The title of this post is a proverb or expression that appears to have been in colloquial usage and in popoular media for at least the latter half of the twentieth century. it means egypt is mother of the world. In the 1990s, reading some speculations by genetic scientists has provided added meaning to that phrase.
Some sort of genetic information analysis which I should hopefully re-look up and cite sometime later indicates that the current "stock" of humans, get this,
a. belongs to the same stock
b. seems to descend from a group of about 500 000 people somewhere in africa
some two or few decades of millenia ago, iirc, about 100 0000 years ago.
I don't recall the rationale behind these conclusions, which by themselves beg substantiation and elaboration.
Current paleontologic thinking also supports the idea that humans originating in africa, fanned out to the rest of the world. So the geneticists' "stock" eventually migrated out of africa onto the fertile crescent then the autral asian coasts , turkey minor, and beyond to asia and europe. Apparently historical evidence shows that the former were the earliest routes taken by the african migrants.
If this were so, then considering the routes out of africa, the northeast coast does seem to be the most likely route. Assuming that sea crossing was for long preceded by sailing along coastlines, then one supposes the way out of africa, either by sea or by land was indeed the egyptian realm, comprising both the coasts of sinai , opposite which the asian coast is visible to the naked eye,
as well as the land route across north sinai .
On the way those migrating africans would have followed not only the eastern african coast, but the much more likely route of the very long river Nile, which finds it sources deep in the center , in kenya.
Those migrating africans would have thus interacted with egyptian society, and some may have settled in it and therefore contributed to it. Perhaps also the sedentary egyptian population contributed also to the outward asia-ward migration.
Being a bottleneck of sort to early or first human migration out of africa, the phrase opening this post takes on a new sheen of credibility or possibility that egypt is indeed (figuratively speaking) a mother of the world.
Some problems arise however.
Was that out-of-africa migration a wave, a series of waves (how long were intervals?) or in continuous fluctuating streams or trickle of human movement?
But why then do traces of the oldest civilisation in egypt date back only about six millenia, and not as far back as true settlement which must have somewhere near or at least halfway to those 100 000 years ago.
The small size of the population at an early age, would not account for a huge migration. Supposing a slowly growing group of 500,000 humans began trans continental movement, it would have or must have amounted to a trickle if stretched across a long period of time.
How does this out-of-africa theory tally with the earliest accounts of population in various regions around the world? What constraints would the earliest available population estimates in addition to proposed population growth rates preceded those estimates, put on the sizes and destination of out-of-africa migrations supposing they began about 100,000 years ago ? Can such consideration hint at other ages for out-of-africa migration?
The out-of-africa theory is not quite aligned with religious cosmogonic accounts (let alone other mythological (or defunct religious) ones). I'm almost certain hindu traditions place humanity's beginnings in the subcontinent or near it.
The abrahamic traditions seem to point a fertile crescent, levantine or rather mesopotamian patrimony to the major peoples of the region, including the "founders" of nations , viz. the hamitic - like egypt, libya and punt - and the semitic nations. On the other hand, the latter or modern abrahamic tradition does not address the origin of all nations (except through adam and some of his progeny) and thus it does not claim an anthropogenesis for all nations, except in the person of adam and thereafter limits its scope to the hamito-semitic nations.
So in this sense at least the abrahamics are not necessarily in direct conflict with the geneticists' out-of-africa thesis, except on matters of evolutionary speciation of humans, aka "homo sapiens sapiens" to the geneticists.
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Updates to this post:
paleohistory dept.: aegypten, muter der welt,
egypt-populated-between-130-and-50-thousand-yrs
cf. also this graph to illustrate DNA haplogroup or haplotype divergence,
https://flic.kr/p/pKETLi , published 21.x.xiv.
This article in Archaeology magazine seems to support the "out of Egypt" hypothesis,
Genetic Study Suggests Humans Migrated North Out of Africa http://t.co/kivBJs9wKZ #archaeology
— Archaeology Magazine (@archaeologymag) May 29, 2015
... Read more
