Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
EARLY BEGINNINGS
About 3.6 million years ago, East Africa's earliest inhabitants trekked across the plain at
Laetoli near Oldupai (Olduvai) Gorge in northern Tanzania, leaving their footprints in vol-
canic ash. The prints were discovered in 1978 by archaeologist Mary Leakey, who identified
them as the steps of our earliest known ancestors - hominids known as
Australopithecines
.
The first travel guide to the Tanzanian coast:
Periplus of the Erythraean
Sea,
written for sailors by a Greek merchant around AD 60. Third-century
AD coins from Persia and north Africa have been found along the Tan-
zanian coast - proof of a long trading history with Arabia and the Medi-
terranean.
About two million years ago, the human family tree split, giving rise to
homo habilis,
a
meat-eating creature with a larger brain who used crude stone tools, the remains of whom
have been found around Oldupai (Olduvai) Gorge. By 1.8 million years ago,
homo erect-
us
had evolved, leaving bones and axes for archaeologists to find at ancient lakeside sites
throughout East Africa.
What is today Tanzania was peopled by waves of migration. Rock paintings possibly dat-
ing back at least 6000 years have been found around Kondoa. These are believed to have
been made by clans of nomadic hunter-gatherers who spoke a language similar to that of
southern Africa's Khoisan. Between 3000 and 5000 years ago, they were joined by small
bands of Cushitic-speaking farmers and cattle-herders moving down from what is today
Ethiopia. The Iraqw who live around Lake Manyara trace their ancestry to this group of ar-
rivals. The majority of modern Tanzanians are descendants of Bantu-speaking settlers who
began a gradual, centuries-long shift from the Niger delta around 1000 BC, arriving in East
Africa in the 1st century AD. The most recent influx of migrants occurred between the
15th and 18th centuries when Nilotic-speaking pastoralists from southern Sudan moved into
northern Tanzania and the Rift Valley. The modern Maasai trace their roots to this stream.
Monsoon Winds
As these migrations were taking place in the interior, coastal areas were being shaped by
far different influences. Azania, as the East African coast was known to the ancient Greeks,
was an important trading post as early as 400 BC. By the early part of the first millennium
AD, thriving settlements had been established as traders, first from the Mediterranean and
later from Arabia and Persia, came ashore on the winds of the monsoon and began to in-
termix with the indigenous Bantu speakers, gradually giving rise to Swahili language and
culture. The traders from Arabia also brought Islam, which by the 11th century had become
entrenched.
