Afrocentrism is probably unique amongst ethnocentric ideologies for its claims that basically every nation and people everywhere on earth were originally black. A thread:
At this point most people are familiar with this line - that the first Europeans were black.
But this goes all the way. The Anglo-Saxons were black, as were many royals and important figures in English history.
The Celts and Vikings were also black, the evidence is in.
We can also add most other Iron Age and pre-medieval peoples as well. All black.
Classical civilisation has long been fought over by Afrocentrists and their allies.
Less well known are the black Magyars, the black Uralics, and black continuity from the Neolithic Vinca culture onwards between Crete and the Carpathians.
Expanding outwards we have black Arabs, the Middle East was originally black.
Heading east we find that China was also an og black nation, we even have DNA evidence apparently.
China is one thing, but I bet you didn't know about the Old Africans of Japan?!
Australia naturally gets a look in, and Melanesia seems to be a fringe case with some claims for their Africanness.
The Maori and other Polynesians are unsurprisingly black as well, the Niger-Congo languages of New Zealand are well documented.
A full blown claim of African origin hasn't been made for the Inuit yet, but it's definitely coming. We have a Nunavut Black History society and a reflective essay on what George Floyd meant to this Inuk-Jamaican woman.
The idea that the first Native Americans were black has been around for a while.
As has the claim that the Aztecs and other Mesoamericans were from Africa.
"by 12,500 BC Africans were already living in Chile"
So there you have it, the whole world was once populated by black Africans. The real question is, what happened?
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*Haiti Update April 2025* - the international Kenyan led forces have failed to dislodge the gangs now running the capital, cholera outbreaks have been noted, gang rape is rife and the homicide rate continues to increase.
Rival gangs are looking to spread outside of Port-au-Prince, targeting prisons, roads and buses for kidnapping operations. There's something surreal about the fact that a gang faction called 'Taliban' has a stronghold in a suburb of Port-au-Prince called Canaan.
Politically Haiti is currently ruled by an unelected council, since it has been unable to commence elections and there are no legitimate politicians left to rule. The hope is that new elections will be run in Nov 2025, but the gangs are seeking to destabilise this situation.
Around AD 1500 this six month old child was buried under a pile of flat stones and sealskins, in the shadow of a large cliff at Qilakitsoq, Greenland. Centuries later experts determined he was likely buried alive, on the body of his mother 🧵
Qilakitsoq is in eastern Greenland, and was occupied by the Thule Inuit, who arrived circa AD 1250. They pushed out the original Dorset Culture people, and named the site Qilakitsoq, meaning 'that which has little sky', a reference to the high cliffs.
In 1972 a pair of brothers out grouse hunting stumbled upon a burial site in the cliffs.
Somewhere between 500-800 million people rely on cassava root as their main source of carbohydrate. Incredibly it looks like many of them suffer from chronic cyanide poisoning as a result of improper preparation
The quantity of cyanide depends on the cultivar, growing conditions and differences between the root and leaves of the tuber. The amount ranges from 15-1000mg cyanide per kilo of root.
Turning raw cassava root into a safe and edible food requires careful processing to reduce the cyanogenic glycosides. A combination of crushing/fermenting, plus drying seems best - some simple methods like boiling do very little to detoxify the root.
A thread on the Pacific Dwarf mythology that accompanied the Austronesian expansion - the Primordial Little People Type-Tale
The dominant hypothesis as to why many Austronesian-Polynesian cultures have a foundational little-people story, is that when the proto-Austronesians arrived in Taiwan they found a short statured Palaeolithic people already living there.
This theory was recently strengthened by the discovery of 'negrito-like' human remains in Taiwan, dating back around 6000 years. The skull shows many similarities to other Negrito and African San peoples.
In 2016 the British Dental Journal identified a new child protection issue - the sub Saharan practice of gouging out the healthy tooth buds of children, euphemistically called 'Infant Oral Mutilation' (IOM) 🧵
IOM is the practice of removing erupting infant teeth in order to prevent ill physical and spiritual health - the buds are believed to be tooth worms or bad spirits which cause diarrhea and fevers. The cure is to remove the primary teeth.
The teeth are extracted in an extremely crude and painful manner, using bike spokes, penknives, hot nails, fingernails, razor blades etc, without anaesthetic and with the high risk of blood loss and subsequent infection, including passing on HIV or hepatitis B.
Thread of pictures from Australia, taken from the book Peoples Of All Nations (1922) Vol I.
The British authors survey both the European and Aboriginal inhabitants, considering the former to be a "sub-type of the British race... far more assertive, self-confident, ruthless"
"The Sturdy Stock They Raise On Australian Farms" - the authors mention the low birth rate in the cities, but praise the outdoor Australian lifestyle, as well as pointing to new technologies replacing older rural livelihoods.