Monday, 20 February 2017

Why Iwo Eleru is important - The Yoruba did not emigrate from Mecca!

Iwo Eleru is a rock shelter in south-western Nigeria. It is about 24 km north-west of Akure (the state capital of Ondo State) with coordinates 7°26’30” N and 5°7’40”.
Archaeological findings in Yorubaland have always confirmed that Neolithic (later part of the Stone Age) people once inhabited Yorubaland especially around the Ile-Ife environs. However, the watershed moment came in 1965 when a team lead by Thorstan Shaw of the University of Ibadan discovered a skeletal remains dated to circa 9200 BC in a cave at Iwo Eleru (near Akure). This discovery unambiguously and unequivocally confirmed that humans were living in Yorubaland 13,000 years ago!
No chance this particular person whose remains was found at Iwo-Eleru came from Mecca! It poured cold water on the fable of Lamurudu/Oduduwa - magicians turned Muslims narrative who emigrated from Mecca to Ile-Ife. Islam is just 1,400 years old compared to a 13,000-year old remains!
Apart from this archeological evidence, linguistic evidence proved that the Yoruba language emerged as a distinct language which separated from the Kwa group in the Niger-Congo group of languages.as long as 2000BC. Even though Yoruba language later borrowed some Arabic words (e.g alaafia/al-aafiah, alubosa/al-basal, adua/ad-du'a, alubarika/al-barakah etc) the two languages have nothing in common lexically.
Even if the Yoruba migrated from somewhere else before they settled in Yorubaland, they certainly did not come from Mecca or Arabia. Furthermore, according to Islamic tradition, the history of Mecca goes back to Abraham (Ibrahim), who built the Kaaba with the help of his elder son Ishmael in around 2000 BC.

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