Remains of First African Slaves Found 392
An anonymous reader writes to tell us LiveScience is reporting that Archaeologists may have found the oldest remains of slaves brought from Africa to the New World. From the article: "The African origin of the slaves was determined by studying a chemical in their tooth enamel that reveals plant and rock types of their native land. The chemical enters the body through the food chain as nutrients pass from bedrock through soil and water to plants and animals. It is an indelible signature of birthplace, the researchers said, because it can be directly linked to the bedrock of specific locales."
Re:So they know they were African... (Score:5, Informative)
Almost. That figure might be true once the slave trade boomed, but at first most Africans imported to the Americas were indentured servants.
link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Slavery_in_N
to quote the article: The first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants, not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants were, to serve seven years.
It is possible/relatively likely that these skeletons they examined were not slaves, but skip ahead 100 years, and that percentage shrinks to (almost) zero.
Re:Not... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oldest (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think so. (Score:5, Informative)
Check out http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm [erols.com].
While I agree that the slave trade was bad, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao far outstrip it.
That page is kinda freaky.
Re:Maafa - The American Holocaust (Score:1, Informative)
Pure bullshit puffery. I'm by no means excusing or diminishing the immense suffering slaves underwent, but if I were it still wouldn't compare to your offhand dismissal of the deaths of tens of millions. Khmer Rouge weren't brutal? Nor Stalin's purges? Please read a book before trivializing genocide again.
Re:So they know they were African... (Score:2, Informative)
On the other hand, if you can go to africa and buy people as property, and their descendents remain property...the economics starts to make sense.
Re:Or about 50 years after the Spanish started com (Score:2, Informative)
When it's American History slavery gets alot of attention, when it's the Middle East it's brushed aside.
And, slavery is called for in the Bible and Koran
Sura 2 Verse 178
2.178: O you who believe! retaliation is prescribed for you in the matter of the slain, the free for the free, and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female, but if any remission is made to any one by his (aggrieved) brother, then prosecution (for the bloodwit) should be made according to usage, and payment should be made to him in a good manner; this is an alleviation from your Lord and a mercy; so whoever exceeds the limit after this he shall have a painful chastisement."
"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids" (Leviticus 25:44)
"Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever" (Leviticus 25:44-46)
Yea, I got two quotes from the Bible, I'm not as up on my Koran as I am on my Old Testament.
Re:"not long after Columbus..." (Score:5, Informative)
The house I live in is 200 years old. The school I went to was over 400. And the pub at the end of our road is nearly 700 years old.
Why do you think a lifetime is a long time? Most mature cultures go back thousands of years. Incidentally, though many people would quote the Mansfield ruling of 1779 as marking a legal end of slavery in England, this actually marked a legal rejection of the condition of slavery, a statement that foreigners could not expect to enforce this state in England.
If you are considering when slavery ceased to be an accepted part of life in the countries which later became the UK, this would have been in the early Middle Ages, around 1100 (not long after the Romans left and the Danes settled, around 800. The Vikings would have been the last group living in England who accepted slavery as a normal condition. Habeas Corpus, though codified in the Magna Carta (1215), was part of the common law well before this date, and indicates that freedom is the presumed state for any individual who has not been found guilty of a crime. While slavery was formally abolished in the US around 1865, the acceptance of slavery seems to have persisted in the southern states until around 1960.
Individual English and European businessmen were still free to run enterprises in other countries where the slave laws were different. But the reason why the US is considered so culpable on this question is that it maintained a hypocritical stance of freedom from commercial taxes but slavery for people, which the rest of the Anglo-Saxon community had rejected about 800 years earlier.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Or about 50 years after the Spanish started com (Score:2, Informative)
The Expedition did kill alot of nobles and military leaders, once in a, maybe, unprovoked attack on the Temple of the Moon during a High Holy day and then alot of others were killed during the following responses at the Palace of Axayactl, Cortes's relief and escape and the Battle of Otumba in 1520 and then in the fighting of 1521.
Since the leadership of the Aztecs and other nations in the region lead from the front so to speak, the decapitation of the ruling families and thier destruction largely came about on the field of battle in 1520 and 1521. The sack of Tenochtitlán in 1521 really was the only time there was torturing and murder by the Spanish and thier allies in the conflict. Most of the Aztec, Tepeacan and other allied leaders were lost in the field before the illnesses and murders during the sack.
Recall that during the period following the retreat of the Spanish and Tlaxcalan from Tenochtitlán envoys from the Aztecs tried to pull the Tlaxcalan leaders into an alliance, however the severity of the Aztec relations with their neighbors trumped the Aztec called for unity in the face of invasion by outsiders even though the Tlaxcalan and Aztecs shared ancestry and gods. The Aztecs apparently treated others in the region so poorly that the Tlaxcalans would not come to thier aid even though they had a history togeather.
Re:Maafa - The American Holocaust (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So they know they were African... (Score:2, Informative)
The early Indian astronomers are largly forgotten but around 500AD a guy called Àryabhata [htttp] taught that the earth is a sphere and rotates on its axis, and that eclipses resulted from the shadows of the moon and earth.
If you are interested the Archaeogeodesic achievements of the Ancients then that whole site is a good reference : http://www.jqjacobs.net/astro/aegeo.html [jqjacobs.net]
The Islamic scholar Abu Arrayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni [st-and.ac.uk] probably read Àryabhata's works 500 years later, he certainly wrote of Indian astronomy in his work "India". This is the same al-Biruni who calculated the radius of the earth to be 6339.6 km using the angular incidence of shadows.
The Indians did more than invent 0, they contributed much of the numerals which we often mistakenly label Arabic in origin, al-Biruni writes [st-and.ac.uk] : "What we [the Arabs] use for numerals is a selection of the best and most regular figures in India."
Ancient true black African contributions are a little less well documented, the writings struggling to survive the 5000 years necessary, even if someone bothered to patent "I have discovered how to make a rotating disk from three pieces of wood such that they can aid in transporting goods", but it's legacy lives on in your mouse : the wheel. As well as the agricultural revolution, copper, tin, bronze (the ore for which was transported from Asia & Syria), the potters wheel ("the first really mechanical device").
I, for one, thank our black African ancestors, our Islamic discoverers (one of whom even made a pin-hole camera using a whole room, it might have been al-Biruni but I can't find a cite !) and our Indian scholars.
Even today we can't even get the history of science right. The NYT recently published a story with the summary : Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time.
I here's a non-NYT link to the list :
http://physics.nad.ru/Physics/English/top10.htm [physics.nad.ru]
See what's number 2. Pfft, he didn't even do that demonstration, let alone discover the phenomena.
The Belgian-Dutch mathematician, Simon Stevinus, did the demonstration in 1586.
Ironically, the article does have a great lesson : "he [Galileo] had demonstrated the importance of taking nature, not human authority, as the final arbiter in matters of science."
Re:I don't think so. (Score:3, Informative)