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12:04:09 | Because it is on the coast, East Africa had contacts with India and Egypt and West Asia, and even with China, long before other parts of Africa did. The earliest written evidence we have about East Africa comes from a Roman guidebook for sailors, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which was written (in Greek) about 50 AD.

01:03:09 | There is archaeological evidence for a port around 700 AD at Shanga, in modern Kenya. There were only a few people living there. They seem to have kept cattle.

Some archaeologists think the people of Shanga had already converted to the new religion of Islam by the 800's AD, although the evidence is not very clear. But they were certainly building an Islamic mosque by the 900's. Sometime around this time, the people of East Africa also began speaking a Bantu language, which became known as Swahili (swah-HEEL-ee). According to the theory of recent African origin of modern humans, the mainstream position held within the scientific community, all humans originate from East Africa[21]. Some of the earliest fossilized hominid remains have been found in East Africa, including those found in Awash Valley of Ethiopia, Koobi Fora in Kenya and Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

The southern part of East Africa was occupied until recent times by Khoisan hunter-gatherers, whilst in the Ethiopian Highlands the donkey and such crop plants as teff allowed the beginning of agriculture around 7,000 B.C.[22]. Only in quite recent times has agriculture spread to the more humid regions south of the equator,