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REVIEW OF ARTICLE BY NICHOLAS WADE

By Professor Catherine Acholonu

Lead-author, The Gram Code of African Adam;

They Lived Before Adam; The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam.

The New York Times (Apr. 2011) has published an article by Nicholas Wade, reviewing a new research, which maintains that all languages developed from a common mother-language from Sub-Saharan Africa that was carried to other parts of the world by Homo erectus African migrants over 100,000 years ago during the Out of Africa migrations. The linguistic research was said to have been conducted by Dr Quentin Atkinson, a biologist. Though I find it hard understand the practice of linguistics by a Biologist, yet this research supports our thesis, nevertheless.

I have been getting mails from colleagues and readers who maintain that this research corroborates our thesis published in the Adam Trilogy, where our research team maintain, based on our linguistic findings that Homo Erectus left Africa with language and culture and a set of cosmic symbols which are found on stones and rock all over the world.

The DISCOVERY that language first developed in Sub-Saharan Africa  was first released from the findings of the Catherine Acholonu Research Center in 2009 and was aired on C-Span Book TV in New York. All our findings in this regard are published in our ground-breaking/award-winning Trilogy - The Gram Code of African Adam (2005); They Lived Before Adam (2009); The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam (2010).

The Adam Trilogy proffers a pile of proofs that our researchers amassed over a period of twenty years in three volumes totalling about 1,500 pages of research to the effect that (among other things) Homo erectus had a language and a culture before leaving Africa, and that the mother language of humanity  originated in the Niger -Congo/Chad basin area of Africa, not Southern Africa as the new research purports. As a matter of fact, what this new research calls "South-West Africa" should be understood as "West Africa", as opposed to "Northern Africa" because the Bantus who populate much of East, Central and Southern Africa migrated from Nigeria as linguists have long proved. Similarity]ies of words and meanings including their clan name, show that the Shan/San Bushmen of the South African Kalahari most likely migrated from West African cave-men called Nshi among the Igbo of Nigeria.

The new research by Atkinson is based only on phonemes (sounds), but the Catherine Acholonu Research Center used both phonemes (common sounds) and morphemes of common meanings (cognates) as well as paleontological and archaeological evidence to prove our point that all languages originated from West Africa in the Nigeria/Cameroon/Chad axis. In fact Australopithecus lived in Chad/Nigeria basin by 7 million BC and Homo Erectus his direct descendant lived in Igbo land in Nigeria by 500,000 - 1 million BC according to the findings of French palaeontologist Prof. Michel Brunet and Nigerian archaeologist, Prof. F.N. Anozie of the University of Nigeria.

That first language - the mother of all languages was traced all the way through Hebrew, Canaanite, Akkadian, the Americas, Chinese, Eastern and Western European languages, ancient Egyptian, even Sanskrit in our Adam Trilogy. (See the speech by Prof. Catherine Acholonu on C-Span Book TV in July/August, 2009 at the Harlem Book Fair, Schomburg Center, New York,  aired thrice in July and August, 2009 (available online on U-Tube or C-Span Library).

    Our new book The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam (2010) demonstrates that Egyptian hieroglyphics, as well as many ancient inscriptions of the Middle East can be traced back to bronze and pottery inscripotions on Igbo Ukwu archeological artifacts dug up by a British archaeologist in the 1950s, and to some extent to pre-historic stone inscriptions located in Ikom villages in Cross River State, Nigeria.

We found several words of common sounds and meanings in both Igbo and Egyptian, which means that ancient Egyptians spoke Igbo language or a related dialect; but most shockingly, we found that Igbo Ukwu, the town where the enigmatic artifacts were dug up in the 1950s is still standing on a buried city outside living memory. That city's buried artfacts (the few that were dug up by archaeologists) have been found to conform to a large extent to totems known to be associated with the Egyptian gods Nut,Thoth, Isis and Osiris, and with the Egyptian creation story, leading to the suspicion that we might be dealing with the lost Egyptian Edenic capital- Heliopolis and the lost nation of Punt/Tilmun - the land of the gods of Egypt and Sumer. The discovery that THERE IS A BURIED CITY THERE changes everything previously thought about Africa, and creates the notion that there might be other buried cities in the Nigerian cultural environment such as Nok, Oyo, Benin, etc.

The new research by Atkinson did not pin-point that original African mother-language, which keeps their work still in the realm of speculation. But we did. In fact we went as far as answering the now emerging question, What language did God speak? and What language did Adam speak? (see volume 2 of the Trilogy, They Lived Before Adam, which won the 2009 International Book Awards in USA)? 

Our research, paralleling that of oriental linguist Ralph Ellis, shows that the language spoken in Eden by Adam and his family was the same language used by "God" in uttering the words of Genesis as contained in Hebrew Torah and in ancient Egyptian creation myth and language: "Let there be ...", "Let the waters be gathered to one place...". The Torah using words that matched ancient Egyptian says that the vernacular words used by God for "Let there be" were hahya uwr. In Igbo language of Nigeria, the equivalent is haa ya owuru, meaning 'let it be allowed to be'! In both Hebrew and ancient Egyptian, the words, which God uttered to "divide the waters", were qavah and Khef, respectively (see Ralph Ellis - Tempest and Exodus/Eden in Egypt). Ellis' study indicates that these words mean in Hebrew and Egyptian 'sweep the waters away' and 'tie them together'.The Igbo equivalents are Kwaa va, kwoo va and Kee fa (meaning - 'push away the wall of water', 'sweep them away' and 'tie them together', respectively. Igbo language is still spoken today by the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria.

This discourse is taken up fully in my article titled "IGBO LANGUAGE: A FORMER GLOBAL LINGUA FRANCA AND THE MOTHER OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES" presented at the Igbo Studies Association Conference, at Howard University, 8-9th April, 2011 and published on our center's website www.carcafriculture.org. But our detailed analyses are to be found in the trilogy, which are available on Amazon and Paypal.