Born on this day 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, pastor, and political dissident.

A photograph of Dietrich Bonhoeffer taken in 1932 at Gland near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Berlin State Library.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in the city of Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), the sixth child of a middle class, intellectual family. His father was the psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer, while his mother, Paula Bonhoeffer was a teacher and the granddaughter of both the Protestant theologian Karl von Hase and the painter Stanislaus von Kalckreuth. As such he was always destined to gain an education and enter a profession, settling on theology following the death of his older brother, Walter Bonhoeffer, during the First World War.

Bonhoeffer studied theology at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, before completing a doctorate at Humboldt University at the age of 21 in December 1927. He then travelled to Barcelona, where he served as assistant pastor to a German-speaking congregation for two years. In 1930 he travelled to New York to study at the Union Theological Seminary for a year. Bonhoeffer appears to have been somewhat unimpressed by the quality of academic study at the seminary, but during this time he did discover the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he worked as a Sunday school teacher and became an advocate of ecumenical Christianity (co-operation between different Christian churches and traditions).

Upon returning to Germany in 1931, Bonhoeffer took up a lectureship at the University of Berlin, and was appointed as a youth secretary to the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, a precursor to the World Council of Churches, and ordained as a pastor of the Prussian Union of Churches.

In  November 1932, a group calling themselves the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), who sought to align the church with the nationalist views of the rising Nazi Party, won a third of the elections for officials within the Prussian Union of Churches. One of the notable policies of the Deutsche Christen movement was that Jews (defined by the religion of their grandparents) could not become Christians through baptism, but remained a separate racial group, excluded from the church. This brought the organisation close to a schism, due to factional fighting with the Young Reformers, a group who sought to bring the church closer to the teachings of Christ. 

In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and shortly after ordered new elections at all German Protestant Churches. Bonhoeffer was involved in trying to organise opposition to the takeover of the church, campaigning for the election of non-Nazi aligned officials, but in the event Deutsche Christen were able to take over all churches except the Westphalian Union and the Baptist churches of  Bavaria, Hanover, and Württemberg.

Alarmed by this development, Bonhoeffer tried to organise a theological strike, advocating for pastors to refuse to conduct all ceremonial services, including baptisms, conformations, weddings, and funerals, although he was eventually persuaded against this. He then went on to co-author a document called the 'Bethel Confession' which asserted primacy of the scriptures in defining the Christian faith, in opposition the idea that church doctrine can be redefined to suit the political situation of any given period. In the event, this document underwent substantial revision by different authors before being published, with Bonhoeffer refusing to sign the final version, which he felt had been altered to avoid risking offending the Nazi regime. 

In September 1933 the church formally accepted the Deutsche Christen position on Jewish conversion to Christianity, and all church officials of Jewish descent were expelled. In response to this, Lutharian theologian and pastor Martin Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund (Emergency League of Pastors) to defend the principle of baptism as a means of conversion. The following month Deutsche Christen passed a resolution demanding that the Old Testament be removed from the Bible. deeming it a Jewish document, leading to thousands more pastors joining the Pfarrernotbund.

Around this time Bonhoeffer turned down the offer of a parish in Berlin, instead travelling to London for a two year appointment as a pastor to two German-speaking churches in Sydenham and Whitechapel. Although accused by some of running away from the battle in Germany, Bonhoeffer acted as an agent for the Pfarrernotbund, which in 1934 became the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), remaining in contact with Martin Niemöller, and using his contacts through the ecumenical movement to develop a network of allies among the Christian community in England.

In 1935 his stint in London came to an end, and although offered a chance to study at Mahatma Ghandi's ashram in India, Bonhoeffer chose to return to Germany where he he resumed teaching at the University of Berlin, as well as setting up an underground seminary for the Bekennende Kirche. In August 1936 Bonhoeffer lost his position at the university, having been denounced as a pacifist by Theodore Heckel, a newly appointed bishop and supporter of Deutsche Christen. 

Following this, Bonhoeffer dedicated all of his time to the Bekennende Kirche, operating largely from the estate of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, Countess of Zedlitz-Trützschler, a German noblewoman, supporter of the Kirche, and opponent of the Nazi regime. In August 1937 the Bekennende Kirche was officially banned and a number of members were arrested. Bonhoeffer moved further underground, travelling from village-to-village to teach, and running an underground seminary at Groß Schlönwitz in what is now northern Poland. In 1938 Bonhoeffer was banned from entering Berlin, and moved his seminary to Tychow, also now in Poland. 

At this time Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who was married to Bobhoeffer's older sister Christel, was working at the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence). Although essentially a civil servant, von Dohnayi was familiar with many senior members of the Nazi Party, and was convinced that a major war was about to break out. Along with other members of the Abwehr, von Dohnayi had been involved with the German resistance movement for several years, ensuring that the crimes of the Nazi Regime were carefully recorded so that they could one day be held to account, and helping a number of Jewish Berliners to escape to Switzerland. 

With war looming, von Dohnayi was concerned that Bonhoeffer would be conscripted into the army, and that the idealistic pastor would refuse to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler or bear arms, both of which could earn him a death sentence. To avoid this von Dohnayi recruited Bonhoeffer into the Abwehr, arguing that his contacts through the ecumenical movement as evidence that Bobhoeffer would make an excellent agent.

In June 1939 Bonhoeffer was dispatched to the Union Theological Seminary in New York, although he returned to Germany two weeks later, despite pressure from his friends to remain, citing a need to be in Germany during the coming war if he was to have any part in rebuilding the country during its aftermath. 

Back in Germany, Bonhoeffer continued to be harassed by the authorities, despite being a member of the Abwehr. while the resistance movement within the Abwehr tried to use him to make contact with the governments of the Weston powers, in order to gain their support. In 1942 he flew to (neutral Sweden to meet with  George Bell, Bishop of Chichester and a friend of Bonhoeffer, hoping to gain the support of the British Government, for coup attempt and planned assassination of Adolf Hitler. However, by this time the British Government was only interested in an unconditional surrender from Germany, and was unwilling to enter into negotiations on any other matter. This was probably not helped by the fact that Bell was an outspoken opponent of the British policy of bombing civilian populations in Germany, which had made him suspect in the eyes of the Churchill government.

In January 1943, Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, the granddaughter of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, although this does not been a love match so much as a way of assuring the continued support of the noblewoman. At the time of the engagement Bonhoeffer was 36-years-old, while von Wedemeyer was only 18, and they did not meet again after the celebration, with Bonhoffer citing the war as a reason not to marry soon. 

Bonhoeffer and von Dohnayi continued to be involved with efforts to smuggle Jews and other dissidents out of Germany, and von Dohnayi additionally became involved with Henning von Tresckow's failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in February 1943. In April 1943 the Gestapo uncovered evidence of von Dohnayi's involvement in the aiding of Jews to escape to Switzerland, and he, Christine, and Bonhoeffer were all arrested, although Christel was later released. 

While both men should in theory have been quickly brought to trial, proceedings were held up by military judge Karl Sack, another member of the resistance, and Bonhoeffer spent the next year-and-a-half in Tegel Prison, where he ministered to both prisoners and guards (one of whom is claimed to have offered to help him escape, though Bonhoeffer reputedly refused).

In February 1944, acting on the advice of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler disbanded the Abwehr, and placed its head, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, under house arrest. A subsequent investigation into the organisation revealed diaries kept by Canaris, linking the organisation to a number of plots. Confronted with this evidence Hitler is reported to have flown into a rage and ordered the execution of all Abwehr members.

Bonhoeffer was taken from Tegel Prison and brought before SS judge Otto Thorbeck, who convicted Bonhoeffer and sentenced him to death at a trial with no evidence, witnesses, or defence. He was taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he was executed on 9 April 1945 alongside Admiral Canaris, General Hans Oster, General Karl Sack, Theodor Strünck; and Ludwig Gehre. Von Donayi was executed the same day at the Sachsenhausen camp.

A doctor at the Flossenburg camp, Hermann Fischer-Hüllstrung, recorded that Bonhoeffer knelt before the gallows and prayed, before going calmly to his fate. However, later accounts by inmates of the camp contradicted that, suggesting that Bonhoeffer may have died in a more brutal and protracted fashion, with Bonhoeffer being repeatedly hung until nearly dead, then taken down, given time to recover, then hung again. His body was never recovered, and is presumed to have been either incinerated or thrown in one of the mass graves at the camp.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is today recognised as a martyr by the Methodist Church and some Anglican congregations. The anniversary of his death is marked by a number of protestant christian denominations. The German church in Sydenham was bombed during the war, but was rebuilt after and reconsecrated under the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer Kirche. Many of Bonhoeffer's writings are still considered important works of theology, particularly those on the importance of the church remaining separate from, and able to remain critical of, the state. A poem by Bonhoeffer, Von guten Mächten, was set to music by Siegfried Fietz in 1970, and voted Germany's most popular hymn in 2021.

See also...

The first Americans.

For much of the second half of the twentieth century, a single model of the peopling of the Americas was accepted by the vast majority of the archaeological community. This was that at the end of the Pleistocene, the receding North American icecap allowed a group of people living in an area called Beringia, a land bridge which connected Alaska to the northeastern tip of Asia. These people, the Clovis Culture, brought with them a suite of tools including a distinctive projectile tip, the Clovis point, taken as an indicator they used spears and bows to hunt. They expanded rapidly across the Americas, reaching the southern tip of South America in less than a thousand years, and driving much of the megafauna of the Americas extinct in the process. All subsequent Americans, until the arrival of Europeans in the 1490s, were descended from this population.

A selection of Clovis points in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Tim Evanson/Wikimedia Commons.

There have been four main objections raised to this theory.

The first, and most obvious, of this is that many sites in the Americas appear to be older than the first Clovis occupation. These include sites such as Tanana and Nenanan valleys in Alaska, the Manis Mastodon site in Washington State, Paisley Caves in Oregon, the Channel Islands of California, the White Sands National Park site in New Mexico, the Topper site in South Carolina, the Saltville site in Virginia, the Buttermilk Creek site in Texas Tlapacoya in Mexico, the El Abra and Tibitó sites in Colombia, the Monte Verde and Tagua Tagua sites in Chile, the Pedera Funda and Lapa do Boquete sites in Brazil.

However, many of these sites were uncertain in their dating, for example radiocarbon dates from remains which appear to be associated with tools, but which cannot be conclusively linked. Other sites have not yielded tools or Human remains as such, but rather Animal remains which appear to show signs of butchering by Humans, leaving room for alternative interpretations. One of the most convincing sites is Buttermilk Creek in Texas. Here tools belonging to the non-Clovis Western Stemmed Tradition, and are found within a layer directly overlain by a layer containing Clovis tools. The Western Stemmed Tradition is found at a number of other early sites, and has been suggested to represent a widespread pre-Clovis tradition in North America. However, while this culture is considered separate from Clovis, the two are clearly closely related. Thus the Western Stemmed Tradition might represent a slightly group of people closely related to the Clovis people, who entered North America slightly earlier, or such a people who entered at the same time but reached some areas first.

The second objection is that the Clovis people appear to have spread across the continents of the Americas incredibly fast, far faster than Humans appear to have colonised any other landmass. This has been raised in particular with reference to sites in southern Chile, which appear to be close in age, if not actually older than, the first Clovis sites in North America.

The third objection is that some of the earliest archaeological sites from South America have produced tool sets conceptually entirely different to the Clovis Technology, which is to say, the tools produced were made in a way so different that it seems unlikely that the producers had any knowledge of the Clovis manufacturing system. Notably, the Umbu, Itaparica, and Lagoa Santa stone tool traditions of Brazil were identified by Brazilian archaeologist Astolfo Araujo as being not only entirely conceptually different from Clovis, but entirely different from one-another. Furthermore, these cultures apparently continued to make entirely different sets of tools, having no influence upon one-another, despite living alongside one-another for thousands of years. However, none of the sites associated with these three cultures pre-dates the Clovis sites, rather their cultural uniqueness appeared to derive from an unknown earlier wave of settlers, which itself has left no trace.

Selected archaeological sites related to the eastern South America Paleoindian Traditions. Lagoa Santa: (1) Lapa do Santo, Boleiras and Taquaraçu; (2) Santana do Riacho; (3) Lapa Pequena; (4) BA-RC-28; (5) Abrigo do Pilão. Itaparica: (6) Gruta do Gentio II; (7) Lapa do Varal; (8) GO-JA-01; (9) MT-GU-01; (10) Lapa do Dragão; (11) Lapa do Boquete; (12) Furna do Estrago; (13) Pedra Furada (São Raimundo Nonato area); (14) Lajeado. Umbu: (15) PR-FI-124; (16) PR-FI-138; (17) Capelinha; (18) RS-C-43 and RS-S-327; (19) RS-I-69. Araujo (2015).

The final challenge to the Clovis-first Hypothesis came from the morphometric examination of ancient remains. Morphometric analysis is a tool used by palaeontologists, archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic pathologists to analyse and compare specimens. It relies on taking numerous measurements of an object such as a bone or shell, and comparing both these measurements and ratios between measurements to those obtained from other specimens in order to establish relationships between them. Traditionally these measurements have been obtained using tape measures and calipers, but modern scientists often use more sophisticated tools such as structured light scanners, which are capable of building highly detailed three dimensional models of specimens. 

Between 1989 and 1991 archaeologists Walter Neves and Hector Pucciarelli published a series of papers in which they suggested that, based upon morphometric examinations of their skulls, many sets of ancient individuals from South America appeared to be more closely related to modern Austronesians than to modern Native Americans or Northeast Asians. These remains, which included crania from sites associated with the Lagoa Santa culture, they identified as 'Palaeoamericans' to differentiate them from 'Palaeoindians' the term usually given to the most ancient Humans in the Americas, and which by extension are considered the ancestors of modern Native Americans.

This was controversial for a number of reasons. Firstly, while morphometric analysis is generally considered to be a reliable method of determining the relationships between species, it is less reliable in judging the difference between different groups of Modern Humans, where variation within populations is often as great as that between them. Attempts at applying morphometric analysis to Modern Human remains have frequently been linked to attempts by 'scientific racists' (a group who could be politely described as pseudoscientists) to prove that some groups of living Humans are somehow 'superior' to others.

Secondly, such studies rely on studying preserved skulls in museum collections. Many such skulls were acquired in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries under what would now be considered highly dubious circumstances, robbed from graves, or taken from executed criminals or prisoners of war (the execution of several people for stealing bodies from graves to sell to medical schools in eighteenth century Europe and the United States suggests that this was never thought to be particularly ethical). Such skulls often had (and in many cases still have) living relatives who objected to their being held in museum collections rather than being buried properly. 

Finally, many Native American populations are now marginalised in the Americas, having largely been displaced by the activities of European colonial powers and their successor states. Against this background, communities in many areas have managed to gain some protection, on the basis that they are the original inhabitants of the land. Any suggestion that this is not the case can potentially threaten such protections, leaving Native Americans open to the accusation that they are just one group in a long succession of different settlers.

Walter Neves, with Luzia, a skull from Lagua Santa, which is the oldest cranium discovered in the Americas to date. The skull was thought to be lost following a fire at the National Museum of Brazil in 2018, although fragments of it were subsequently recovered. piauí.

Despite these controversies, Walter Neves and his team continued with this research, adding more crania from South, Central, and even North America to their list of 'Palaeoamerican' skulls. In 2001, American archaeologist James Chatters published a book 'Ancient encounters: Kennewick Man and the first Americans' in which he assigned a 'Palaeoamerican' origin to Kennewick Man.

Kennewick Man (sometimes known as 'Ancient One') was a partial skeleton already surrounded by controversy. The skull of Kennewick Man was discovered by two college students in shallow sediment in the Columbia River in Washington State in 1996. Not unreasonably, they passed the skull to the local police. A subsequent search recovered much of the rest of the skeleton. The Benton County Coroner, responsible for the area where the remains were found, surmised that the remains were not recent and passed them to Chatters, who at that time ran an independent archaeological consultancy, for examination. 

Chatters initial diagnosis of the remains caused the initial controversy, since he concluded upon radiocarbon evidence that Kennewick Man was more than 9000 years old, and upon morphometric analysis of the skull that he was 'Caucasoid' - a term which did not exactly correspond to either 'European' or 'White' - but which had pretty clear implications. By convention, Native American remains discovered on federal lands in the US should be returned to the tribe to which they belong, for internment as they see fit. However, if Kennewick Man was more than 9000 years old, then he could not clearly be determined to belong to any modern Native American group, and the diagnosis of 'Caucasoid' implied that he was not Native American at all, and by implication that Native Americans were not the first people in the Americas.

This led a collection of Native American groups headed by the Umatilla Tribe, who live in the area and have an oral history which they assert goes back 10 000 years, to launch a legal bid to recover the remains of Kennewick Man. This was supported by the them President of the United States, Bill Clinton, and the US Army Corps of Engineers, who had nominal responsibility for the area where the remains were found. A counter case was brought by a group of anthropologists led by Robson Bonnichsen of the Center for the Study of the First Americans, who reasoned that the nature of the Kennewick Man's remains was so significant that they should be retained for study by science. In the event, on 4 February 2004, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that the remains should not be handed to the Umatilla or any other tribe, on the basis that kinship could not be established. The court further found that the United States Government had acted in bad faith in supporting the case, and awarded US$2 739 000 in costs to the anthropologists. A subsequent attempt in 2005 by Senator John McCain to amend the law on Native American remains to allow the return of the skeleton also failed.

The skeleton of Kennewick Man. Chip Clark/Smithsonian Institution.

Chatters' description of Kennewick Man as 'Palaeoamerican' did not follow Neve's description as a member of an Austronesian-related group, but rather proposed a mixture of European, Ainu (from northern Japan), Asia, Polynesian, and Australian features. If proposing that a cranium belongs to an ethnic group on the basis of morphometric analysis alone is problematic, the proposal of such a complex mixture should probably have been rejected out of hand. Nevertheless, this was taken quite seriously at the time, and discussions about Kennewick Man's possible affinities continued for several years.

In a paper published in the journal Nature on 18 June 2015, a team of scientists led by Morten Rasmussen of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, and the Department of Genetics at Stanford University, presented the results of a study which compared the genome of Kennewick Man to those of a variety of modern populations. This study found that Kennewick Man was of unequivocal Native American affinities, and was most closely related to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the groups which had previously tried to claim his remains as an ancestor. The United States Senate subsequently passed legislation allowing the remains to be returned to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes, and they were subsequently reburied at a secret location. 

On 21 August 2015 another paper was published in the journal Science, by a group of scientists led by Maanasa Raghavan, then also of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, and including Morten Rasmussen as one of the contributors. This paper sought to examine the wider origin of Native American peoples by sequencing the genomes of ancient individuals from the Americas and living individuals from 28 Native American and Siberian communities, which were then compared to a wider database of Human genomes from 169 populations around the globe. 

Raghaven et al. found that all Native Americans, with the exception of the Inuit, formed a single clade (group defined by a common ancestry), which could be divided into a northern group, comprising Athabascans (speakers of languages belonging to the Athabascan language group, which have sometimes been suggested to be a separate group from other Native Americans) plus some other groups from northwest North America), and a southern group, comprising all other Native Americans from elsewhere in North, Central, and South America. 

The Inuit were found to belong to a sister clade which also included the Koryak and Yupik peoples of Siberia. Interestingly, both the Inuit and Yapik appeared to be equally closely related to a 4000-year-old individual from the ancient Saqqaq culture of Greenland, suggesting that they might represent a back-migration from North America into northeastern Asia. All Native American, Inuit, Yapik, Saqqaq, and Koryak peoples were calculated to have had a last common ancestor who lived about 20 000 years ago (around the last glacial maximum), and a last common ancestor with the Nivkh people of Sakhalin Island and the Amur River basin as well as the Han Chinese about 23 000 years ago.

The last common ancestor of the northern and southern Native American groups was calculated to have lived about 13 000 years ago, and while whether this happened in Beringia or North America is unclear, Raghaven et al. believe that North America is the more likely region, as the southern group were found to be more closely related to the Anzick-1 child, who lived about 12 600 years ago in central Montana, and who was buried with a number of tools associated with the Clovis industry. Several ancient individuals from North America, including Kennewick Man, were found to be closely related to modern peoples living in the same area, showing a remarkable level of genetic continuity across much of the continent. No evidence of early European populations contributing to the Native American gene pool was found.

Curiously, however, Raghaven et al. did find a faint trace of Austronesian affinities among some Native American populations, including Aleutian Islanders, Athabascans, and the Surui people of Brazil. Despite the earlier controversies, this was not entirely improbable; the ancestors of modern Austronesians are known to have been present in East Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, and it is not impossible that an Austronesian-related people, or a people containing some admixture of Austronesian and Siberian genes, could have reached the Americas.

Origins and population history of Native Americans. (A) The results show that the ancestors of all present-day Native Americans, including Amerindians and Athabascans, derived from a single migration wave into the Americas (purple), separate from the Inuit (green). This migration from East Asia occurred no earlier than 23 000 years ago and is in agreement with archaeological evidence from sites such as Monte Verde. A split between the northern and southern branches of Native Americans occurred about 13 000 years ago, with the former comprising Athabascans and northern Amerindians and the latter consisting of Amerindians in southern North America and Central and South America, including the Anzick-1 individual. There is an admixture signal between Inuit and Athabascans as well as some northern Amerindians (yellowline); however, the gene flow direction is unresolved because of the complexity of the admixture events. Additionally, a weak signal related to Australo-Melanesians can be seen in some Native Americans, which may have been mediated through East Asians and Aleutian Islanders (yellow arrows). Also shown is the Mal’ta gene flow into Native American ancestors some 23 000 years ago (yellow arrow). It is currently not possible to ascertain the exact geographical locations of the depicted events; hence, the positioning of the arrows should not be considered a reflection of these (B) Admixture plot created on the basis of TreeMix results shows that all Native Americans form a clade, separate from the Inuit, with gene flow between some Native Americans and the North American Arctic. The number of genome-sequenced individuals included in the analysis is shown in brackets. Raghaven et al. (2015).

What is unclear is when such a population could have arrived. It is possible that such a population reached the Americas some time before the ancestors of modern Native Americans, but only survived and contributed to later genomes in a few places. It is also possible that such a population could have entered the Americas at the same time as other Native Americans, although why they appear to have interbred with a few widely dispersed populations before disappearing is unclear. It is also possible that all of the earliest Native American arrivals had a proportion of Austronesian ancestry, but that the genetic traces of this have been lost in most subsequent populations. Finally, it is possible that such a population entered the Americas later than other Native Americans, possibly through the Aleutian Islands, though it is unclear how they could have spread through an already inhabited Americas contributing to the gene pools of only a few widely scattered populations.

In order to try to test this hypothesis, Raghaven et al. carried out a morphometric analysis of a series of crania from ancient populations previously identified by Walter Neves and others as being of Palaeoamerican affinities, resembling Austronesians. This included samples from the ancient Pericúes people of Baja California, the Fuego-Patagonians of southern Chile and Argentina, and the ancient Lagoa Santa people of Brazil. However, they were unable to repeat the earlier results, finding that these people were not apparently morphologically different from other Native Americans.

On 8 November 2018, a group of scientists led by Víctor Moreno-Mayar, again of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, published another paper in the journal Science, which sought to understand the rate at which the earliest ancestors of modern Native Americans spread through the Americas. In order to do this they used genome data from 15 ancient individuals from the Americas, as well as modern individuals from indigenous communities. 

Moreno-Mayar et al. found the same early divide into Northern Native American and Southern Native American populations observed by Raghaven et al., although two of the oldest individuals in their study USR1, a female child from the Upward Sun River site in the Tanana River Valley of Alaska dated to 11 500 years before the present, and Trail Creek 2, a deciduous tooth from the Trail Creek Cave site on the Seward Peninsula dated to about 9000 years before the present, were found to form an outgroup to both of these despite being younger than the division between the two, suggesting that the Ancient Beringian population from which both were descended persisted in Alaska at this time. This supports the idea that the split between the Northern Native American and Southern Native American lineages occurred after the ancestors of these peoples had migrated south of Alaska. This also suggests that the Athabascan and Inuit populations of Alaska, who are members of the Northern Native American group and an outgroup to all Ancient Beringian and Native American populations respectively, moved into the region some time after 9000 years ago.

The split between the Northern Native American and Southern Native American populations was estimated to have happened between 17 500 and 14 600 years ago by Moreno-Mayar et al. The 12 600-year old Anzick-1 child from Montana, the Spirit Cave Individual from Nevada, dated to 10 700 years ago, and five individuals from Lagoa Santa dated to between 10 400 and 9800 years before the present. Two of the Lagoa Santa individuals belong to the same female haplogroup as Anzick-1 (determined from mitochondrial DNA, which is found in the mitochondria, and is passed directly from mother to child without being sexually recombined each generation), while three belong to the same male haplogroup as Spirit Cave (determined from Y-chromosome DNA, which is passed from father to son without recombination), suggesting that all of these individuals were closely related, confirming the extremely fast distribution of this group across the Americas. 

Surprisingly, the Lagoa Santa individuals were found to be more closely related to the Spirit Cave individual than were the modern Mixe people, who live in the eastern highlands of the state of Oaxaca State, Mexico. Moreno-Mayar et al. calculate that this is because, while the Mixe belong to the Southern Native American Group and show clear affinities to the Lagoa Santa group, they have also received a large genetic influx from a group they describe as Unknown Population A. This group was found to have diverged from the common ancestors of Ancient Beringians, Northern Native Americans, and Southern Native Americans, between 30 000 and 22 000 years before the present, around the time that these groups split from Siberians and East Asians. Moreno-Mayar et al. estimate that the Mixe are the result of a Southern Native American group interbreeding with Unknown Population A around 8700 years ago, and that they derive about 11% of their genetic heritage from this group.

The Anzick-1 and Spirit Cave individuals are thought to have shared a last common ancestor with the Lagoa Santa individuals and modern Mixe people who lived around 14 100 years ago, while the last common ancestor of the Lagoa Santa individuals and Mixe people is thought to have lived around 13 900 years ago, again supporting a very rapid dispersal of these groups across the Americas.

Moreno-Mayar et al. note that both the Spirit Cave individual and the Lagoa Santa individuals have been identified as 'Palaeoamericans' with apparent morphological similarities to Austronesians, and that some present day groups living in the Amazon region have been shown to have some Austronesian ancestry (although these groups have not been subjected to morphometric analysis). They found that the Lagoa Santa individuals did show a proportion of their genetic heritage with the modern Suruí people and Austronesians, and that this genetic heritage was not shared with the Mixe or Huichol peoples of Mexico, nor the Spirit Cave individual. 

Moreno-Mayar et al. also observe that many modern South American populations appear to have derived a significant part of their genetic heritage from a later influx from Mesoamerica, which shared the admixture of genes from Unknown Population A seen in the Mixe. Many modern populations show descent from both the migration which produced the Lagoa Santa individuals and the group ancestral to the modern Mixe. Notably, evidence of an Austronesian input only appears to be present in individuals from east of the Andes. Some North American populations also show signs of an influx of genetic material from Mesoamerica, although this appears to be more recent.

Thus, Moreno-Mayar et al.'s findings appear to support the presence of an Austronesian-related population in South America in the Early Holocene, although this appears to have been largely swamped by subsequent influxes of migrants belonging to different Southern Native American groups. However, a subsequent paper published in the journal Cell on 15 November 2018, by a team led by Cosimo Posth of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and the Institute for Archaeological Sciences, Archaeo- and Palaeogenetics at the University of Tübingen, which included a greater number of ancient genomes than previous studies came to a rather different conclusion. 

The new individuals included in the study included a 10 900-year-old individual from Los Rieles in Chile, two individuals from Belize dated to 9300 and 7400 years before the present, and individuals from the 9600-year-old Lapa do Santo site (associated with the Lagoa Santa culture) and the 6700-year-old Laranjal site (associated with the pottery-producing Koriabo culture) in Brazil, none of which appeared to be particularly closely related to modern individuals living in the same region. 

Also included were individuals from Cuncaicha and Lauricoch in Peruvian Andes, which despite being around 9000-years old, did appear to be directly related to modern individuals living in the same area. Individuals from Arroyo Seco in Argentina and Laguna Chica in Chile, both dated to around 8600 years before the present. The 5800-year-old Moraes individual, and individuals from the 2000-year-old Jabuticabeira 2 site in Brazil do show affinities with modern Brazilians.

Posth et al. note that many of the earliest individuals in South America, including those from Los Rieles in Chile and Lapa do Santo in Brazil, show close affinities with the Clovis Culture Anzick-1 individual from Montana, again supporting the rapid spread of this lineage, although this close relationship largely disappears from later populations. 

Posth et al. conclude that all Native American populations in South America, living and historic, are descended from four waves of migrants, all of which belong to the Southern Native American group. The first of these appears to have diverged from the main part of that lineage before Anzick-1, and therefore may-or-may-not have been associated with the Clovis Culture. The second has direct affinities to Anzick-1, and therefore can be associated with the Clovis Culture; this population appears to have reached the southern part of South America soon after the earliest sites associated with that culture in North America. The third group appears to be related to ancient individuals from the Californian Channel Islands, and to have reached the Central Andes by about 4200 years ago. The fourth group appears to have contributed to modern populations in the Amazon region; it is this population which other researchers have identified as having Austronesian affinities, however, Posth et al. disagree with this analysis.

By using both a larger set of ancient individuals and a wider coverage of the genome, Posthe et al. conclude that the 'Austronesian' influence found in many American groups is in fact a relic of ancient diversity found in the earliest Native Americans and Ancient Beringians, and that this has simply disappeared from most modern populations. This explains the apparently random distribution of these alleles (gene variants) in modern and ancient populations, without the need to invoke an ancient migration of Austronesian peoples into the Americas. 

There remains a considerable debate about the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas. It remains possible that one or more groups may have entered the Americas long before the arrival of modern Native American groups, and that that people may have had affinities to Austronesians, Siberians, East Asians, or other groups living in East Asia in the Late Pleistocene. There is, however, no evidence that such a population contributed to the genetic makeup of modern Native Americans. 

The Clovis Culture appeared among Southern Native Americans after they had entered North America, and rapidly expanded, reaching the southern part of South America within 2000 years. It was never, however, the only Native American culture in the Americas, and it is not therefore surprising to find evidence of other cultures preceding it in some areas.

See also...

English university returns rare Māori cloak to New Zealand.

The Oriental Museum at the University of Durham has returned a traditional Pauku Māori war cloak to New Zealand for a five-year exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, according to a press release issued on 11 December 2025. How the cloak came to be in the UK is unclear; it was initially loaned to the museum by the Trevelyan family in the 1960s, then donated in 1971, but had remained in storage for decades before being rediscovered. Pauki cloaks are incredibly rare, with the discovery of the Durham cloak bringing the number known to exist to five. 

The Pauku Māori war cloak. Te Ao Māori News.

A Pauku cloak was not a conventional cloak work primarily as a garment, but instead was used as a shield in battle, worn over one arm and held in front of the body. As such it was made of heavy fabric, specifically a tightly woven single-pair weft twined cloth called whatu patahi, and often soaked in water or mud, making it able to absorb much of the energy of a blow. Unfortunately, such cloaks offered little protection against firearms, and are not thought to have been manufactured since the eighteenth century.

The Durham cloak has a wā pōkere border design, popular in the seventeenth century and not previously seen on a Pauku Cloak. This design has a black background, representing the primal void, and a pattern representing the emergence of the world from this.

The cloak will be on display at the Auckland War Memorial Museum for five years, as part of an exhibition funded by the British Council and Creative New Zealand, as part of the Connections Through Culture program. During this time it will be studied by researchers and traditional weavers, and a decision will be made as to where it will be permanently located.

See also...

The deep roots of social inequality in South Africa's Cape Colony.

Thirty one years after the end of the Apartheid system, the World Bank still rates South Africa to be the most unequal country on Earth, with a Gini Index of 0.63, four points ahead of the second-placed nation, Namibia (the Gini Index measures inequality from 0.00 to 1.00, where 0.00 represents all wealth being distributed equally among the population, and 1.00 represents a single person owning everything within a nation). It has been calculated that the richest 1% of the South African population own 55% of the country's wealth, while the top 10% own more than 85%. Thus wealth inequality within South Africa is equal to that of the entire globe.

Most modern research into inequality in South Africa concentrates on the post-Apartheid era, although it is generally accepted that the country's long history of racial discrimination and political repression is linked to the current state of inequality. However, the question of when this inequality first arose has not really been addressed by historians.

In a paper published in the South African Journal of Science on 26 November 2025, Johan Fourie of the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past at Stellenbosch University presents the results of a study in which he examined historical records from the Dutch Cape Colony of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the British Cape Colony of the early nineteenth century, in order to attempt to understand the origins of the severe inequality seen in South Africa today.

Fourie notes that the Cape Colony was a deeply unequal place, even compared to modern South Africa. There were three distinct populations present, European settlers, enslaved people, and the indigenous Khoesan population (note, this is not always considered to be an acceptable name for this group, as it is linked to a history of persecution and discrimination, however, no term is universally deemed acceptable, and it is the term used by Fourie within his study). The economic inequality between these three groups, was predictably stark, but even within these groups inequality was very high.

Most societies in the developed world became steadily more equal in the decades after the Second World War, however, whilst this continued for the remainder of the twentieth century in continental Europe and Japan, the countries of the English-speaking word have become increasingly unequal since the 1970s, a pattern which has been repeated in India and China. Estimating inequality in pre-twentieth century societies is much harder, due to a paucity of records. Calculations have been made for the mid nineteenth century for the US and some western European countries, suggesting that they were more unequal than today. Studies looking at societies from before the nineteenth century are harder still, as census data simply did not exist in most places (the US undertook its first census in 1790, while the first census in England and Wales was taken in 1801). In Africa, such data is generally absent well into the twentieth century.

The Cape Colony provides a rare opportunity to examine wealth distribution in a pre-industrial society, as it was administered by colonial officials from first the Dutch East India Company and then the British Empire. who kept meticulous records of financial transactions, albeit largely with the aim of extracting wealth from the colony. Furthermore, Cape Town has never been affected by any major military conflict, something which as led to the destruction of records in many other parts of the world. 

Map of the Dutch Cape Colony in 1795, from George McCall Theal (1816). History of Africa south of the Zambesi - from the settlement of the Portuguese at Sofala in September 1505 to the conquest of the Cape Colony by the British in September 1795. G. Allen & Unwin Ltd, London. Internet Archive. 

Previous studies of inequality in South Africa have largely concentrated on the twentieth century, and the entrenching of disparities between racial groups by the Apartheid system, and associated political exclusion, social stratification, and control of the labour market. However, this system only entrenched divisions which were already present.

This concentration on twentieth century inequality has led to two visions of inequality in South Africa emerging, a 'Liberal' view which sees inequality as having arisen as a result of European conquest, with people becoming impoverished as a result of being dispossessed from their traditional lands, and a 'Radical' view, which views poverty as a result of a prolonged struggle over land, labour and markets. However, the debates between these two camps have generally been based around the way in which the problems should be viewed, with neither side concentrating particularly on the measurement of inequality.

The Cape Colony was founded by the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) in 1652, as a resupply station for ships on their way to Asia. It subsequently grew into a settler colony with a large agricultural economy, where at least a portion of the population enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that of Europe. This colony subsequently expanded into the African interior, with an expanding agricultural economy built upon the labour of  enslaved and Khoesan workers, and producing grain, wine, and livestock products.

Landing of Van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope by Charles Davidson Bell (painted in about 1850). Wikimedia Commons.

By 1825 the Cape Colony comprised 11 districts, with more than 10 420 settler households. At the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1834, a census found over 37 000 enslaved individuals. Records of Khoesan labourers are less clear, though this appears to have increased steadily over time.

Fourie was able to access a variety of records to facilitate his study. The most important of these were annual tax censuses, which were kept by both the Dutch East India Company and British colonial officials, and many of which have been transcribed in the past decade by a team of historians at the Cape Archives. Another source of information was probate inventories (records of people's assets at the time of their death, and how these were divided amongst their heirs), which were collected by the Master of the Orphan Chamber, a public official esponsible for administering estates when individuals died intestate, left heirs under 25 or unmarried or had heirs who were untraceable. A third source of information was the Slave Emancipation Dataset, which provided detailed information about the ownership of slaves at the time of emancipation. This survey was carried out by officials appointed from London, who toured the colony documenting who owned slaves, how many slaves they owned, and estimating the value of those slaves.

A wealthy family with slaves in Cape Town in 1760. Stellenbosch Museum.

Fourie began by calculating annual Gini coefficients for the district of Stellenbosch-Drakenstein based upon annual censuses taken between 1685 and 1844. This dataset comprised 142 219 individual household records, with an average of 995 households each year. To calculate relative wealth, six assets were examined, Horses, Cattle, Sheep, wheat reaped, vines and wine.

Three trends became immediately obvious from this dataset. The first was that wealth distribution in the Cape Colony was remarkably uneven, even when only free households were included. Second is that this applies to all assets, with no asset producing a Gini coefficient less than 0.5 at any point in the record. The third was that whole there were some periods of volatility in the records, these largely reflect points at which the data collecting method was changed, rather than political events.

Fourier then combined all six asset datasets into a single bucket, using values for each item derived from the Orphan Chamber dataset. This again produced a record of remarkably uneven wealth distribution, with the Gini coefficient remaining between 0.6 and 0.75 throughout the eighteenth century, then rising further in the nineteenth century (although this was lower than for the most extreme asset types).

Looking at the share of wealth held by the wealthiest portion of the population, Fourier found that the top 1% of the population held an average of 12% of the total wealth over the eighteenth century at, but that this increased over time, with their holding on average 18% of the wealth over the period 1800-1830. This was true for smaller wealth divisions too, with the wealthiest 0.1% of the population holding an average of 2% of the total wealth in the eighteenth century and 3.7% of the total in the period 1800-1830, while the top 0.01% owned an average of 0.5% of the total wealth through the eighteenth century, and an average of 0.8% of the total wealth in the period 1800-1830. Fourier notes that because these figures reflect only agricultural assets, that they cannot be directly compared to modern statistics, but that they do demonstrate evidence for early wealth inequality.

Fourier also calculated a Gini coefficient for slave ownership, which again was very high, consistently remaining above 0.7. Adding slaves into the general basket, however, reduced the average slightly, which Fourier suggests may reflect many slaves being involved in non-taxable activities, such as domestic servitude.

However, slaves are not just assets, they are people, and members of the community. Since most slaves could be assumed to have no assets (this is not always strictly the case), Fourier first tried representing each male slave as the head of a household with zero assets. This skewed wealth distribution even further, reaching 0.92 by the end of the eighteenth century. Since slaves do have to be provided for in some way, Fourier next repeated the experiment with the assumption that slave households had resources equivalent to six sheep per year. This produced a Gini coefficient with varied between 0.89 and 0.91 over the course of the eighteenth century, comparable for the figures calculated for the slave-owning communities of the Caribbean. Thus the Cape Colony would have been one of the most unequal societies of the early modern world.

Because these records are only from a single district, Stellenbosch-Drakenstein, there remains the possibility that this district was uniquely uneven in its wealth distribution. Records were not available for all districts throughout the period, but Fourier was able to assemble a roughly coeval record set by using 1825 for the Cape District, Stellenbosch, Graaff-Reinet, Swellendam, Albany, Beaufort, George and Uitenhage; 1824 for Clanwilliam and Worcester; and 1823 for Cradock. Using this data, he created Gini coefficients for Horses, Oxen, Cattle, Sheep, wheat and wine. This record included 10 420 individual households.

The Gini coefficient remained above 0.5 for all agricultural measures in all districts, with the single exception that Albany District does not produce any wine. In all other districts, wine produced a Gini coefficient of 0.8 or higher. Distributions were most even for Horses and Oxen. Fourier suggests that Stellenbosch was at the upper end of wealth distribution inequality for two reasons; high wine production and a large number of slaves.

'Mossel Bay on the Indian Ocean' by Robert Cocking, 1818. British Library/Wikimedia Commons.

Next Fourier looked at information derived from probate records. Potentially, this could be used to examine household possessions, something absent from the taxation records, though Fourier instead chose to remain with agricultural assets, as this allowed easier comparison with records derived from other sources. Probate records were available for all districts for the entire period, with little variation in how records were made. 

Using these records, Fourier examined five agricultural assets, Cattle, Horses, Sheep, ploughs, and wagons, for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This produced similar results to the taxation records, consistently showing a Gini coefficient of greater than 0.6 for all assets, and from 1770 onwards, a Gini coefficient greater than 0.7, indicating a high rate of wealth inequality among settlers from the earliest days of the colony. 

The slave emancipation report records the value of each slave owned at the time of abolition, plus the compensation paid to each slave-owner, with a total of 36 417 individual records. All records come from the year 1834. Gigi coefficients constructed for slave ownership by district showed a high level of inequality, but not as great as for other assets, ranging from 0.29 for Somerset and Uitenhage to a 0.47 for Worcester. Gini coefficients for compensation for the loss of slaves ranged from 0.45 in Somerset to 0.55 in the Cape District. 

However, these figures only show inequality among slave-owning colonists, with less than 30% of the settler population at the time actually owning slaves. Once the 13 033 non-slave-owning settler households were added to the equation, the Gini coefficients shifted considerably, giving coefficients for slave-ownership between 0.49 in Stellenbosch (where slave-ownership was comon) and 0.75 in Beaufort (where slave-ownership was unusual). Coefficients for compensation were even higher, ranging from 0.83 in Somerset to 0.92 in the Cape District.

However, European settlers and their slaves were never the only people present in the Cape Colony. By the early nineteenth century a number of Khoe settlements had been incorporated into the colonial administrative system, with some, notably mission stations, having produced documentation which is now being transcribed and analysed by modern scholars. To try to represent this population, Fourier looked at three such settlements, Bethelsdorp, Swartrivier, and Groenekloof, concentrating on records from 1825.

Bethelsdorp, near Algao Bay, was founded in 1804 by the London Missionary Society, and became an important settlement where the Khoe people were able to gain some protection and autonomy within the colonial system, with a population of 425 households by 1814. However, the settlement suffered from poil soil quality, and a variety of other economic problems. 

The Swartrivier settlement in Swellendam District grew more organically, attracting pastoralist Khoe who worked as herders of labourers for European farmers, often under exploitative conditions. By 1825 Swartrivier was home to 364 households.

Groenekloof, located on the coast 55 km to the north of Cape Town, was founded by the Moravian Missionary Society in 1808, and became a haven for freed slaves and Khoesan, By 1825 the settlement comprised 108 households, practising subsistence farming, or working as labourers on settler-owned farms.

Tax records were collected for these settlements in the same way as they were for settler communities, although the number of variables per household was generally lower, probably as a reflection of these households owning fewer assets. In analysing these households, Fourier looked at five assets, Cattle, Horses, Oxen, Sheep and wheat reaped. 

Creating Gini coefficients for these assets revealed severe inequality within all three settlements. Only a single asset type (Cattle at Bethelsdorp) produced a coefficient lower than 0.75, and that was 0.72. The distribution of many assets approached near perfect inequality (i.e. the situation where one person owns all of the asset). For example, only ten families owned sheep in Bethelsdorp and only one family owned Sheep in Groenekloof. Thus, inequality among the Khoe was typically more severe than among European settlers. Including this group with the general population pushed inequality even further, due to the greater wealth typically held by settler households. This led to a Gini coefficient for Cattle ownership of 0.92, and measures for Horses, Oxen and wheat all in excess of 0.77.

Korah/Koranna preparing to move. Samuel Daniell, 1831. William Fehr Collection/Iziko Museums of South Africa.

Fourier's findings reflect severe inequality (generally interpreted as a Gini coefficient of greater than 0.6) for all assets, and both within and between communities, throughout the history of the Cape Colony. Such inequality had clearly arisen long before the beginning of the twentieth century. While comparing historic income and wealth to their modern equivalents is notoriously problematic, within-period comparisons can determine the distribution of assets, and therefore how equal or unequal societies were.

See also...

The Blood Customs of Dahomey.

The West African coast on the Gulf of Guinea comprises a network of lagoons and waterways stretching from the Volta River to Lagos, with hundreds of miles of navigable waterways, good agricultural land, and both access to the Atlantic Ocean shelter from its storms. People have lived in this area for at least two-and-a-half thousand years, potentially much longer, although we do not really know how long. The archaeological record of this area is poor. The wet tropical climate does not favour preservation, much of the landscape is made up of shifting islands and waterways, which appear and vanish over time, and many old occupation sites are seen as sacred by the local population.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD, Aja-speaking peoples migrated from the Tado area on the River Mono in what is now eastern Togo migrated southeast onto what is now southern Benin, conquering or intermingling with the peoples already living their, and forming a new ethnic identity, the Fon. By around 1600 AD, this are had been split into three kingdoms, Allada (or Greater Arda), on the southeastern coastal plain of modern Benin, Ajatche (or Lesser Arda) on the southwestern coastal plain, and Dahomey on the Abomey Plateau, inland and to the north of both.

Initially Allada appears to have been dominant to the other two kingdoms, which paid it tribute, but sometime between 1620 and 1645, however, this relationship was overturned when a King of Dahomey, probably Dakodonu, overthrew the king of Allada. The name Dahomey itself is probably a misnomer, meaning, roughly 'The King had his stomach ripped out' in the Fon language, in reference to this overthrowing of Allada; the people of the kingdom probably always referred to it as 'Abomey', the name of both the capitol city and the plateau on which it stands, but European travellers favoured Dahomey, which was the name eventually given to the French colony which was formed in 1894; this later gained independence as the Republic of Dahomey in 1960, changing its name to the People's Republic of Benin in 1975 (confusingly, this refers to the Bight of Benin, part of the Gulf of Guinea; the city of Benin is far to the east in Nigeria), and the Republic of Benin in 1990.

Dahomey appears to have embraced the opportunity to trade with Europeans early. It initially traded extensively with Portugal, importing firearms, cloth, beads and Cowrie shells, cloth, and alcohol, and exporting local goods and slaves. This trade appears to have been profitable to both sides, relations were good between the nations, and Dahomey established a permanent diplomatic mission in Brazil, so important was the trade relationship. Portuguese traders recorded Dahomey as a civilised country with a ruling class living in walled cities and an agricultural economy, based largely on serf labour, not notably different to its neighbours. Most of the slaves purchased there were local serfs, with some prisoners of war captured from neighbouring states.

Over time, the Portuguese were replaced as the main trading partners of Dahomey by the British, whose merchants told a very different story. They recounted Dahomey as a fierce warrior kingdom, with a standing army of over ten thousand, including regiments of female amazon warriors. This Dahomey waged constant war against its neighbours, and exported thousands of slaves every year, all apparently taken in battle. The agricultural system had been transformed, with a plantation system imported from the Americas and manned by more captured slaves, the Dahomeans themselves appear to have been almost entirely employed in the business of war (even the women). Furthermore, each year a great ceremony, known to Europeans as the 'Customs of Dahomey' took place in which hundreds of slaves were sacrificed to the local deities of the Voodún (or Voodoo) religion (despite their willingness to trade with Europeans, the Kings of Dahomey appear to have had little time for Christian missionaries). 

An illustration depicting victims awaiting sacrifice at a ceremony in Abomey in 1793, from Archibald Dalzel's The history of Dahomy, an inland Kingdom of Africa. New York Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

There are a number of potential explanations for this difference. Possibly, the Portuguese were unaware, or untroubled, by the ferocious nature of the Dahomeans, although given the apparent closeness of the two nations, and the general enthusiasm of the Portuguese Empire for spreading the Catholic faith (which was willing to put up with quite a bit of brutality in the name of Christ, but nor any pagan deity), this seems unlikely. Alternatively, British merchants may have greatly exaggerated the behaviour of the Dahomeans. This would have had some advantages, if Dahomey was such a wild and savage place, then the merchants who ventured there would be seen as correspondingly more brave and adventurous by their peers. Also, slavery was much easier to justify if you were taking slaves from brutal masters in Africa, who might sacrifice at any moment on the whims of the priests of some terrible pagan god, and selling them on into the comparatively benign stewardship of a Christian planter in the New World. A third explanation is that the size of the slave industry had a brutalising affect on the kingdoms of West and Central Africa, as over time each nation had to raise a larger-and-larger army to protect its own citizens from raids by its neighbours, and was forced to fund its armies by carrying out more-and-more raids on its neighbours. Under this scenario, which was favoured by abolitionists in Britain and elsewhere, smaller African states were wiped from the map, with their citizens being shipped en mass to the Americas, while the remaining nations needed not just to be well armed, but to appear sufficiently alarming to be left alone.

The Voodún religion is not a doctrinal monolithic faith with a single religious text like Christianity or Islam, but rather a polytheistic religion with a large (and variable) number of deities, with different stories told about them in different places. The religion has historically been followed in the southeast of Ghana, southern parts of Togo and Benin, and the southwest of Nigeria (although the variable nature of the religion means that there can be some doubt about where it starts and finishes), and has spread to areas of the New World, including parts of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Southwestern United States. 

Voodún is split into a large number of cults, each dedicated to a specific deity, with different forms of worship, although most commonly through 'fetishes', idols in which divine spirits are believed to reside, and to which sacrifices (typically of food) are made. Some are open in their worship, organising large public festivals and parades; others are secretive in nature. A persistent rumour among Voodún worshippers, and neighbouring peoples, is that some of these more secretive cults practised Human sacrifice (a popular trope in both Hollywood and Nigerian movies), something which appears to have become part of the official state religion in Dahomey. 

From 1728 the Oyo Empire, a Yoruba state based in western Nigeria, which had by this time expanded to cover most of Yorubaland (the area occupied by culturally Yoruba people) and several areas outside it, staged a series of invasions of Dahomey, finally incorporating it as a vassal state in 1748. During this time a Dahomean King named Agaja married a Voodún priestess named Hwanjile, about whom there are a variety of legends. Hwanjile may have been herself captured by the Dahomeans as a slave, before marrying the king, and may have brought two sons from a previous relationship with her, who then became stepsons of the king. It is also said that when the Oyo Emperor demanded a son of the King of Dahomey be sent to him as tribute, and all of the other wives of the king refused to send their sons, that Hwanjile sent one of hers. 

The Oyo Empire at its greatest extent in about 1780. Lovejoy (2014)/Wikimedia Commons.

Agaja was a successful military leader, who expanded to borders of Dahomey in several directions by taking over smaller states, but was unable to completely repel assaults by the Oyo Empire, a much bigger state with a large and highly effective cavalry. In 1740 Agaja died, probably in another battle with Oyo, he was not succeeded by his oldest son and official heir, Zinga, but by a younger son, Tegbessu, who was either a son of Hwanjile, or had made an alliance with her. 

Upon becoming king, Tegbessu appointed Hwanjile his 'Kpojito' a title which translates roughly as 'Queen Mother'. Similar roles exist in many traditional African kingdoms, and imply a female relative who co-rules with a king. This is not usually the king's spouse, and while it could be his mother, it might equally be an aunt or sister. In this role Hwanjile appears to have significantly re-arranged religious practices within Dahomey, introducing new deities, and (allegedly) the custom of human sacrifice. The name Hwanjile has itself become an important title, with a succession of priestesses descended from the original Hwnajile taking on the name and serving as chief priestess to this day. Tegbessu was eventually forced to submit to dominion by the Oyo Empire, but remained an important ruler, reigning over Dahomey until his death in 1774.

Tegbessu was followed as king by Kpengla (the relationship between the two is unclear), who ruled till 1789, with the throne passing to his son, Agonglo, who ruled till 1797, and was succeeded by his son, Adandozan. All three of these kings struggled against, but were ultimately unable to overthrow, dominion by the Oyo Empire. In 1818 Adandozan was overthrown in a coup by his brother (or son, depending on the version of the story), Ghézo, with the aid of a Brazilian slave trader called Francisco Félix de Sousa. With de Souza's help, Ghézo significantly restructured the Dahomean state, replacing a peasant-based agricultural system with plantation system manned by captive slaves, similar to that of Brazil, and using the freed Dahomean workforce to vastly expand the military. 

In 1823, the Dahomeans began raiding areas outside of Dahomey but considered to be under the protection of the Alaafin (Emperor) of Oyo. The Alaafin immediately ordered that this cease, and a large sum of reparations be paid. Instead, Ghézo sent de Souza as a messenger to Oyo, demanding that Oyo make peace. The Alaafin rejected this, and dispatched an expeditionary force to Dahomey, with the aim of putting down the rebellion, but this was defeated by Ghézo's reformed military, securing independence for the kingdom.

Portrait of King Ghézo of Dahomey, painted some time before 1851. From Frederick Forbe's Dahomey and the Dahomans. New York Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

In theory, this should have left Dahomey well-placed, and independent nation with a strong military, no need to pay tribute to a larger state, and having good contacts with the market to which its primary commodity, slaves, was sold. Unfortunately, in the 1833 slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, and the British Navy began imposing a blockade on the Atlantic coast of Africa intended to prevent everyone else stop trading in slaves too. This did not bring an immediate end to the slave trade (demand for slaves was growing in the Americas at this time, British merchants were still quite happy to trade in goods derived from slave labour, and those freed by the British Navy intercepting slave ships were more likely to end up in indentured servitude in a British colony somewhere), but it did present a significant problem for African states with economies reliant on the export of slaves. 

This lead to a slow weakening of Ghézo's power both at within his kingdom, where a poor economy undermined support for his reign, particularly following the death of de Souza in 1849, and in the wider region, where states such as Abeokuta and Badagry in southern Nigeria profited by forming close ties with the British. In 1851 Ghézo launched a disastrous invasion of Abeokuta, in which the armies of Dahomey were defeated with British support, and which led to a British naval blockade of all ports controlled by Dahomey. In 1852 Ghézo was forced to sign in a treaty promising to end the trade in slaves (although British officials in the region never believed he was completely sticking to this), and in 1853, in a second treaty, he agreed to end the sacrifice of captives taken in wars in the annual customs (convicted criminals could still be executed at these events). In 1857 Ghézo officially announced he was breaking these treaties and resuming the slave trade probably in response to internal pressures within his kingdom, and in 1858 launched a second war against Abeokuta. Unfortunately, the Dahomean army was defeated just as quickly on this occasion, and Ghézo was (probably) assassinated later that year, being replaced by his son Glele. Dahomey never regained its military strength, and in 1890 was invaded by France, being first made a protectorate, and then four years later officially part of French West Africa. 

Each of the Kings of Dahomey built their own palace complex, including a mixture of residential, administrative, and ceremonial buildings. In 1944, Charles André Maurice Assier de Pompignan, Lieutenant-Governor of the Dahomey Colony and Dependencies, converted these palaces into a museum, the Royal Palaces of Abomey, open to the public, something which they remain to this day, additionally becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. Between 2018 and 2022, a collaboration between the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, and the French Ministère de l'Europe et des Affaires étrangères, were allowed to carry out archaeological investigations at the Royal Palaces of Abomey.

Entrance to the Palace of Ghézo at the Royal Palaces of Abomey. Karalyn Monteil/UNESCO.

Within the compound of Ghézo at the Royal Palaces of Dahomey is the tomb of the king himself. The mortar from which these buildings were made is reputed to have contained a mixture of ritual ingredients, including the blood of 41 sacrificed Human victims (the ritual inclusion of magical or sacred ingredients into the mortars from which traditional buildings were made is not unusual in West Africa, but including the blood of sacrificed Human victims certainly is).

The archaeologists were able to take two samples from an inside wall of King Ghézo's tomb at the Royal Palaces of Dahomey. These were then tested for their protein content, with the results of the study being published in May 2024 in a paper in the journal Proteomics, by Philippe Charlier of the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, the Laboratory of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Biology at Université Paris-Saclay, and the Foundation of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Biology at the Institut de France, Virginie Bourdin, also of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Biology at Paris-Saclay University, Didier N’Dah of the Département d’Histoire et d’Archéologie at the Université d’Abomey-Calavi, and Mélodie Kielbasa, Olivier Pible, and Jean Armengaud of the Département Médicaments et Technologiespour la Santé at Université Paris-Saclay, present the results of this study and discuss its implications. 

Proteomics, the study of proteins recovered from ancient materials, is a relatively new discipline, which has some distinct advantages over the more established discipline of palaeogenomics. Proteomics it targets ancient proteins rather than DNA. Since protein is much more stable than DNA, this enables the study of much older samples, as well as samples from environments where DNA is unlikely to be preserved well, such as the wet tropical climate of the Abomy Plateau. Moreover, while our DNA is identical in every cell, each tissue the body produces contains a number of unique proteins, which not only helps to determine the type of tissue being examined, but also helps to rule out contamination, as this is typically in the form of skin or hair cells, and can be excluded from a study such as that carried out by Charlier et al. which was looking primarily for traces of blood.

Illustration of the wall of King Ghezo’s tomb. Panel A shows a general view of the cenotaph wall. Panel B shows specific detail of the red wall buttressed by a wood beam. Philippe Charlier in Charlier et al. (2024).

Charlier et al. were able to identify 5866 different peptides (short chains of amino acids, which can be combined together to form proteins) in their sample, including 4208 from Bacterial proteins, 1240 from Eukaryotes, and 50 from Archaeans. Of the Eukaryotic peptides, 271 could be assigned to Chordates, including 49 from Bovids, 21 from Chickens, and 215 from Humans. Furthermore, while the Bovine peptides were largely associated with milk, many of the the Human and Chicken peptides were associated with blood, indicating that both Human and Chicken blood had been added to the mixture from which the mortar had been made, with Human blood making up a significantly larger portion.

Taxonomical results obtained for dataset B3. Five taxonomical ranks (Superkingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus) are represented by rings (from the inner to the outer, respectively). The number of entities identified for each of the taxonomical ranks are separated by white lines,and their width corresponds to the abundance measured (TSMs ratio). The most abundant genera are indicated. Charlier et al. (2024).

Thus, Charlier et al.'s data strongly indicates that Human blood was a significant ingredient of the mixture from which the walls of the tomb of Ghézo were made. This in turn appears to support the more lurid stories of European, particularly British, visitors to the Dahomey from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which emphasise the frequency and large scale of Human sacrifice within the kingdom. However, this is a study of a single tomb from a specific point in the history of Dahomey, and does not imply that this was the case throughout the kingdom's history, thus the earlier, largely Portuguese, accounts which do not mention these practices may equally be true, in which case the kingdom may have adopted these practices during its long involvement with the slave trade and constant wars with neighbouring states.

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