First to Dominate Earth
One and a half million years ago when human beings first began to evolve in Africa, they had black skin. When anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa 100,000 years ago, they gave rise to the Black man and woman. Research by geneticists and archaeologists has traced the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia.
Within approximately 5,000 years, some of these early human pioneers had spread along the edge of the Indian Ocean and down through southeast Asia, arriving in Australia around 65,000 years ago. Others made their way north through the Middle East and Pakistan to reach central Asia.
H. Imbert, a French anthropologist who lived in the Far East, says in “Les Negritos de la Chine,” “The Negroid races peopled at some time all the South of India, Indo-China and China. The South of Indo-China actually has now pure Negritos as the Semangs and mixed as the Malays and the Sakais.”
Around 50,000 years ago, low sea levels allowed Africans to begin traveling into Europe via the Istanbul Strait. They settled and lived in Europe as Black people until 6,000 years ago, when the mutation that gave rise to pale skin arose. By 25,000 years ago, humans had spread into northern Europe and Siberia and then walked across the Bering land bridge into Alaska around 20,000 years ago.
In many of these places Black people went on to build some of the world’s first civilizations, including the Indus Valley Civilization in South Asia and the Shang, China’s first dynasty.
