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."

Comments

So they know they were African...

[Max Threshold]

How do they know they were slaves?

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:*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.

Re:I don't think so.

[jcr]

Well, slavery went on for thousands of years. It predated written history, and continued until western civilization decided that slavery was repugnant and stamped it out, over the objections of nearly every other society. Driving slavery almost out of existence was probably the greatest achievement of the British empire.

-jcr

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.

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, when they started discouraging it, and 1833, 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.