The Eighth Continent

So for those curious I have based the main components of the Qamari on three groups

  • The semi-mythical Vazimba known by the stories of Merina as the indigenous people of Madagascar. They are described as dark skin, hairy, short and vegeculturalists who brought about the political structure of proto-Malagasy peoples. The Vazimba queen intermarried into what would become the ruling merina family who were darker than other elites who retained a largely southeast asian appearance and used their royal vazimba heritage as their claim to power of the Island.
  • The Akafula. The same source ATL's Qamari people and most likely Vazimba. These are the semi-mythical aboriginal peoples of eastern Katanga, Zambia, Malawi and northern Mozambique. A dark skin, hairy and short people connected to the real Nachikufan complex that existed north of the Zambezi. These peoples were exploiters of rivers, lakes and miombo; were hunters and fishers who used weighted bored stones on digging sticks, used microliths, ground stone axes, scrapers and beaters for bark cloth manipulation. Strangely the traditions of Chewa and other agriculturalists with bantu roots claim the Akafula and not they were metallurgists and taught such traditions to these new migrants along with rainmaking.
  • Further north in Tanzania and Kenya nearer to the coast Chagga and other bantu migrants speak of a "little people" who were distinct from the yellow skinned steppe Wasi (Hadza and Sandawe) near Mt Kilimanjaro and surrounding mountainscapes. All the bantu around this region have a rather complex list of terms to denote Banana radically different than everyone else and are not a lexical innovations. Rather their terms align with a yet undiscovered non-bantu/non-khoisan language for "Ensete" a distantly related relative of Banana. Given the record of ensete exploitation of about 100k years old in Mozambique these people may very well have been a distinct semi-agriculturalist ensete culture population whose knowledge of vegetative propagation in ensete may have allowed an easy transition into Banana and Taro brought by Southeast Asians 3-2k b.p.
According to recent genetic testing both eastern Zambia and southeastern Mozambique have populations with highly divergent and unique haplogroups distinct from groups we today call Khoisan

Overall, the results of this analysis indicate that it is very unlikely that the highly divergent L0k1b/L0k2 lineages were incorporated into the Bantu-speaking populations via gene flow from a population that was ancestral to a Khoisan population in our sample but subsequently lost from the Khoisan population via drift.Instead, these results support the hypothesis that the ancestors of the Bantu-speaking populations carrying the divergent L0k lineages (who now live mainly in Zambia) experienced gene flow from a pre-Bantu population that is nowadays extinct. Alternatively, it is possible that descendants from this pre-Bantu population do exist but have not yet been included in population genetic studies; however, our extensive sampling of populations from Botswana, Namibia, and West Zambia (which includes representatives of nearly all known Khoisan groups) makes it highly unlikely that this pre-Bantu Khoisan population has not yet been sampled.
The American Journal of Human Genetics, 17 January 2013 doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2012.12.010

Ancient Substructure in Early mtDNA Lineages of Southern Africa

"The southeastern Bantu from Mozambique are remarkably differentiated from the western Niger-Congo speaking populations, such as the Mandenka and the Yoruba, and also differentiated from geographically closer Eastern Bantu samples, such as Luhya.

These results suggest that the Bantu expansion of languages, which started ~5000 years ago at the present day border region of Nigeria and Cameroon, and was probably related to the spread of agriculture and the emergence of iron technology, was not a demographic homogeneous migration with population replacement in the southernmost part of the continent, but acquired more divergence, likely because of the integration of pre-Bantu people.

The complexity of the expansion of Bantu languages to the south (with an eastern and a western route), might have produced differential degrees of assimilation of previous populations of hunter gatherers. This assimilation has been detected through uniparental markers because of the genetic comparison of nowadays hunter gatherers (Pygmies and Khoisan) with Bantu speaker agriculturalists.

Nonetheless, the singularity of the southeastern population of Mozambique (poorly related to present Khoisan) could be attributed to a complete assimilation of ancient genetically differentiated populations (presently unknown) by Bantu speakers in southeastern Africa, without leaving any pre-Bantu population in the area to compare with. . . the fact that our dataset of 2841 SNPs has only limited fine-scale resolution makes the observed strong differentiation of the population from Mozambique even more striking."
European Journal of Human Genetics (2011) 19, 84–88; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2010.141; published online 25 August 2010

A genomic analysis identifies a novel component in the genetic structure of sub-Saharan African populations
 
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Thoughts so far? I'm trying to work on my writing style but I only ever look at non-fiction dry reads.
 
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"Great Duyu!

We make your bed in tilled soils made soft

Come lie down and rest

We sing, No! We praise your glory

For you fed our ancestors before the Great Washing only to greet us when we landed on new ground

Great Duyu!

You fill our bellies and furnish our homes, give fibre to twist our rope and weave our cloth

Fill our cradles with your padding and wrap our dead, shade our sick and infirmed, keep us vital and in good health

Rest in bed and gain your strength

For come harvest we will wake you from slumber

We broke your crown as we break our daily bread from the ladder

Cared for your children as we would ours

Make young marriage partners fat and fertile, make our families large and strong

Flower and add sweetness to our tongues and souls with your fruit and by the meat of your stem and corm to encourage our service, a prayer through the sweat of our brow

We prostrate and give alms before the forest spirits that inhabit the Sacred Groves, we beg for abundance.

Let us renew our sacred pact: for as long as we live we will make Duyu flourish, for as long as we breath we will Duyu into existence and ask Duyu to allow our people life into perpetuity

So it is said, so it will be done!
The core prayer of highest holy day in the Central Highland at the beginning of the growing season

Duyu or Ensete Qamariensis is the lifeblood of Qamari society. As the song above states Duyu provides the basis for day to day lives of it's farmers and livestock. It compliments the growing of coffee and spices by way of shade and water retention.

It is hard to say exactly when the first Duyu was domesticated since its wild and domesticated forms over lap in form and habit but with recent data we place ensete dependency by no later than 11kya. Archeologists have dated the oldest pits for storage at some 9k years but the size and number show a likely much older date.

Propagation is largely made vegetatively with ease by making a cut on the crown of the corm and placing soil over it. In time, a number of sprouts develop ranging from a dozen to about one hundred depending on the variety. Placed in nurseries to develop and harden, by two months they are ready to plant in the main fields.

Unlike banana, the main bulk of calories is derive from its starchy core and corm that's scraped and fermented in pits sometimes over a decade. But unlike abyssnian ensete if allowed to fully fruit sweet yet distinctly flavored and seedless berries can be harvested as a delicacy.

With the adaption to shedding its leaves at the peak of cool dry season in the wild, Duyu is a drought and frost tolerant crop found from the humid lowlands to just above the treeline with varying degrees of efficiency and robustness provided microclimates are given in the hottest regions.

A resilient store house for an out of the way subsistence farmer's daily needs or the urban poor with a marginal plot to cultivate. Duyu makes life a little easier for the penniless.

What would the world look like today had Duyu in all its variety not been adopted throughout the tropics and semi arid sub tropics? Likely, its many people would be relying heavily on cassava devoid of nutrients and minerals; full bellies but highly malnourished with nothing to feed livestock.
 
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Africa, both East and South should be completely different this ATL.
This civilization will be visited by Indian and Indonesian traders as they've reached Madagascar OTL.
A domesticate capable of surviving the Tsetse Zone will have very interesting effects.

Though I really hope you'll refrain from using words we don't understand and having to break immersion to scroll down and check your Author notes just to keep reading. It's incredibly annoying.
 
Africa, both East and South should be completely different this ATL.
This civilization will be visited by Indian and Indonesian traders as they've reached Madagascar OTL.
A domesticate capable of surviving the Tsetse Zone will have very interesting effects.

Though I really hope you'll refrain from using words we don't understand and having to break immersion to scroll down and check your Author notes just to keep reading. It's incredibly annoying.
There will be real shifts in South Africa and East Central Africa but in all reality it's going to change the whole continent and globe.

I am going along the same path as LoRG and LoIM with the use of new words. To me shifting the language gets people to understand a society's social constructs and cultural institutions.
 
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