Horn of Africa
Prehistory

Some of the earliest Homo sapiens fossils, the Omo remains (from ca. 233,000 years ago) and the Herto skull (from ca. 160,000 ago) have been found in the region, both in Ethiopia.

The findings of the Earliest Stone Tipped Projectiles from the Ethiopian Rift dated to more than 279,000 years ago "in combination with the existing archaeological, fossil and genetic evidence, isolate East Africa as a source of modern cultures and biology."

According to the Southern Dispersal scenario, the Southern route of the Out of Africa migration occurred in the Horn of Africa through the Bab el Mandeb. Today at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits, the Red Sea is about 12 miles (19 kilometres) wide, but 50,000 years ago it was much narrower and sea levels were 70 meters lower. Though the straits were never completely closed, there may have been islands in between which could be reached using simple rafts. Shell middens 125,000 years old have been found in Eritrea, indicating the diet of early humans included seafood obtained by beachcombing.

Ethiopian and Eritrean agriculture established the earliest known use of the seed grass teff (Poa abyssinica) between 4000 and 1000 BCE. Teff is used to make the flatbread injera /taita. Coffee also originated in Ethiopia and has since spread to become a worldwide beverage.

Historian Christopher Ehret, cited genetic evidence which had identified the Horn of Africa as a source of a genetic marker " M35 / 215 " Y-chromosome lineage for a significant population component which moved north from that region into Egypt and the Levant. Ehret argued that this genetic distribution paralleled the spread of the Afrasian language family with the movement of people from the Horn of Africa into Egypt and added a new demic component to the existing population of Egypt 17,000 years ago.
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