Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

Ironically, Walker is himself a Black American who was born in Texas. According to Walker, “Afrocentrism is a
mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic. . . . [It] places an emphasis on Egypt that is, to put it
bluntly, absurd. . . . There is no evidence that the ancient Egyptians were black as we understand that term today.” 10
The born-and-bred-American Walker insists that he is not African, that he has never been to Africa and has no desire
to go there. He sees himself as “an old-fashioned intellectual critic” and adds, “I don’t like a lot of work being done in the
field. . . . Just because you want to believe the world was created by black people doesn’t make it so . . .” 11 Actually,
though many may disagree with Walker about the ancient Egyptians, it is possible to find admirable the fact that he does
not think his own Blackness should affect his scholastic conclusions. This may be a hopeful indicator that personal
ethnicity should not affect our scientific or scholarly conclusions. Further, perhaps there is a problem of terminology—it
may be accurate to label these commentators as Afrocentrists, for Afrocentrism is a pseudoscience, but only in the same
way that Eurocentrism should be considered a pseudoscience. Both imply an attempt to fit data and observations into a
box of preconceived notions. If the data, on balance, indicates that the people who originated the pharaonic civilization of
Egypt were indeed Black Africans, then drawing such a conclusion need not be labeled Afrocentric or anti-Eurocentric—
it may be thought of simply as accurate.
THE OUT OF AFRICA EVE
Ironically, in spite of views such as those of Clarence Walker, scientists in the field of genetics have been pointing out
that it may actually be correct to say that the world was created by Black people. In 2009, more than a century after the
exploration of darkest Africa by Livingstone, Burton, Stanley, and others, the BBC aired a documentary series titled The
Incredible Human Journey. In the series, introduced to a wide British public, was the notion that all human beings alive
today have their origins in Africa—indeed, that these origins can be traced to a single Black African woman, the so-called
Out of Africa Eve. This view is now widely held by scientists, and it is also called the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis,
because it traces the ancestral lineage of humans back through the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on only from the
mother. This hypothesis was first published by a team of University of California biochemists in Nature magazine in
1987. 12
Mitochondrial Eve: Mitochondrial DNA exists in human cells outside of the cell nucleus in membrane-enclosed
organelles called mitochondria and contains a genome that is independent of the nuclear DNA genome. At conception
mitochondrial DNA is passed on separately from the nuclear DNA, with mitochondrial DNA transmitted only from the
mother without combination from the father. Thus mitochondrial DNA passes from generation to generation with very
little change, only infrequent mutations change the mitochondrial DNA over time. Genetic scientists realized if they could
measure the variance (set of all differences) among currently living humans, and if they could estimate the mitochondrial
DNA mutation rate, then they could estimate the “origin time” from which all of today’s humans’ mitochondrial DNA must
have come. The logic is sort of similar to the way the “big bang” creation of the universe was first discovered—
astronomers observed that all distant galaxies were moving away from each other and then measured the rate at which
the galaxies are now moving apart and simply turned the clock backward to when the galaxies would have all been in the
same place, about fourteen billion years ago, and called that the “big bang.” For mitochondrial DNA, geneticists
measured the currently existing variance in humans around the world, and they estimated the mitochondrial DNA
mutation rate, and running the genetic clock back in time gave a human mitochondrial DNA origin date of about 200,000
years ago—this is called the “Mitochondrial Eve,” and geographic details of the mitochondrial DNA variance point to that
origin location as east-central Africa. Mitochondrial “Eve” is the most recent human woman from whom all living humans
today have at least one unbroken matrilineal line. Eve was not alone though. There were many human women alive at the
time who share ancestry to living people today, but for all of them other than Eve their descendant lineages contain at
least one man (who did not pass the mitochondrial DNA). In fact nuclear DNA analyses indicate that human population
never dropped below a few tens of thousands (e.g., Naoyuki Takahata, “Allelic Genealogy and Human Evolution,” in
Molecular Biology and Evolution, January 1993, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 20–22). As is the big bang in astrophysics, the
Mitochondrial Eve is considered nearly settled science in genetics. But controversies do remain, especially involving
uncertainties in the DN A mutation rate (e.g., Christopher Wills, “When Did Eve Live? An Evolutionary Detective Story,”
in Evolution, 1995, vol. 49, pp. 593–607). Similar studies of male Y-chromosomes place the most recent common male
lineage ancestor, or “Y-Chromosomal Adam,” several tens of thousands of years more recent than Mitochondrial Eve
(e.g., Yuehai Ke, et al., “African Origin of Modern Humans in East Asia: A Tale of 12,000 Y Chromosomes,” in Science,