undefined | Better HN

0 pointssimonh3y ago0 comments

So what? The same applies. Sub Saharan Africa had frequent contact with North Africa and the Middle East. The Romans sent expeditions, and Arab traders travelled across much of the continent. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu#History

The Egyptians sponsored a Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa. Finds at the ruins at Great Zimbabwe include items from as far away as China.

Check out this mural of the Roman emperor Severus and his wife from the 2nd century, and tell me again how there were no black people in Europe as long ago as Medieval times.

https://www.history.co.uk/article/severus-rome’s-first-afric...

And again, we know for a fact from Tolkien that the Numenorians ranged from the north all the way to the far southern continent, and the oceans of the Far East.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

thrown_223y ago· 2 in thread

Yes, and you keep ignoring the death rates for those expeditions.

simonhOP3y ago

Please point out the evidence for these death rates. Any way the death rates from disease don’t matter. What matters is the survivors. What we do know is this contact happened. That’s a fact. It was even common enough to be economically important. That’s all it takes for people from far populations or with distant ancestry to show up.

thrown_223y ago

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310799440_Mortality...

Somewhere between 10% to 30% of Europeans that moved to West Africa died each year.

To put that in context the black death on average killed between 30% to 60% of the population _once a generation_.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse