In my last op-ed (2/13/’25), my focus was on Black History Month as it began in the USA, and the special role of Kentucky and the Clay family with regard to Liberia. Cassius Clay, a former slave turned world champion boxer, changed his name to Mohammed Ali who ruled Egypt(1805-1848). His Albanian routes suggest that he may have had slave origins.

Part 2 of my Black History Month focus could be entitled: “scientists’ recent affirmation that civilized humankind began in Africa shows us that the first human civilizations were black.”

“Civis” is Latin and has come to mean city. But the earliest Sudanese/Egyptian discoveries are based more on the organized hunting/gathering/fishing skills still being found by archeologists and other scientists. The oldest remains of homo sapiens(contemporary humans) have been found in south-western Ethiopia (around 200 thousand years ago, in Southern Africa (260,00 years ago), and in Morocco (300,000 years). Well-preserved pre-historic remains have been uncovered in what is now northern Sudan that are 50,000 years old. This area was called Nubia and was predominantly black and shared much of their history with Egypt which they briefly ruled in the eighth century BCE.

The heart of ancient Nubia is where the White Nile meets the Blue Nile(Ethiopia) at what is today Khartoum—the capitol of Sudan. Some historians note that ancient Hebrew oral traditions that describe the genesis of humankind in the ‘Garden of Eden’ believe that the Genesis story locates the garden “where the two great rivers meet;” but does not name them as the Tigris and Euphrates. In the Hebrew calendar February 2025 is 5785—dating to the creation of the world.

While there are many interpretations of the beginnings of humankind, where scientists and many historians agree is that the origin of humankind is in Africa and the ancestors of all of us were black.