Last October (h/t CBD @ace), was published a history of malaria's jump to African humankind. This happened 50kBC. It jumped from the gorilla and not from the Asian apes, which trend more orange.
By that time, human huntergatherers were already roaming Eurasia and even, I think, Australia.
The main genetic resistance to malaria was the Sickle Cell. This gene, Rosie McCall reported last year, first appeared 259 generations ago - estimated, 5300 BC - in the Moist Sahara. It had got to the Scorpion Kingdoms by the time they could first do pictograph, 3200 BC.
McCall thinks the gene traveled to India with the major trade-routes. She dates that as late as the "Bantu migrations". At a guess, so did malarial mosquitoes, perhaps in the rain-buckets carried on board. Sasanian era?
BACKDATING 11/17
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