black skin and long limbs..think black NBA players
"Egyptians also fall within the range of modern African populations (Ruff and Walker, 1993), but close to the upper limit of modern Europeans as well...we found that ancient Egyptians are significantly different from US Blacks, although still closer to Blacks than to Whites."
Raxter, M. H., Ruff, C. B., Azab, A., Erfan, M., Soliman, M., & El‐Sawaf, A. (2008). Stature estimation in ancient Egyptians: a new technique based on anatomical reconstruction of stature.
American journal of physical anthropology,
136(2), 147-155.
On this basis, many have postulated that the Badarians are relatives to South African populations (Morant, 1935 G. Morant, A study of predynastic Egyptian skulls from Badari based on measurements taken by Miss BN Stoessiger and Professor DE Derry, Biometrika 27 (1935), pp. 293309.Morant, 1935; Mukherjee et al., 1955; Irish and Konigsberg, 2007).
From Irish & Konigsberg's study cited above:
"Inspection of the original D2 matrix (their Table 5.6: 84) does, in reality, indicate a Badarian affiliation to North Africans, not sub-Saharan samples" p. 150 of
Irish, J. D., & Konigsberg, L. (2007). The ancient inhabitants of Jebel Moya Redux: measures of population affinity based on dental morphology. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 17(2), 138-156.
Furthermore, like the Badarians, Naqada has also been classified with other African groups, namely the Teita (Crichton, 1996; Keita, 1990)
Two issues:
1) Crichton's study was in 19
66, not 19
96.
2) Keita's 1990 study concludes "The Badari and Nagada I cranial patterns emerge as tropical African variants...In summary, canonical variate analysis demonstrates the impressive variation suggested previously for early northern Africa."
3) Why that study by Keita? If you are interested in physical characteristics of Africans (Egypt is in Africa) during some period of time and across some region (including Egypt), Keita's study on craniofacial variation would seem more what you want:
"The position of Nile Valley and Horn individuals considered collectively is seen to be at the extreme of the two morphometric trends, but overlapping the greatest with the other Africans and Europeans. Stated in relative morphometric terms, they tend to exhibit
narrower bases in relationship to more projecting faces, and
broader nasal areas than Europeans, although there is a range of variation. Relative
to the other African groups they have narrower nasal areas, and narrower faces in relationship to vault length."
Keita, S. O. Y. (2004). Exploring northeast African metric craniofacial variation at the individual level: A comparative study using principal components analysis.
American Journal of Human Biology,
16(6), 679-689.
To sum up, Nubia is Egypts African ancestor.
...not Egypt's Egyptian ancestor. Did you read the paper?
"If
the Egyptian Predynastic took advantage of the Nubian social development process, Nubia did the same in return. These
Nubian kings (or, more precisely, chiefs)
adopted the same royal iconography as that of the Egyptian kings.
There is no archaeological information for Upper Nubia at this time but it is likely that chiefdoms were present there as well (
as many historical Egyptian texts report; Roccati 1982)."
The study is about the relationship between "African" ancestry among Egyptians, bot claiming that the Nubians were somehow the "original Egyptians". Quite the contrary, actually. It is to identify possible interactions to explain the presence of genetic, archaeological, and literary evidence of African-Egyptian links.
"The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the "super-Negroid" body plan described by Robins (1983).. This pattern is supported by Figure 7 (a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans. Of the Egyptian samples, only the Badarian and Early Dynastic period populations have shorter tibiae than predicted from femoral length. Despite these differences, all samples lie relatively clustered together as compared to the other populations." (Zakrzewski, S.R. (2003). "Variation in ancient Egyptian stature and body proportions". American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (3): 219-229.
Nice editing: "values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb
are longer relativeto the proximal segments than in many African populations (data from Aiello and Dean, 1990). This pattern is supported by Figure 7 (a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans."
The study was about Egyptian physiology from a diachronic perspective. It wasn't a comparison between physiological characteristics between Egyptians and the rest of Africa. You edited out the line that indicates differences between Egyptian populations and many African populations.
The strong cultural connection between the ancient Egyptians and the modern peoples of the Upper Nile/Great Lakes region has been noted by scholars for over a century now:
Of course. So has the connection between Egypt and the Near East and the contrasts between the Egyptians and nearby African regions:, not to mention the disdain the Egyptians had for their African neighbors:
"Various studies strongly suggest that ancient Egyptians were a distinctive people early in the pharaonic period, but with much of the same variations of physical characteristics that one sees in modern Egypt...Their artistic representations of their neighbors are demeaning, and
they clearly show that the ancient Egyptians considered themselves physically different from Nubians and other sub-Saharan Africans in facial features and skin tones, and from Asiatics as well"
Wenke, R. J., & Olszewski, D. (1990).
Patterns in prehistory: humankind's first three million years. Oxford University Press.
Anthropological research consistently concludes that the earliest ancient Egyptians were black Africans
Sure, so long as
1) We toss out most of the evidence and read our interpretations into what remains: "In 1981 Diop confidently asserted that Egyptians were Negroes, thick-lipped, kinky-haired and thin-legged. Although it is certainly true that
some surviving Egyptian mummies or depictions of ancient Egyptians fit this description,
the fact is that most of both the former and the latter are anthropologically and visually quite different to Diops description."
2) Adopt a basic mistrust for mainstream
contemporary anthropology: "to assume, as many Afrocentrists appear to do, first that much conventional Egyptological thought is still infected by such racism, and second that the very existence of such prejudice in some way proves that,
contrary to much of the visual and written evidence, ancient Egyptians were both black and African, seems a little unjustified."
from Shaw's
Ancient Egypt
The ancient Nile Valley populations were essentially bands of various different black African tribes
"While some researchers support the idea of gene flow along the Nile Valley (e.g., Keita 2005; Krings et al. 1999; Lalueza Fox 1997; Lucotte and Mercier 2003), others describe a remarkable degree of genetic isolation and in situ biological evolution within Nubian and Egyptian groups (e.g., Brace et al. 1993; Carlson and Van Gerven 1979; Johnson and Lovell 1995; Prowse and Lovell 1995)."
Buzon, M. (2006). Biological and ethnic identity in New Kingdom Nubia.
Current anthropology,
47(4), 683-695.