Thursday, August 4, 2022

African corridor

It used to be said that the Beringians took a corridor through the ice in order to get to the Americas proper. As Dillehay and others have overturned the timing, this thesis no longer holds. A route along Pacific isles would do, for a people certainly attuned to Alaskan islands already. Now falls another corridor - the Sangha River.

The Bantu languages are now seen to have entered a wider rainforest at an earlier time, the late 2000s BC. This is, of course, long before they had iron or domestic cattle.

Specifically the "Discussion" pinpoints a 3890 BP dispersion event, and then East Bantu 3150 BP. 2400 BP, meaning the 400s BC, still holds for millet agriculture aided with iron tools - both imports, probably from the same place which is the "Sahel" by which I'll infer, Berbers and Chads. A more-secure understanding is that the Central Africans by then were already solidly Bantu - for over a millennium.

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