Remains of First African Slaves Found

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."

Oldest

[imoou]

But possibly not the first.

So they know they were African...

[Max Threshold]

How do they know they were slaves?

"not long after Columbus..."

[mrnobo1024]

The remains, in a colonial era graveyard in one of the oldest European cities in Mexico, date between the late-16th century and the mid-17th century, not long after Columbus first set foot in the Americas.

100 years is "not long after"? Has the length of the year changed since then or what?

Re:Not...

[Max Threshold]

Only if the crew included pregnant women, and they drank stored water from that one location for several months. Possible, but highly unlikely.

Re:interesting fact

[nomadic]

The slave trade has always been blamed on Europeans and African slavetraders as well. One of the reasons America gets the lion's share of the blame is because we took so long to actually abolish it.

in America?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's odd.

I always assumed the first African Slaves were in Africa.

But, maybe that's because they were.

Re:interesting fact

[dotslashdot]

Yes, those poor wealthy white Americans addicted to slavery. If only the Spanish hadn't gotten America hooked on the slave trade. Americans are blamed for slavery because *gasp* white America enslaved blacks and treated them like animals and property. Americans are blamed for slavery today because apologist posters like you just don't seem to get it and try to minimize or deny the terrible atrocity.

Re:interesting fact

[GaryPatterson]

It's not that interesting.

It's very widely known that the UK had a lot to do with slavery, as did a number of other European nations. The fact that damns the US is that so many people kept slavery going for so much longer than the rest of the world.

The rich Americans were exactly the ones involved though. They were absolutely not unwittingly addicted to slavery, but were instead willing to buy and sell slaves because they made more money by not paying wages. A lot of wealth in the US was founded on slavery, but then robber barons throughout history have been doing more or less the same thing. It's down to morality versus wealth. For some reason these seem mutually exclusive to most of the world's wealthy people.

Re:*cough*

[the real manta]

I'm happy to see any science-related stories on slashdot - if you're not interested, don't read it.

Re:*cough*

[posterlogo]

What exactly does this have to do with NEWS FOR NERDS. STUFF THAT MATTERS.?

I actually agree with you, partly. Although I am happy to see more science-related issues on Slashdot, comments like yours prove that clearly some nerds here are not intelligent enough to handle them.

Maafa - The American Holocaust

[Philip K Dickhead]

It took the "middle passage" [wikipedia.org] and other horrors to really turn large-scale [wikipedia.org] African slavery [wikipedia.org] into the worst atrocity [swagga.com] of the past two-thousand years.

Stalin? The Nazis and Khmer Rouge? Small potatoes to these horrors, which continued for almost two-hundred years. The Arab and interneccine slavery of Africans was unjust - but seldom so relentlessly brutal, with human beings reduced to a level of treatment beneath that of animals.

You mistake paper Islam with real Islam.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah on paper Islam says certain things, but Islam practiced for real is a different thing. Need an example? Islam says for Muslims to be tolerant of other religions. Yet go to Saudi Arabia, and find out if can you practice your non-Islamic religion in public? Can you build a church, temple or synagogue? Can you be a citizen without being a Muslim? Can you even walk around Mecca if you so desired, without being a Muslim? Let me know if the answer to any of these questions is no longer "no"?

Paper Islam and real Islam are two mutually exculsive things, my naive and sheltered techie.

Re:*cough*

[ChrisGilliard]

There are many kinds of nerds ok? This is interesting to our anthropological nerd brethren. Nerds need to learn to respect each other.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Or about 50 years after the Spanish started com

[glwtta]

Did they? My understanding was that Hernán Cortés had the ruling family and other people with power tortured and/or killed. Of the general population, those who didn't die in the violence of the Spanish invasion were forced to flee and probably ended up mixing with other tribes.

All true, but the fact remains that the indigenous American civilizations went into a sharp (relatively speaking) decline 100-200 years before the Spanish got there. The area was significantly depopulated by Cortes' time; I believe there are several examples of cities whose population size wouldn't be matched again until early 19th century, being virtually deserted, long before any invaders looking for a "New World".

As far as I know, the reasons for this are still unknown - doesn't necessarily make it "mysterious", we just don't have the info.

Re:Aztec colonies

[Anonymous Coward]

From Wikipedia: Human sacrifice was practiced in many ancient cultures. Victims were ritually killed in a manner that was supposed to please or appease gods or spirits. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Sacrifice [wikipedia.org])

When you talk about human sacrifice among aztecs, for fairness sake you should also mention human sacrifice in Spain of that times: Inquisition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition [wikipedia.org]) .

Re:"not long after Columbus..."

[larry bagina]

the rest of the Anglo-Saxon community had rejected about 800 years earlier.

If only girls "rejected" me in the same way.

Slavery never was popular in Great Britain, but it was never popular in the northern US either. It was popular in the Southern US and Carribbean, on plantations.

Remind me: How much tobacco, sugar, or cotton does Great Britain produce?

Of course, those plantations were set up and owned by the English (along with the French, Portugese and Spanish). From the 1650s through the early 1800s, the English dominated the slave market. Europeans were very much involved in all aspects of the slave trade, even if you didn't practice it in your own homes.

Re:So they know they were African...

[Max Threshold]

Because the article cites no evidence indicating that they were slaves, and significant evidence that they were not. As other commenters said, the notion that they were slaves seems like pure conjecture... and makes good copy for Black History Month.

Re:Stalin, The Nazis ...Small potatoes ???

[Philip K Dickhead]

And the "puritans" were not, by and large, escaping religious persecution - anymore than the Taliban are, by fleeing into Pakistan. These were a nasty, repressive rapacious and intolerant lot of religious manics - who stoned women and children to death, for immodesty in dress. That included the wearing of colors.

Look into teh English Civil war, and the Parliamentary terror of England that was birthed in the midlands. Mullah Omar should have had such a run.

These people were ejected for their inability to live withtheir neighbors, or fled accountability after the return of the Monarchy.

This is a gross simplification - but roughly the shape of things. They were egalitarian enough - were you a member of their class, race and creed.

Funny, so few Americans are actually descended from these people that, as children, they are trained to regard as their forebears. Most of the blacks in America can claim a longer association with the country's history than most whites or asians.

Re:I don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slavery certainly hasn't been driven out of existence, as much as we like to pretend that it's a problem that's behind us. Even in Britain there are thousands of mostly Eastern European women who were brought over as sex slaves, and no, I don't mean that they're willing economic migrants, but forced, purchased human beings, kept in a trade they don't want to do in a foreign country. That's slavery.

It makes me sick that people are smugly patting themselves on their backs for a good job done, oblivious to what's still happening in the world, or even whining about how their ancestors were slaves and they still feel hurt about it. If so, what are you doing to help the current lot? Nothing? Well, I have less sympathy for you then. There's a lot of work still to do.

Re:So they know they were African...

[Grab]

It's pretty scientific, yes. Think of sailing technology at the time. Columbus and his pals just about had the technology needed to get directly from Africa to America. No West African nation had the same technology. Most coastal areas had sailors (the Meditterranean had some particularly good ones), but they didn't have ocean-going ability. Even the Vikings couldn't do that - the most they managed was island-hopping. And to get from Africa to Central America in any realistic time requires the direct route, otherwise we have to postulate an African expedition (in open boats) that went from Africa to Mexico via Spain/Portugal, France, Britain/Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the entire eastern US seaboard. It's not unreasonable to assume that an expedition like that would have been noticed by someone in Europe who would have written it down.

Anyway, we're talking an African found in a graveyard in an area known to have been a centre of slaving, at a time when slaving was at a peak. He might not have been a slave, in the same way as the guy you find sat in your car fiddling with the ignition might be the superhero Captain Car-Rescue instead of a car thief. But don't bet on it... ;-)

Grab.

The problem with the third world generally

[Flying pig]

This post is more than interesting, it is insightful. Why is Africa such a mess? Because, basically, it has few middle class educated people. Why is India progressing so rapidly? Because it has a large and growing middle class fueled by the high status of education. Why does China want Taiwan so badly? Because China is (relatively speaking) a backward oligarchy and it would benefit from quickly acquiring a large educated middle class and its vast intellectual productive resources.

So why is the American (and British) system currently so geared to benefiting oligarchs and making things using cheap labor? Why are our education systems increasingly failing? Is it because our leaders are becoming like the backwards oligarchs of the South, interested solely in lining their own pockets to the detriment of our long term prospects?

What makes this especially interesting is the rise in prominence of people like McKain in the US and now Cameron in the UK, who are emphasising traditional middle class values against the corporatism of the respective governments. Time for an educated middle class backlash, perhaps.

Re:So they know they were African...

[cortana]

In other news, Nazi scientists report discovering artifacts and human remains indicating that the human race did not originate in Africa, as previously believed, but in Germany instead. :)origin of the human race was not Africa,

First in the New World, that is

[Frodo420024]

Sometimes it looks as if the colonist of the New World invented the slave trade. That was not at all the case. It had been running for centuries on the coasts of Africa, with Arab traders dealing with the local rulers, buying prisoners of war and other potential slaves.

But they sure did get a boost in business when Europeans joined the trade!

My, but you're disingenuous.

[Grendel Drago]

Most mature cultures go back thousands of years.

In intelligible form? Sorry, but no European culture goes back "thousands of years". If you go back two thousand, you're at the dawn of Christianity, which bore only a passing resemblance to today's versions. The Romans had switched over to imperial rule. While I can understand how Western culture takes a lot from Romans and Greeks, to imply that we're all part of the same culture is plainly bullshit--we don't do human sacrifice, giant statues of our gods in the town square, gladiator fights, Legions forbidden from coming home, or the divine right of kings. Or humping little boys.

You'd have as much luck fitting into Roman society as you would into a Bantu empire of the same period. Living in Europe may mean you live near some old buildings, but it doesn't mean you live in the same culture that built them.

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.

No, those are the dates when enslaving white people became unacceptable. The British were quite involved with African slavery from 1562 until 1803 [wikipedia.org], when they started discouraging it, and 1833 [wikipedia.org], when it was actually abolished by the Brits.

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.

It's disingenuous for you to compare the time when Brits stopped enslaving fellow whites to the time when Americans ended legal discrimination against blacks.

And also, what persisted in the South until the Civil Rights era wasn't slavery so much as it was Jim Crow--segregation, much like the Apartheid that South Africa had until relatively recently. Racist, certainly--but comparing it to the end of whites-as-slaves in Viking culture? Give me a break.

Re:Wait a minute ...

[Cardinal Biggles]

Columbus had been to "the Gold Coast" of Africa (aka The Slave Coast aka The Ivory Coast) and had met the representatives of the king of Mauritania, if not the king himself, at the time probably the wealthiest man in the world. They had had a few colonies "a few days to the west" in a new land, but they had abandoned them year before, because the locals kept attacking them.

Interesting. But if America was only "a few days to the west" from West Africa, these Mauritanians must have had some really speedy boats. ;-)

My wild guess would be that they were talking about the Cape Verdian Islands. That's a place that could realistically be reached from Africa's West Coast in a couple of days. Brazil would take weeks.

Lincoln was a Republican, Idiot

[Black-Man]

And the Southern Democrats were the slave owners. Oh, and the abolitionists like John Brown? They were like the Religious Right. Read some history, moron.

Re:Oldest

[PACSADMIN]

just in time for black history month

Headline incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

It is well known that domestic slavery in Africa, as well as the slave trade to the "old world", was alive and well long before slaves were transported to the new world. Thus, the headline "Remains of First African Slaves Found" is incorrect and misleading. There are no doubt innumerable remains of African slaves on the continent of Africa and elsewhere that predate by hundreds and even thousands of years those remains mentioned in TFA.

Sympathy for the white devil

[Loquax]

Hold on a second there. I in no way want to defend slavery or genocide, but Columbus was a man acting in his time with his time's morality and ethics. First, the "genocide" that you refer to happend as a result primarily of diseases and their effects that Columbus could not have been aware of. Second, at that time in the world, all of the world, slavery was the norm not the exception. Owning a slave and using his or her body for labor however you wished was no more "immoral" than you or I owning a car or eating meat. Would you want someone 100+ years from now who lives in a society of pedestrian vegitarians judging you on the basis of your driving a car or eating meat. I wouldn't. What happend to the slaves and the American Indians was a tragedy in hind sight. But don't kid yourself. If the poor African slave had guns and the upperhand, they would have (and in many cases did) enslaved other peoples. If the Indians had developed technology permitting them to take over Europe and had the need to go on conquest, they would have done so as well. The history of the Native Americans is littered with bloody battles between the various tribes.

My point is that "man is a bad animal" wherever and whenever he is. We'll kill our own kind, crap where we eat, and take more than we need and then use our wonderful rational mind to justify it all.

Re:not so, my friend, not so...

[radtea]

First of all, one must understand that slaves are capital, not labour.

The difficulty with this assertion is that human beings cannot be owned, and therefore cannot be property and therefore cannot be capital. This is true regardless of what the law says. The law can say pi is equal to three. But that does not make it so.

I will grant you that slaves can serve in the economic role of capital, just as 3 can serve in the mathematical role of pi. But economies (and circles) built on the basis of such falsehoods will be grossly distorted, and for much the same reaasons.

Re:"not long after Columbus..."

[yetanothertechie]

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.

It always annoys me when the US is considered one big homogeneous society, either past or present. Slavery was a divisive issue in the US almost from the beginning, crystallizing in a north vs. south divide on the issue. There were many people in the north who were adamantly opposed to the practice and who not only lobbied against it but actively helped escaped slaves from the south to freedom in Canada. The country was so divided on this issue (and some others) that we fought a war over it, almost resulting in the country being split in two.

What is it with Americans?

It's unfair to generalize this way.

America-centric bias

[readin]

Remains of First African Slaves Found Don't they mean the first African slaves in America. It's not like there was no slavery in Africa before Columbus found America.