|
Post by truthteacher2007 on Jan 13, 2014 19:30:44 GMT -5
Terms such as "White" and "Black" are very subjective. How pale does someone have to be to be "white" and how dark does someone have to be to be "black"? A for the opinion that fair skin is recent in North Africa, how does one explain the Egyptian depictions of Lybians with very pale skin? These sort of depictions go back to the Middle Kingdom at least. From what I can gather, there has been fair skinned people in that part of Africa for a very long time. It's not new or recent, as Keita himself has stated. At the end of the previous clip a person asked him when did "European looking" people enter Africa. This is what he had to say: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qErhFiCvyKE This clip ends the discussion, but I think he makes some important points: I also think the jist of he video clip you posted must be taken into consideration. While it is true that he stated on the maternal line there is diversity in the gene pool of certain North Africans, it in no way implies that they are any less African than any other group on the continent. Might I remind you that the Afro American and Afro Latino communities are also very admixed. Admixture and physical features do not always go hand in hand, a point that keita touched on in the first video I reference here. There are many Afro Americans who to the naked eye, look no different from any African on the continent, however, they carry European paternal and in some cases maternal lines of descent. Whatever the explanation for the physical appearance of North Africans may be, the fact of the matter is that they are fundamentally African to their core. They are not the products of migration and we know this because as Keita says in the video you posted, their language is native to the African continent. Whoever came to North Africa, (and the fact that they are on the coast, this should not come as a surprise), they were absorbed into the population that was alrady there. Their language, culture stc are all distinctly African. Therefore, if this is the case, who cares what they look like? Does the fact that Adam Clayton Powel looked like a Southern European mean that he was any less Afro American? hen you consider the fact, that no matter how pale they are, North Africans in France are stil to this day traeted like dirt and forced to live in ghettos just like Afro Americans and Latinos in the US, what the hell difference does it make? Africans are Africans and if we are to overcome the evils of colonialization and slavery, then we need to stop all this nit picking and division and work together.
|
|
|
Post by mendeman on Jan 14, 2014 10:15:49 GMT -5
truthteacher2007 Ancient Egyptians would never have used the word Libyan, that is a Greek term, so who are these "Libyans" you are talking about? It is like using the term “Nubian”, those two words truly mean nothing, and are European descriptions of people they came across and in many instances, they lumped people together who aren’t even the same people. We see that with the term Aethiop as well. That is point 1. Point 2 then becomes, you are using thousands of year old paintings, some of which are faded, some of which have been repainted by current peoples etc. to try and make an argument, and it just doesn’t work. We can rely on what people saw, I don't think you in 2014 are any smarter than someone thousands of years ago. They knew what a black person was, and no, you do not see them describing anyone that is white or tan in North Africa, in any significant numbers prior to 1100AD. Here are the facts, "Libya" is described as almost fully Negro by Greeks with the exception of some Greek pockets. Romans say Gaetuli (a region in Africa) has a group they refer to as Leco Gaetulian, which I have seen some researchers claim denotes this subgroup as being white. You can read Strabo and Herodotus for more info on that, both have books online for free. If I remember right, a map made by Ptolmy put these people somewhere in West Africa. I should also mention, Libya was not just the name of North Africa. Europeans used it to describe ALL of Africa at one point, which is abondundently clear when you read Strabo’s work. You can read about them in one of the peer reviewed articles I mentioned earlier. If I remember right, not all of these Gaetulians were described as white either, so they too were a mixed group. We know that starting around 700AD a slave trade begins with Africans importing slaves from Europe and this trade really starts to pick up around 1400 or so. One researcher put the importation number at 2 million Europeans, every 2 hundred years. This researcher admits that his numbers are actually conservative. This can be found in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. Now as for the Keita’s video, you are picking and choosing what is being said. In the beginning of the video, he talks about their having been “lighter skinned people with straight hair”. Does that mean he is talking about whites or tans? No, it does not. You can go to Ethiopia today and see light skinned people with straight hair, and there is no mistaking that these people are nothing more and nothing less than black people. Hell, in Mali you can find light skinned Songhai; and Songhai women with straight and curly hair, who by the way, some postulate are from North Africa originally. We can see the same thing in Eritrea, Sudan, parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, etc. I am not talking about people who are admixed either, but black people with those above mentioned features. However, you are trying to use those statements to justify a current population, which are clearly introduced from the outside. Now at 0:19 he says "In terms of their skin color they would have been dark based on ecological principles. Do we have any empirical proof? Now, he starts babbling about “evolutionary processes” every 15,000 years etc., which is a load of non-sense. Western sciences isn’t even older than say 1600s CE or so. So they have not be observing long enough to make such a statement emphatically. What they can say is “we dug up bones and they seem to have this set of features”. However, that is not enough. One must also look at historical factors. Did an outside population come in and get absorbed? There are a lot of factors which can explain why a group starts off looking one way and then later on we find them looking another. We see that in South America. Skulls start off looking “negroid” and then later skulls change, why? Well they know that there was an invasion of other peoples from the outside, which caused this. You can watch a video about the oldest skull found in the Americas here and in it they talk about the mongloid invasion, which then absorbs the negroid population. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2EU6HuTixANow back to Keita, in that video he talks about narrow features being found in Africa, again no indication of white skin and no indication that these people with said features resemble white and tan skinned so called amazigh. But let me explain something to you. Unlike you, my family is from W. Africa and I have a cousin whose skin is almost jet black. Yet his nose is straighter than most white men you would ever see. These are black African features, these are not things that were introduced, but white skinned so called Berbers we know were introduced, that’s just the reality of it. Hell you even have berbers right now with Arabized European names. You see this a lot in Morocco. One Irishmen in the 1800s travelled to N. Africa and claimed he could understand some of the “Berbers” when they were speaking, because they were speaking something that sounded close to Gaelic. Little did he know, a LOT of slaves came from Ireland, in fact the Irish town of Baltimore was emptied of almost all it’s inhabitance and they were carted off to North Africa. Unlike slavery in the West, these whites were not forced to give up their culture, so it would make sense they were able to hold on to their language. You can see a video about that here www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOPYiG_FOe4Now finally, if you follow Kieta you will see that his lectures start to mature over time. In his latest video he stops speaking about genetics solely and admits that it is not the end all and be all to explain populations, you also need HISTORY to explain what is going on in an area, just as I stated above. You can watch this one for more info www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4sbLY6rxxgNow for my claims about paintings in Egypt being faded and in some cases being repainted in colors that do not represent their original color, you can go to Egyptsearch.com forums. Someone posted an entire thread showing this fact. Maybe someone with more time and care can provide a link.
|
|
|
Post by herodotus on Jan 14, 2014 10:18:30 GMT -5
Terms such as "White" and "Black" are very subjective. How pale does someone have to be to be "white" and how dark does someone have to be to be "black"? A for the opinion that fair skin is recent in North Africa, how does one explain the Egyptian depictions of Lybians with very pale skin? These sort of depictions go back to the Middle Kingdom at least. From what I can gather, there has been fair skinned people in that part of Africa for a very long time. It's not new or recent, as Keita himself has stated. At the end of the previous clip a person asked him when did "European looking" people enter Africa. This is what he had to say: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qErhFiCvyKE This clip ends the discussion, but I think he makes some important points: I also think the jist of he video clip you posted must be taken into consideration. While it is true that he stated on the maternal line there is diversity in the gene pool of certain North Africans, it in no way implies that they are any less African than any other group on the continent. Might I remind you that the Afro American and Afro Latino communities are also very admixed. Admixture and physical features do not always go hand in hand, a point that keita touched on in the first video I reference here. There are many Afro Americans who to the naked eye, look no different from any African on the continent, however, they carry European paternal and in some cases maternal lines of descent. Whatever the explanation for the physical appearance of North Africans may be, the fact of the matter is that they are fundamentally African to their core. They are not the products of migration and we know this because as Keita says in the video you posted, their language is native to the African continent. Whoever came to North Africa, (and the fact that they are on the coast, this should not come as a surprise), they were absorbed into the population that was alrady there. Their language, culture stc are all distinctly African. Therefore, if this is the case, who cares what they look like? Does the fact that Adam Clayton Powel looked like a Southern European mean that he was any less Afro American? hen you consider the fact, that no matter how pale they are, North Africans in France are stil to this day traeted like dirt and forced to live in ghettos just like Afro Americans and Latinos in the US, what the hell difference does it make? Africans are Africans and if we are to overcome the evils of colonialization and slavery, then we need to stop all this nit picking and division and work together. Light eyes and white skin entered coastal North Africans recently through gene-flow via Europeans. Claiming those features are African is silly. Even Keita (1993) would laugh at such a suggestion. Here's what he says: "The supra-Atlas mountain and coastal norther Africans are viewed here as perhaps being biologically more, but not only related to southern Europeans, primarily by gene flow" wysinger.homestead.com/keita-1993.pdfKeita certainly isn't trying to pass off European-looking coastal or mountain Berbers as African.
|
|
|
Post by truthteacher2007 on Jan 14, 2014 13:58:46 GMT -5
Terms such as "White" and "Black" are very subjective. How pale does someone have to be to be "white" and how dark does someone have to be to be "black"? A for the opinion that fair skin is recent in North Africa, how does one explain the Egyptian depictions of Lybians with very pale skin? These sort of depictions go back to the Middle Kingdom at least. From what I can gather, there has been fair skinned people in that part of Africa for a very long time. It's not new or recent, as Keita himself has stated. At the end of the previous clip a person asked him when did "European looking" people enter Africa. This is what he had to say: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qErhFiCvyKE This clip ends the discussion, but I think he makes some important points: I also think the jist of he video clip you posted must be taken into consideration. While it is true that he stated on the maternal line there is diversity in the gene pool of certain North Africans, it in no way implies that they are any less African than any other group on the continent. Might I remind you that the Afro American and Afro Latino communities are also very admixed. Admixture and physical features do not always go hand in hand, a point that keita touched on in the first video I reference here. There are many Afro Americans who to the naked eye, look no different from any African on the continent, however, they carry European paternal and in some cases maternal lines of descent. Whatever the explanation for the physical appearance of North Africans may be, the fact of the matter is that they are fundamentally African to their core. They are not the products of migration and we know this because as Keita says in the video you posted, their language is native to the African continent. Whoever came to North Africa, (and the fact that they are on the coast, this should not come as a surprise), they were absorbed into the population that was alrady there. Their language, culture stc are all distinctly African. Therefore, if this is the case, who cares what they look like? Does the fact that Adam Clayton Powel looked like a Southern European mean that he was any less Afro American? hen you consider the fact, that no matter how pale they are, North Africans in France are stil to this day traeted like dirt and forced to live in ghettos just like Afro Americans and Latinos in the US, what the hell difference does it make? Africans are Africans and if we are to overcome the evils of colonialization and slavery, then we need to stop all this nit picking and division and work together. Light eyes and white skin entered coastal North Africans recently through gene-flow via Europeans. Claiming those features are African is silly. Even Keita (1993) would laugh at such a suggestion. Here's what he says: "The supra-Atlas mountain and coastal norther Africans are viewed here as perhaps being biologically more, but not only related to southern Europeans, primarily by gene flow" wysinger.homestead.com/keita-1993.pdfKeita certainly isn't trying to pass off European-looking coastal or mountain Berbers as African.
|
|
|
Post by truthteacher2007 on Jan 14, 2014 14:50:36 GMT -5
truthteacher2007 Ancient Egyptians would never have used the word Libyan, that is a Greek term, so who are these "Libyans" you are talking about? It is like using the term “Nubian”, those two words truly mean nothing, and are European descriptions of people they came across and in many instances, they lumped people together who aren’t even the same people. We see that with the term Aethiop as well. That is point 1. Point 2 then becomes, you are using thousands of year old paintings, some of which are faded, some of which have been repainted by current peoples etc. to try and make an argument, and it just doesn’t work. We can rely on what people saw, I don't think you in 2014 are any smarter than someone thousands of years ago. They knew what a black person was, and no, you do not see them describing anyone that is white or tan in North Africa, in any significant numbers prior to 1100AD. Here are the facts, "Libya" is described as almost fully Negro by Greeks with the exception of some Greek pockets. Romans say Gaetuli (a region in Africa) has a group they refer to as Leco Gaetulian, which I have seen some researchers claim denotes this subgroup as being white. You can read Strabo and Herodotus for more info on that, both have books online for free. If I remember right, a map made by Ptolmy put these people somewhere in West Africa. I should also mention, Libya was not just the name of North Africa. Europeans used it to describe ALL of Africa at one point, which is abondundently clear when you read Strabo’s work. You can read about them in one of the peer reviewed articles I mentioned earlier. If I remember right, not all of these Gaetulians were described as white either, so they too were a mixed group. We know that starting around 700AD a slave trade begins with Africans importing slaves from Europe and this trade really starts to pick up around 1400 or so. One researcher put the importation number at 2 million Europeans, every 2 hundred years. This researcher admits that his numbers are actually conservative. This can be found in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. Now as for the Keita’s video, you are picking and choosing what is being said. In the beginning of the video, he talks about their having been “lighter skinned people with straight hair”. Does that mean he is talking about whites or tans? No, it does not. You can go to Ethiopia today and see light skinned people with straight hair, and there is no mistaking that these people are nothing more and nothing less than black people. Hell, in Mali you can find light skinned Songhai; and Songhai women with straight and curly hair, who by the way, some postulate are from North Africa originally. We can see the same thing in Eritrea, Sudan, parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, etc. I am not talking about people who are admixed either, but black people with those above mentioned features. However, you are trying to use those statements to justify a current population, which are clearly introduced from the outside. Now at 0:19 he says "In terms of their skin color they would have been dark based on ecological principles. Do we have any empirical proof? Now, he starts babbling about “evolutionary processes” every 15,000 years etc., which is a load of non-sense. Western sciences isn’t even older than say 1600s CE or so. So they have not be observing long enough to make such a statement emphatically. What they can say is “we dug up bones and they seem to have this set of features”. However, that is not enough. One must also look at historical factors. Did an outside population come in and get absorbed? There are a lot of factors which can explain why a group starts off looking one way and then later on we find them looking another. We see that in South America. Skulls start off looking “negroid” and then later skulls change, why? Well they know that there was an invasion of other peoples from the outside, which caused this. You can watch a video about the oldest skull found in the Americas here and in it they talk about the mongloid invasion, which then absorbs the negroid population. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2EU6HuTixANow back to Keita, in that video he talks about narrow features being found in Africa, again no indication of white skin and no indication that these people with said features resemble white and tan skinned so called amazigh. But let me explain something to you. Unlike you, my family is from W. Africa and I have a cousin whose skin is almost jet black. Yet his nose is straighter than most white men you would ever see. These are black African features, these are not things that were introduced, but white skinned so called Berbers we know were introduced, that’s just the reality of it. Hell you even have berbers right now with Arabized European names. You see this a lot in Morocco. One Irishmen in the 1800s travelled to N. Africa and claimed he could understand some of the “Berbers” when they were speaking, because they were speaking something that sounded close to Gaelic. Little did he know, a LOT of slaves came from Ireland, in fact the Irish town of Baltimore was emptied of almost all it’s inhabitance and they were carted off to North Africa. Unlike slavery in the West, these whites were not forced to give up their culture, so it would make sense they were able to hold on to their language. You can see a video about that here www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOPYiG_FOe4Now finally, if you follow Kieta you will see that his lectures start to mature over time. In his latest video he stops speaking about genetics solely and admits that it is not the end all and be all to explain populations, you also need HISTORY to explain what is going on in an area, just as I stated above. You can watch this one for more info www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4sbLY6rxxgNow for my claims about paintings in Egypt being faded and in some cases being repainted in colors that do not represent their original color, you can go to Egyptsearch.com forums. Someone posted an entire thread showing this fact. Maybe someone with more time and care can provide a link. Okay, have it your way. We're talking about the Libu, Meshwesh and Tehenu who lived to the west of Egypt. . These people have been depicted time and time again. Pale skin, feathers in the hair, long beards, dressed in animal skins. It is what it is. I've been to the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and seen the depictions myself. Why would the pictures of the North Africans be faded while the paintings of the Egyptians are not? I've seen the depictions in the Cairo Museum. They're not faded. It just is what it is. As for what Keita says. If you look at the entire interview that I took tose 2 videos from, he has always stated that genetics does not tell you everything. He even says so in the video I posted. You have to look at history, culture, genetics all together to get the full picture. So lets see what prompted him to make the comment he did that there were always people with lighter skin and straight hair in North Africa. At 6:30 in the video a gentleman asked Mr. Keita when did Mediterranian looking people enter Egypt. This is what he had to say. I think he makes himself quite clear what he means by lighter skin. He even goes on to say that there is no reason to believe that those traits didn't evolve in Africa. As to picking and choosing, I'm not picking anything. When I listen to a speaker like Keita, I listen in the context of their entire speech. All I am doing is repeating, in context, what he is saying. You can't cherry pick with scientific findings and keep the ones that you like and ignore the ones that you don't like. Keita's position is and always has been clear. Regardless of what they look like or why, North Africans are fundamentally Africans. When taken as a whole, culture, language, genetics, they are tied firmly to the African continent and NOT to Europe or the Middle East. They are Africans just like light skinned Afro Americans are still people of African origin and NOT Europeans regardless of the fact that significant percentages do in fact have genetic European input. Or are you suggesting that Afro Americans who have European ancestry ae not really part of the African family. Is that the point you're trying to make? As for European slavery, that's old news. Everyone who knows basic history knows that way before the transatlantic slave trade the major hub of the international slave trade was Europe.
|
|
|
Post by herodotus on Jan 14, 2014 16:05:16 GMT -5
Light eyes and white skin entered coastal North Africans recently through gene-flow via Europeans. Claiming those features are African is silly. Even Keita (1993) would laugh at such a suggestion. Here's what he says: "The supra-Atlas mountain and coastal norther Africans are viewed here as perhaps being biologically more, but not only related to southern Europeans, primarily by gene flow" wysinger.homestead.com/keita-1993.pdfKeita certainly isn't trying to pass off European-looking coastal or mountain Berbers as African. He says "whiter" and "straighter haired" not white and straight haired. Big difference. Straight hair and white skin are not African traits and Keita knows this. All he saying is that straighter hair textures than woolly evolved in Africa. The straightest African hair textures are nowhere near "straight" like hair common in East Asia. Keita in his video talks of "ecological principles". This rules out white skin completely from being African. Pale skin only evolved in latitudes north of Africa.
|
|
|
Post by anansi on Jan 14, 2014 21:08:38 GMT -5
He says "whiter" and "straighter haired" not white and straight haired. Big difference. Straight hair and white skin are not African traits and Keita knows this. All he saying is that straighter hair textures than woolly evolved in Africa. The straightest African hair textures are nowhere near "straight" like hair common in East Asia. Keita in his video talks of "ecological principles". This rules out white skin completely from being African. Pale skin only evolved in latitudes north of Africa. There are conditions south of Europe in North West Africa where developing lite skin or even white skin and straight hair could be possible,not saying that's the case here but the conditions are there,remember what Keita said about polytopicity. Courtesy of Azrur from p1 of this thread Although the above is to the far south of Europe dark skin would not be an advantage in those condition and how far back in time have folks been living in that area.
|
|
|
Post by truthteacher2007 on Jan 15, 2014 0:31:52 GMT -5
He says "whiter" and "straighter haired" not white and straight haired. Big difference. Straight hair and white skin are not African traits and Keita knows this. All he saying is that straighter hair textures than woolly evolved in Africa. The straightest African hair textures are nowhere near "straight" like hair common in East Asia. Keita in his video talks of "ecological principles". This rules out white skin completely from being African. Pale skin only evolved in latitudes north of Africa. There are conditions south of Europe in North West Africa where developing lite skin or even white skin and straight hair could be possible,not saying that's the case here but the conditions are there,remember what Keita said about polytopicity. Courtesy of Azrur from p1 of this thread Although the above is to the far south of Europe dark skin would not be an advantage in those condition and how far back in time have folks been living in that area. Exactly. For one thing the environment in those areas is far different from the Eithiopian highlands. For one thing, North Africa, particularly northern Lybia, Tunisia and Morocco are at a higher line of latitude, even higher than northern Egypt. Anyone whose ever been to Alexandria in the winter knows it can get pretty chilly. When you go to a place like Tangier it's even colder. Now add to that the elevation of the Riff Mountains. Even as far south as Marakech, the Atlas Mountains remain snow covered. Now given the combination of higher latitudes=lower UV radiation and wintery conditions, it's not so far fetched. Although it is rare, it did snow in Cairo this winter. However, in other areas of North Africa, snow is very common. There are actually ski resorts in Morocco.
|
|
|
Post by herodotus on Jan 15, 2014 20:26:24 GMT -5
No its not possible. Each geographical location has an annual UV index (average). The UVI is a standard measurement of the strength of the ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun, but other measurement exist which produce the same annual averages: No place in Africa has an annual low UV Index. White skin never evolved there. The fact you can find rare exceptions to the annual UV average is irrelevant. Such exceptions are not limited to Africa. In Scandinavia for example some incredibly hot temperatures and high UVI's have been reported. Does this mean Scandinavia's climate selects dark brown skin? Of course not. I think this thread is getting into the silly "Africans have all features" mentality which was criticized in the other. Africans don't have all features, especially not white skin. To suggest they do only seems to be rooted in some deep self-hatred.
|
|
|
Post by truthteacher2007 on Jan 15, 2014 23:48:37 GMT -5
No its not possible. Each geographical location has an annual UV index (average). The UVI is a standard measurement of the strength of the ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun, but other measurement exist which produce the same annual averages: No place in Africa has an annual low UV Index. White skin never evolved there. The fact you can find rare exceptions to the annual UV average is irrelevant. Such exceptions are not limited to Africa. In Scandinavia for example some incredibly hot temperatures and high UVI's have been reported. Does this mean Scandinavia's climate selects dark brown skin? Of course not. I think this thread is getting into the silly "Africans have all features" mentality which was criticized in the other. Africans don't have all features, especially not white skin. To suggest they do only seems to be rooted in some deep self-hatred. First of all North Africa is Sub tropical. It doesn't receive the same degree of sun as the tropics does. It's mostl likely a combination of several factors, environmental adaptation and absorbtion of occasional lighter skinned migrants into a population that was probably light brown like the San, to begin with. My basic point is that these features have been in place for a very long time, it didn't happen one day in the Middle Ages. There's just too much evidence to show that from deep antiquity there had already been pale skinned people in the region. Whatever the cause is, the fact is those people are there and have been for hundreds of thousands of years. The Egyptians depicted them quite often and it's not the reseult of faded coloring or modern aristic renditions. If that were the cas then why didn't they recolor all he depictions of dark Egyptians and make them pale skinned? The other thing that has to be acknowledged is the fact that those pale skinned people are Africans. Their DNA links them to Africa, their limb rations link them to Africa, their languages are not Asiatic or Europen transplants, but African natives that are not spoken outside of Africa, their music structure is African, their dance aesthetic is African. There is more about them that is African than is not African.
|
|
|
Post by anansi on Jan 16, 2014 0:05:41 GMT -5
Herodotus [quote ]I think this thread is getting into the silly "Africans have all features" mentality which was criticized in the other. Africans don't have all features, especially not white skin. To suggest they do only seems to be rooted in some deep self-hatred.[/quote] Oh pls quit with being net psychoanalysis I see no evidence of self hate here and who here criticized the other for being what they appeared to be physically,and lite-skin is only a short jump to being white skinned under the ideal condition. Folks used to babble about certain type of nose can't possibly be African that was shown to be false then they said Ok!! West Africans, again that was proven false then it was the hair,or thin features like lips ,lite skinned were deemed to have some sort of mixture from outside Africa again false in a lot of cases.you are saying that the lady above if given to selective breeding with males of her complexion of lighter will never mimic at-least Southern Europeans in features and complexion?? However one cannot rule out lite skinned Eurasians out of the gene pool in the case of folks in coastal north Africans as proven by genetics and history.
|
|
|
Post by herodotus on Jan 16, 2014 12:02:12 GMT -5
No its not possible. Each geographical location has an annual UV index (average). The UVI is a standard measurement of the strength of the ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun, but other measurement exist which produce the same annual averages: No place in Africa has an annual low UV Index. White skin never evolved there. The fact you can find rare exceptions to the annual UV average is irrelevant. Such exceptions are not limited to Africa. In Scandinavia for example some incredibly hot temperatures and high UVI's have been reported. Does this mean Scandinavia's climate selects dark brown skin? Of course not. I think this thread is getting into the silly "Africans have all features" mentality which was criticized in the other. Africans don't have all features, especially not white skin. To suggest they do only seems to be rooted in some deep self-hatred. First of all North Africa is Sub tropical. It doesn't receive the same degree of sun as the tropics does. It's mostl likely a combination of several factors, environmental adaptation and absorbtion of occasional lighter skinned migrants into a population that was probably light brown like the San, to begin with. My basic point is that these features have been in place for a very long time, it didn't happen one day in the Middle Ages. There's just too much evidence to show that from deep antiquity there had already been pale skinned people in the region. Whatever the cause is, the fact is those people are there and have been for hundreds of thousands of years. The Egyptians depicted them quite often and it's not the reseult of faded coloring or modern aristic renditions. If that were the cas then why didn't they recolor all he depictions of dark Egyptians and make them pale skinned? The other thing that has to be acknowledged is the fact that those pale skinned people are Africans. Their DNA links them to Africa, their limb rations link them to Africa, their languages are not Asiatic or Europen transplants, but African natives that are not spoken outside of Africa, their music structure is African, their dance aesthetic is African. There is more about them that is African than is not African. I don't really get your views. You're claiming race is a social construct etc (fine) but then you cling to this idea "Africans" are some "real" group (and extend them to include all phenotypes). They are not. Where does Africa begin? Its connected to West Asia via Egypt. The idea of an African continent is a cultural construct itself, not a natural landmass. If you look at earlier definitions, parts of it were even excluded from the current mainstream definition. So "Africans" are as socio-culturally constructed as the race concepts you are criticizing. Your agenda to try to include "pale skinned" people among "Africans" thus doesn't even make sense.
|
|
|
Post by truthteacher2007 on Jan 16, 2014 12:12:08 GMT -5
A few things. First of all, there is more than enough evidence to show that there have been people of varying skin tones in North Africa for a long time. Both of these pictures below are from the Tasili region in Algeria. One shows light complected people and the other dark. As to skin tones in Africa, they can varry greatly. For example, the Red Igbos of Nigeria This woman is very fair. Just as fair as many North Africans. Many people has commented on the Red Igbos, many having light brown and yellowish skin, so the genetics for lighter skin tones is already in Africa. As for the UV radiation thing. It just occured to me that the present levels around the globe may not reflect older periods. During the Ice age, the tilt of the Earth was different resulting in most of Europe being covered in Ice. The extreeme North of Africa would not have been tropical, it's not tropical now, but at that time it would have received less direct sunlight and radiation. Therefore, it is not impossible to suppose that people living in those environments would be lighter. For one thing, because it was colder, they would be wearing more clothes receiving even less radiation. The body would have to decrease the amount of melanine to absorb enough light to make vitamine D. And as Anansi has also pointed out, we can't rule out the issue of migrations of lighter people being absorbed into the population. However, saying that, it was just adding more variability to a population that ran the spectrum from light to dark anyway. Another thing to consider is that while there are many pale individuals in North Africa, not all of them are as white skinned as photographs would lead us to believe. A lot of the pictures we see are the result of the selective preferences of the photographers. What do I mean? What I mean is that often times photographers go into communities and focus on the lightest complected individuals they can find, totally exc;uding the darker members of the community. Case in point, the Moroccan Berbers with the dark blue hoods and bright red dots on the cheeks. The majority of these people are actually much darker. The same yelowish brown as the San people. However, Eurocentric mindset says the only ones worthy of getting their picture are the lightest ones they can pick out of the crowd. Here's another example of what I'm talking about. What if the videographers choose only to focus on the lighter skinned women, or if they requested only the lighter ones to perform? Can you see how that would give a false impression?
|
|
|
Post by mendeman on Jan 16, 2014 15:32:06 GMT -5
truthteacher2007 Ancient Egyptians would never have used the word Libyan, that is a Greek term, so who are these "Libyans" you are talking about? It is like using the term “Nubian”, those two words truly mean nothing, and are European descriptions of people they came across and in many instances, they lumped people together who aren’t even the same people. We see that with the term Aethiop as well. That is point 1. Point 2 then becomes, you are using thousands of year old paintings, some of which are faded, some of which have been repainted by current peoples etc. to try and make an argument, and it just doesn’t work. We can rely on what people saw, I don't think you in 2014 are any smarter than someone thousands of years ago. They knew what a black person was, and no, you do not see them describing anyone that is white or tan in North Africa, in any significant numbers prior to 1100AD. Here are the facts, "Libya" is described as almost fully Negro by Greeks with the exception of some Greek pockets. Romans say Gaetuli (a region in Africa) has a group they refer to as Leco Gaetulian, which I have seen some researchers claim denotes this subgroup as being white. You can read Strabo and Herodotus for more info on that, both have books online for free. If I remember right, a map made by Ptolmy put these people somewhere in West Africa. I should also mention, Libya was not just the name of North Africa. Europeans used it to describe ALL of Africa at one point, which is abondundently clear when you read Strabo’s work. You can read about them in one of the peer reviewed articles I mentioned earlier. If I remember right, not all of these Gaetulians were described as white either, so they too were a mixed group. We know that starting around 700AD a slave trade begins with Africans importing slaves from Europe and this trade really starts to pick up around 1400 or so. One researcher put the importation number at 2 million Europeans, every 2 hundred years. This researcher admits that his numbers are actually conservative. This can be found in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters. Now as for the Keita’s video, you are picking and choosing what is being said. In the beginning of the video, he talks about their having been “lighter skinned people with straight hair”. Does that mean he is talking about whites or tans? No, it does not. You can go to Ethiopia today and see light skinned people with straight hair, and there is no mistaking that these people are nothing more and nothing less than black people. Hell, in Mali you can find light skinned Songhai; and Songhai women with straight and curly hair, who by the way, some postulate are from North Africa originally. We can see the same thing in Eritrea, Sudan, parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, etc. I am not talking about people who are admixed either, but black people with those above mentioned features. However, you are trying to use those statements to justify a current population, which are clearly introduced from the outside. Now at 0:19 he says "In terms of their skin color they would have been dark based on ecological principles. Do we have any empirical proof? Now, he starts babbling about “evolutionary processes” every 15,000 years etc., which is a load of non-sense. Western sciences isn’t even older than say 1600s CE or so. So they have not be observing long enough to make such a statement emphatically. What they can say is “we dug up bones and they seem to have this set of features”. However, that is not enough. One must also look at historical factors. Did an outside population come in and get absorbed? There are a lot of factors which can explain why a group starts off looking one way and then later on we find them looking another. We see that in South America. Skulls start off looking “negroid” and then later skulls change, why? Well they know that there was an invasion of other peoples from the outside, which caused this. You can watch a video about the oldest skull found in the Americas here and in it they talk about the mongloid invasion, which then absorbs the negroid population. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2EU6HuTixANow back to Keita, in that video he talks about narrow features being found in Africa, again no indication of white skin and no indication that these people with said features resemble white and tan skinned so called amazigh. But let me explain something to you. Unlike you, my family is from W. Africa and I have a cousin whose skin is almost jet black. Yet his nose is straighter than most white men you would ever see. These are black African features, these are not things that were introduced, but white skinned so called Berbers we know were introduced, that’s just the reality of it. Hell you even have berbers right now with Arabized European names. You see this a lot in Morocco. One Irishmen in the 1800s travelled to N. Africa and claimed he could understand some of the “Berbers” when they were speaking, because they were speaking something that sounded close to Gaelic. Little did he know, a LOT of slaves came from Ireland, in fact the Irish town of Baltimore was emptied of almost all it’s inhabitance and they were carted off to North Africa. Unlike slavery in the West, these whites were not forced to give up their culture, so it would make sense they were able to hold on to their language. You can see a video about that here www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOPYiG_FOe4Now finally, if you follow Kieta you will see that his lectures start to mature over time. In his latest video he stops speaking about genetics solely and admits that it is not the end all and be all to explain populations, you also need HISTORY to explain what is going on in an area, just as I stated above. You can watch this one for more info www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4sbLY6rxxgNow for my claims about paintings in Egypt being faded and in some cases being repainted in colors that do not represent their original color, you can go to Egyptsearch.com forums. Someone posted an entire thread showing this fact. Maybe someone with more time and care can provide a link. Okay, have it your way. We're talking about the Libu, Meshwesh and Tehenu who lived to the west of Egypt. . These people have been depicted time and time again. Pale skin, feathers in the hair, long beards, dressed in animal skins. It is what it is. I've been to the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and seen the depictions myself. Why would the pictures of the North Africans be faded while the paintings of the Egyptians are not? I've seen the depictions in the Cairo Museum. They're not faded. It just is what it is. As for what Keita says. If you look at the entire interview that I took tose 2 videos from, he has always stated that genetics does not tell you everything. He even says so in the video I posted. You have to look at history, culture, genetics all together to get the full picture. So lets see what prompted him to make the comment he did that there were always people with lighter skin and straight hair in North Africa. At 6:30 in the video a gentleman asked Mr. Keita when did Mediterranian looking people enter Egypt. This is what he had to say. I think he makes himself quite clear what he means by lighter skin. He even goes on to say that there is no reason to believe that those traits didn't evolve in Africa. As to picking and choosing, I'm not picking anything. When I listen to a speaker like Keita, I listen in the context of their entire speech. All I am doing is repeating, in context, what he is saying. You can't cherry pick with scientific findings and keep the ones that you like and ignore the ones that you don't like. Keita's position is and always has been clear. Regardless of what they look like or why, North Africans are fundamentally Africans. When taken as a whole, culture, language, genetics, they are tied firmly to the African continent and NOT to Europe or the Middle East. They are Africans just like light skinned Afro Americans are still people of African origin and NOT Europeans regardless of the fact that significant percentages do in fact have genetic European input. Or are you suggesting that Afro Americans who have European ancestry ae not really part of the African family. Is that the point you're trying to make? As for European slavery, that's old news. Everyone who knows basic history knows that way before the transatlantic slave trade the major hub of the international slave trade was Europe. Those "reprints", if you want to call them that, are not original paintings, they are representations of the original wall paintings. So you have to ask yourself some questions. Were the original wall paintings identical to these reprints? Did the person who made these reprints base them on the original and was he moral enough to not take artistic license? Did the person who reproduced these base them on the wall reliefs after they were “touched up”? If they are based on a photograph was the picture properly exposed? Also, do you know mtu ntr? Can you prove unequivocally that those people in those two paintings represent people living to the west of the Ancient Egyptians? If you cannot read mtu ntr, I can only assume you are basing your opinions on other people’s opinions. The problem with that is, you don’t know where fact ends and fiction begins. There are a lot of problems with your assumptions. Also you stating that the people to the west of Egypt have been represented "time and time again" isn't factual. In fact, there are only TWO drawings that I know of which show the people of the known world as the Ancient Egyptians knew them, and it’s the two reprints you have presented here. Also, on egyptsearch someone did a good analysis of the pigment used on the original wall drawings that the two reprints you have presented are based on. In this analysis it was pretty evident that a dark brown pigment was originally used, not a tan. Also, the dress of those people you are claiming are some white looking north Africans, seem to almost identically mimic how some Fula groups who are found from west to east Africa originally dressed (and still do to this day). I could also belabor the point and talk about the ancient cave drawings in throughout North Africa that date back to a time when the Sahara was a wet land, and funny enough all the drawings are of BLACK people. Either way, none of this trumps eye witness accounts and I have provided you with two source books, and peer reviewed papers. As for the Keita source material which you are discussing, it just further proves my point, not yours. Keita talks about the amount of European blood you are finding maternally in these White and tan looking North Africans. He also talks about how paternally, although there is European DNA there, it is overwhelming DNA that is associated with so called “sub-Saharan Africans”. This also further proves my point. History tells us that a lot of European women were brought into North Africa for concubines. That historical fact, along with the fact North Africa up until recently was fairly black, would mean that these black men were taking white mates and the DNA helps to validate this historical fact. Any rational thought will lead to the conclusion that, to have this much mixing, would have most certainly resulted in features that are not African being brought in, this is just common sense. Also, I think you may have used the wrong video, because he (Keita) makes my point, not yours. He says at 00:53 "they were dark, I don't know how dark, and they had limb ratios that are tropical, that you find in the tropics today, ok. Those are all things, that from based on biological principles, will tie them to where they are. And and and and most people and most scientist will say yes, they would have been dark. How dark, I can’t tell you. They wouldn't have been blonde, no". I assume he is speaking about Ancient Egyptians. Now the Ancient Egyptian climate would have resembled much of North Africa back then as it does today. Which means, if Egyptians would have looked like any other black African, in terms of dark skin, limb ratios etc, well then, the same must hold true for the rest of North Africa. Your problem is, you don't seem to know much about African history. As stated before, before an African was ever carted off to the new world, we imported MILLIONS of whites into North Africa and I mean MILLIONS. Many were also imported into Senegal, Mali, and Cameroon. I have a suspicion some may have been brought into Nigeria as well. But the bulk of them were settled in North Africa. This in turn completely changed the look of 50% of the population there. I have given you a few books to read, you should read them. Once you have the facts, and assuming you are a sane person, you will have a hard time holding on to your present beliefs.
|
|
|
Post by mendeman on Jan 16, 2014 15:34:36 GMT -5
Teacher
Again with the posting the reproduction of drawings. Can you find us the original of the women sitting on the animals with the interesting hair dos? Can you find us a actual photograph of the original? Those don't even seem to match the artistic nature of most of the rock art in North Africa. I will wait for you to find the original photo.
Also, you talking about light skinned Igbo. I suggest you do research on what these people say their origins are. There is a argument that another group came in, in recent times mind you. Specifically Sephardi Jews. This is not far fetched, as we know there were Sephardi Jews living in Senegal at one point and in Mali. Now that isn't to say there aren't light skinned people in Africa, the so called bushmen are a good example of this. However, there is no mistaking these people are black. however, that does not help in anyway prove your point that white skinned, stringy haired north Africans have features that magically appeared there, due to some silly notion of evolution or adaptation. For that to hold true there could be no indigenous dark skinned, black African groups in North Africa, but there are. What sort of bizzaro world, according to evolution theory, would allow for dark skin blacks to evolve along side stringy haired whites, under the same ecological conditions, makes no sense.
|
|