient Egyptians viewed or identified themselves as "black", a claim centering around interpretation of the word "kemet" or "kmt." This claim is a matter of controversy, with supporters citing definitions as a description of what the ancient Egyptians called themselves,[62] and critics who maintain that the term refers to the dark soil of Egypt.[63]
Diop held that despite the Sahara, the genetic, physical and cultural elements of indigenous African peoples were both in place and always flowed in and out of Egypt, noting transmission routes via Nubia and the Sudan, and the earlier fertility of the Sahara. More contemporary critics assert that notions of the Sahara as a dominant barrier in isolating sub-Saharan populations are both flawed 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:
Diop held that scholarship in his era isolated extreme stereotypes as regards African populations, while ignoring or downplaying data on the ground showing the complex linkages between such populations. [65] Modern critics of the racial clustering approach coming after Diop echo this objection, using data from the oldest Nile Valley groupings as well as 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 adaptation, drift and selection) and not the movement of large numbers of outside peoples into Egypt.[66]
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.[67]
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.[68]
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[69]
Diop disputed sweeping definitions of mixed races in relation to African populations, particularly when associated with the Nile Valley. He acknowledged the existence of 'mixed' peoples over the course of Egyptian history but also argued for indigeous variants already in situ as opposed to massive insertions of Hamites, Mediterraneans, Semites or Cascasoids into ancient groupings. Mixed race theories have also been challenged by contemporary scholars in relation to African genetic diversity. These researchers hold 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". These methods it is held, downplay normal geographic variation and genetic diversity found in many human populations and have distorted a true picture of African peoples.[70]
| “ | 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)[71]
Modern research challenges Diop's notion of a distinctive worldwide black phenotype. Researchers such as Lewontin[72] 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.[73] 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 comparatively 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 (Lewontin, Barbajuni, Latter, et al. as noted above) yield even more conservative estimates of race as a factor in genetic variability.[74] 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.[75]
Diop fundamental disputes with classification methods is also echoed in part by criticism of modern DNA and skeletal study methodology. A number of scholars hold that the same pre-sorting methods used in older scholarship has been moved to DNA analysis. Such methodology it is held is often flawed by two weaknesses: (a) pre-sorting of data before the analysis begins[76] and (b)use of very narrow samples to represent African populations while drawing on a broader range of data to define European classifications. In one study for example one individual from Uganda was used to stand in for all Africans, but a broad range of data was used as a stand-in for European groupings.[77]
In addition, critics of these pre-sorting techniques note flawed results even within the pre-sorts, with sorting models not being able to correctly identify the region within which an individual originated, even though the models were front-loaded in advance to enhance the racial cluster approach. [78]
Other studies sometimes exclude or eliminate African data that do not meet the pre-set racial categories assigned by the authors. A 1988 study linking gene flow and languages for example repeatedly excluded African data on Chadic, Omotic and Cushitic speakers to create the impression that Ethiopians are an anomaly, Africans who speak the language of Caucasians.[79] In yet another DNA study, circa 1993, when gene-frequency clustering did not adhere to the designated Caucasian categories (European and Middle Eastern), the study's authors simply excluded the non-European DNA samples to achieve desired results. According to one critical review: "The data in effect were tailored to fit into the traditional racial schema."[80]
The methodology used in statistical studies of skeletal data has also been challenged by some researchers, not only as to the initial manipulation of categories, but in the results obtained with computer programs commonly used by researchers to find matches between sets of data correlated with geographic origins or race. A test of one such program for example matched ancient Nubian samples with people as far afield as Hispanics, Japanese and Easter Islanders. Such programs it is argued, grossly misclassifies ancient remains of African peoples like Nubians, and rely heavily on built-in assumptions as to rigid, "idealized" types and stereotyical features, that render them unreliable in classifying human variability. [81]
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.[82] 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.
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.[83] 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.[84] As Brown and Armelagos (2001) put it:
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, (Arkell and Ucko 1956, Shaw 1976, Falkenburger 1947, Strouhal 1971, Blanc 1964, et al.,[86]). This same modern scholarship however in turn challenges aspects of Diop's work, particularly his notions of a worldwide black phenotype.
| “ | Certainly there was some foreign admixture [in Egypt], but basically a homogeneous African population had lived in the Nile Valley from ancient to modern times... [the] 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.. et al.,)... 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)[64]
English translations:
|
|||||||||||
   | A Brief Biography of an African Champion - raceandhistory.com - CHEIKH ANTA DIOP |
| | Université Cheikh Anta Diop - Accueil Université Cheikh Anta Diop |
| | Cheikh Anta Diop, The Pharaoh of Knowledge - Cheikh Anta Diop - Home page of Momodou Camara |
| | Risch, Tang et al. 2002 - Genome Biology | Full text | Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease |
|
|
Search
