Origins of the Igbo people

Bronze from the 9th century town of Igbo Ukwu, now at the British Museum.^[1]

According to some evidence the ancestors of most Igbo people and their neighbors were the proto-Kwa group, a subdivision of the Niger-Congo language family, who came from the African Great Lakes and Mountains of the Moon of East and Central Africa in the early Holocene and settled at the old Sahara grasslands.^[2] It was the desertification of the Sahara that forced some ancestors of the Kwa speaking peoples to migrate further down to the north of the Niger Benue confluence and founded the Nok culture. Elements of the Kwa people migrated south of this confluence and later became the Igala, Idoma, Yoruba, Igbo, and possibly the Tiv peoples.

According to Professor Michael Onwuejeogwu, a Stone Axe factory site near Okigwe in Igboland dates back to 6000 BCE. Pottery dated at around 4500 BCE that shows similarities with later Igbo work has been found at Nsukka, pottery and tools at nearby Ibagwa, the traditions of the Umueri clan have as their source the Anambra valley, and in the 1970s the Owerri, Okigwe, Orlu and Awka divisions were generally supposed from linguistic, archeological, and cultural evidence have suggested these areas as "an Igbo heartland".^[3] Therefore, evidence suggests the Kwa people's first areas of settlement in Igboland was the North Central uplands (Nsukka-Awka-Orlu) over a 6500-4500 year period. Elements from the Orlu area migrated south, east, and northeast while elements from the Awka area migrated westwards across the Niger river and became the Igbo subgroup now known as the Anioma.

See also

• West Africa

References

1. ^ Apley, Apley. "Igbo-Ukwu (ca. 9th century)". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/igbo/hd_igbo.htm. Retrieved 2008-11-23. 
2. ^ "Atlas of the Human Journey". The Genographic Project. https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html. Retrieved 2009-01-10. 
3. ^ Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo People (London: Macmillan, 1976; ISBN 0333185560); excerpted in "Cultural Harmony I: Igboland — the World of Man and the World of Spirits", section 4 of Kalu Ogbaa, ed., Understanding Things Fall Apart (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999; ISBN 0313302944), pp. 83–85.

External links

• https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html
• http://www.earthrights.net/nigeria/history.html
• http://mccoy.lib.siu.edu/jmccall/jones/misc.html
• http://www.springerlink.com/content/r52vw2388641744h/
• The Igbo People – Origins and History
• A Genetic Migration Story of a Nigerian Igbo