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The Yorubas Were Dated Back To 11,000+ Years BC; They Did Not Emigrate From Mecca

The Yoruba Did Not Emigrate From Mecca
  • "The Iwo Eleru skull is either a descendant of those forms or I think it is much more likely that it is a modern human that has had a bit of interbreeding with these lingering more ancient forms of human that has given it this mixture of features." The study, which is published in the scientific journal PLoS One, used digital scanning techniques to reanalyse a skull found in the Iwo Eleru cave in 1965 by Professor Stringer.
  • This discovery unambiguously and unequivocally confirmed that humans were living in Yorubaland 13,000 years ago!

A study on human remains found in the Iwo Eleru cave in Nigeria, West Africa, shows that Stone Age humans in the area shared characteristics with much older human relatives. Palaeontologists leading the study believe their findings provide evidence that modern humans and older subspecies of human might have coexisted and even crossbred in Africa.

The findings add weight to theories that ancient species of human lived alongside the anatomically modern humans after they first appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago. A skull from the Iwo Eleru cave that dates to just 13,000 years ago shares characteristics of both modern humans and more primitive ancient human species.

Professor Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London, who led the research, said: “If we didn’t know how old it was we would guess it was over 100,000 years old due to its shape, but it is a lot younger than that. “It is a combination of recent Africans and more primitive humans. There is a suggestion that older forms of evolution were hanging on quite a lot later than had been previously thought.

“The Iwo Eleru skull is either a descendant of those forms or I think it is much more likely that it is a modern human that has had a bit of interbreeding with these lingering more ancient forms of human that has given it this mixture of features.” The study, which is published in the scientific journal PLoS One, used digital scanning techniques to reanalyse a skull found in the Iwo Eleru cave in 1965 by Professor Stringer.

Prof Katerina Harvati from the University of Tuebingen in Germany was able to capture the surface of the skull in detail with the technique, allowing researchers to see subtler details about the skull’s surface. The team found the Iwo Eleru skull is longer and flatter than modern humans with a strong brow ridge. They say it has features closer to a much older skull found in Tanzania, which is around 140,000 years old.

The researchers say their findings also underscore a real lack of knowledge of human evolution in the region. Separate research published earlier this month suggests that genetic mixing between hominin species happened in Africa up to 35,000 years ago. Professor Stringer said: “The majority view was that once modern humans emerged in Africa 150,000 years ago, it was kind of the end of the story and modern humans took over.

“I think the reality is that the ancestral forms didn’t just disappear but hung around alongside those that had evolved into modern humans. “Somewhere lurking in bits of Africa were these more archaic people and we are starting to get a picture of that.”

Other genetic research has shown that modern humans in Europe interbred with Neanderthals, another extinct branch of the human ancestral tree. Traces of their DNA can still be found in Europeans living today.

Iwo Eleru is a rock shelter in south-western Nigeria. It is about 24 km north-west of Akurẹ (the state capital of Ondo State) with coordinates 7°26’30” N and 5°7’40”. The Archaeological findings in Yorubaland have confirmed consistently that Neolithic (later part of the Stone Age) people once inhabited Yorubaland especially around the Ile-Ifẹ environs.

However, the watershed moment came in 1965 when a team lead by Thorstan Shaw of the University of Ibadan discovered a skeletal remains dated to circa 9200 BC in a cave at Iwo Eleru (near Akurẹ). This discovery unambiguously and unequivocally confirmed that humans were living in Yorubaland 13,000 years ago!

No chance this particular person whose remains was found at Iwo Eleru came from Mecca! It poured cold water on the fable of Lamurudu/Oduduwa – magicians turned Muslims narrative who emigrated from Mecca to Ile-Ifẹ. Islam is just 1,400 years old compared to a 13,000-year old remains!
Apart from this archeological evidence, linguistic evidence proved that the Yoruba language emerged as a distinct language which separated from the Kwa group in the Niger-Congo group of languages as long as 2000BC.

Even though Yoruba language has some similar Arabic words (e.g alaafia/al-aafiah, alubọsa/al-basal, adua/ad-du’a, alubarika/al-barakah etc) the two languages have nothing in common lexically. Even if the Yoruba migrated from somewhere else before they settled in Yorubaland, they certainly did not come from Mecca or Arabia.

Furthermore, according to Islamic tradition, the history of Mecca goes back to Abraham (Ibrahim), who built the Kaaba with the help of his elder son Ishmael in around 2000 BC.

Source
ncbisciencedirect.comBBCtelegraph.co.ukresearchgate.netsemanticscholar.org

Philip Soneye

Philip Soneye, the initiator of Motherland and many other online platforms. An American-Nigerian IT Innovation & Brand Strategy consultant, a website developer, programmer, retired IT lecturer and businesses investor.

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