Medieval Tanzania a Major Player in the Indian Ocean Trade
THE MODERN COUNTRY has a name that is the combination of the mainland, which was called Tanganyika during the British colonial period, and the island of Zanzibar. The two regions have had dramatically different histories for the last two millennia.
But there is so much more. It seems we all came from there. There is a gated field of rocks in Iraq that is advertised as the Garden of Eden. You can go there and take pictures of it. That’s one story.
The other story is that the earliest examples of shaped stone tools by primates have been found in the mainland regions of what is now Tanzania. Apparently, we are genetically related to those early tool making primates. In that sense, we humans all came from there.
We are coin people, most of us. Some of us are interested in fossils, too. Coins are a phenomenon of the last 2,500 years of human history, from the late Bronze Age until today, while fossils are quite a bit earlier. There is a fossil market, but there seems to be no presence of early hominid fossils, the kind of thing that governments immediately declare export-prohibited and impound.
The stone tools made by those early humans were manufactured by splitting pebbles to make edges. We can assume that they were making tools out of things other than stone, but we
