New evidence of Cinnamon Route from Mtwapa, Kenya

An important story is circulating around in African popular publications, but unfortunately, maybe predictably, it has not been picked up yet by the Western popular media.

One version of the story of Dr. Chapurukha (Chap) Kusimba's research can be found at The East African website:

Digging for history in the sands of time
by Rupi Mangat

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/-/434746/653420/-/item/0/-/mqc8qw/-/index.html

Here are two key paragraphs from the article on discoveries made by Dr. Kusimba, an archaeologist with the Field Museum in Chicago, at the Mtwapa ruins along the coast of southern Kenya:

“This era [the Holocene] sees the bi-directional flow of cultural objects and foods through trade over wide regions of the world. l’m particularly interested in how domestic rice, coconuts, chickens and the Indian cow (Bos indicus) reached Africa from Asia and how African domestic foods like sorghum and millet reached Asia and became staples in countries there.”

This list of trade items shows that many of these exchanges of crops between Africa and South East Asia through trade happened as early as 4,000 years ago.

Now obviously these discoveries are greatly supportive of the theories of J. I. Miller, myself and others about the ancient age of the Cinnamon Route.

In an email correspondence with Dr. Kusimba, I was able to find out that it was specifically the sorghum and millet from the Africa to Asia; and citrus fruit, bananas and Indica rice from Southeast Asia to Africa, that date back to about 4000 years ago (1732 BCE).

Chickens, probably from Insular Southeast Asia, date back at Mtwapa to about 1000 BCE, and the coconut finds have not been datable so far.

Previously I have discussed how banana phytoliths dating back to 500 BCE have been found in Nigeria, and dating to about 2500 BCE were discovered in Munsa, Uganda. Banana cultivation is complicated and labor-intensive so there is no doubt that these domesticated plants were carried to Africa by humans.

Dr. Kusimba mentions that East Africa was known to the ancient Romans as the "Cinnamon coast," and I have suggested earlier, following Miller, that the ancient port known as Rhapta in Greek texts was probably the Punt of the ancient Egyptians. Rhapta was located in the same area as the bustling medieval island ports of Pemba and Zanzibar in modern-day Tanzania. Evidence of chickens in Tanzania dates back to 2800 BCE. These islands are actually quite close to the Mtwapa ruins, which are just north of Mombasa. Possibly we can say that Mtwapa was in the same economic zone as Rhapta, and we cannot rule out that Mtwapa may have been the actual site of that ancient port.

There is evidence of cinnamon or cassia that has been found in animal mummies dating back to the XXIII Egyptian dynasty (818-715 BCE) by Dr. Stephen Buckley. He also found traces of cinnamon or cassia that he states probably came from Southeast Asia in the canopic jar of Djediufankh, which is dated to about 664 - 525 BCE. Cinnamon has also been found at a Hera temple on the island of Samos in Greece that dates back to the 7th century BCE. This evidence puts to rest the idea that that the cinnamon of the ancients that traveled up the eastern African coast was not the cinnamon of Asia that we know today.

It is also worth mentioning again the discovery of clove flower buds at Terqa, Syria, at roughly the same time as the earliest dates for Mtwapa. These cloves may have followed a different coastal route, which I have called the Clove Route, as opposed to the probably trans-oceanic Cinnamon Route that bypassed most of the Asian coast.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
Sacramento

Zimbabwean village chickens originate from Southeast Asia and India

A new study shows that village chickens (Gallus gallus) in Zimbabwe originate from two maternal mtDNA lineages. One of these lineages is from Southeast Asia, while the other is from India. The research also identified a third lineage that did not appear in Zimbabwe or other African chickens and likely originates in South China.

These chickens could have been brought by sea trade and logically then they would be related to the chicken species in Madagascar.

Anim Genet. 2008 Dec;39(6):615-22.

Mitochondrial DNA D-loop sequences suggest a Southeast Asian and Indian origin of Zimbabwean village chickens.

Muchadeyi FC, Eding H, Simianer H, Wollny CB, Groeneveld E, Weigend S.

Institute of Farm Animal Genetics, Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Höltystrasse 10, 31535 Neustadt, Germany.

This study sought to assess mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity and phylogeographic structure of chickens from five agro-ecological zones of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, chickens from Zimbabwe were compared with populations from other geographical regions (Malawi, Sudan and Germany) and other management systems (broiler and layer purebred lines). Finally, haplotypes of these animals were aligned to chicken sequences, taken from GenBank, that reflected populations of presumed centres of domestication. A 455-bp fragment of the mtDNA D-loop region was sequenced in 283 chickens of 14 populations. Thirty-two variable sites that defined 34 haplotypes were observed. In Zimbabwean chickens, diversity within ecotypes accounted for 96.8% of the variation, indicating little differentiation between ecotypes. The 34 haplotypes clustered into three clades that corresponded to (i) Zimbabwean and Malawian chickens, (ii) broiler and layer purebred lines and Northwest European chickens, and (iii) a mixture of chickens from Zimbabwe, Sudan, Northwest Europe and the purebred lines. Diversity among clades explained more than 80% of the total variation. Results indicated the existence of two distinct maternal lineages evenly distributed among the five Zimbabwean chicken ecotypes. For one of these lineages, chickens from Zimbabwe and Malawi shared major haplotypes with chicken populations that have a Southeast Asian background. The second maternal lineage, probably from the Indian subcontinent, was common to the five Zimbabwean chicken ecotypes, Sudanese and Northwest European chickens as well as purebred broiler and layer chicken lines. A third maternal lineage excluded Zimbabwean and other African chickens and clustered with haplotypes presumably originating from South China.