Haplogroup E1b originated in Northeast Africa 45,000 to 50,000 years before the present. E1b1 has two basal branches: E-V38 (E1b1a) and E-M215 (E1b1b).
E1b1a
E1b1a originally came from Northeast Africa and moved around the Green Sahara. It represents an ancient paternal lineage that diversified among multiple pre-Bantu West and Central African populations, some of which later participated in the Bantu expansions, while others became different non-Bantu ethnic groups.
Based on dental evidence, Irish (2016) concluded that the common ancestors of West African and Proto-Bantu peoples may have originated in the western region of the Sahara, amid the Kiffian period at Gobero, and may have migrated southward from the Sahara into various parts of West Africa as a result of the desertification of the Green Sahara around 7000 BC. These groups would become the ancestors of modern West African populations.
From Nigeria and Cameroon, agricultural Proto-Bantu peoples began to migrate, and amid that migration diverged into East Bantu peoples (for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and West Bantu peoples (for example, in Congo and Gabon) between 2500 BC and 1200 BC.
He suggests that the Igbo and Yoruba peoples may have admixture from back-migrated Bantu peoples.
Ancient and modern DNA samples collected from E1b1a also show us that after the Green Sahara period it did not just disperse into West and Central Africa, but into East Africa as well.
In Kenya it can be found among the Kikuyu, Luhya and others, as well as among the Nilotic Anuak people of Ethiopia and Sudan. Ancient samples even stretch into dynastic Egypt.
Sahara and Egypt
The major desertification process of the Sahara that caused this dispersal of E1b1a accelerated around 4000 to 3000 BCE, which overlaps with the rise of early Egypt.
The Green Sahara began drying well before 4000 BCE and the drying intensified over millennia, while unified Egypt formed around 3100 BCE. So the Sahara's drying process is older than dynastic Egypt, but the final transition into the hyper-arid desert we know today continued during Egypt's rise.
Gad et al. (2021) indicates that the ancient Egyptian mummies of Ramesses III and Unknown Man E, possibly Pentawere, his son, carried haplogroup E1b1a, which appears at its highest frequency rates in Central Africa at about 60% and in West Africa at about 80%.
During the 18th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, some mummies from the Amarna Period carried haplogroups E1b1a and L, which are common paternal and maternal lineages of sub-Saharan Africans.
A 1973 X-ray examination of the southern king Seqenenre Tao by the American Egyptologists Kent Weeks and James E. Harris identified similarities between his cranio-facial complex and other Nubian and Old Kingdom Giza skulls. In their view, this was supportive of scholarly interpretations that Seqenenre Tao and his family may have held Nubian ancestry.
Robins and Shute (1983) performed X-ray measurements on the physical proportions of Upper Egyptian rulers such as Thutmose III, Amenhotep III and Tutankhamun. The authors reported that the limbs of the pharaohs, like those of other ancient Egyptians, had "negroid characteristics".
Because the DNA service 23andMe also reported the connection between Ramesses and E1b1a, carriers of this lineage have been misinformed by the misconception that all E1b1a carriers descend from Ramesses, which is an improper reading of what is actually being conveyed.
Modern E1b1a carriers do not descend from Pharaoh Ramesses, but they do share a common ancestor with him.
The reality is that if you are an E1b1a carrier, your ancestral roots come from where your ancestors settled after the Green Sahara dried, or where they migrated to at various points in history.
Peoples such as the Igala of Nigeria, as well as the Mande of Mali, hold oral traditions of migrating to West Africa from Egypt.
The Soninke, who are a Mande group, are also known as "Aswanik", as a tribute to their proclaimed ancestry from Aswan. The name "Aswan" is derived from the Egyptian "Swenet", which is likely where "Soninke" is derived from: "Swenet" becomes "Sonin".
In pre-Islamic Mandinka culture there is a deity called "Faro". Faro was cut into sixty pieces to atone for his twin brother Pemba. Faro represents peace, order and harmony, while Pemba represents chaos, disruption and destruction. Faro and Pemba are reminiscent of the Egyptian brothers Osiris and Set.
There are many peoples from ancient Kemet and Nubia who would migrate to West Africa, and their culture would become a continuation.
After the Green Sahara
After the Green Sahara dried, and through the various migrations and the Bantu expansion, the E1b1a carriers of West Africa would produce peoples such as the Yoruba, Igbo, Fon, Ewe, Akan, Bamileke, Mandinka and Bakongo.
Central African groups produced the Bantu, while East African groups produced Nilotic peoples and Africans of the Horn.
There was also a sample called Mota Man, a man who lived between 2576 and 2465 BCE during the Neolithic Age and was found in the region now known as Mota Cave, in the southern Ethiopian highlands. He was associated with the Neolithic East African cultural group, and his direct maternal line belonged to mtDNA haplogroup L3x2a*.
Reference: I5950 from the Allen Ancient Genome Diversity Project; Lipson et al. 2022; Llorente et al. 2015; Rohland et al. 2022.
The influx of these waves would be the reason why haplogroup E1b1a became the most dominant haplogroup in Africa, which was previously haplogroup A. Haplogroup A would be heavily displaced by E1b1a and other E lineages. This pushed A further south into Central and Southern Africa, but ancient A lineages can still be found in small pockets of the continent.
Most diasporans in the Americas and the Caribbean are predominantly descended from E1b1a lineages derived from West and Central African populations.
Ghost DNA
Ghost DNA is DNA inherited from an unknown extinct human population whose fossils and genome have not yet been directly identified. Scientists infer it because some living humans, especially many West African populations, carry genetic sequences that appear to have split from our ancestors very long ago and later mixed back into Homo sapiens.
Neanderthals were an extinct human lineage that lived mainly in Europe and western Asia. They split from the lineage leading to modern humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, and their DNA is still found predominantly in European and Mustaʿriba Arabian-descended peoples.
Denisovans were a sister lineage to the Neanderthals, known from fossils and ancient DNA in Asia. Denisovan ancestry is highest today in populations such as Indians, Papuans and some other Oceanian peoples, with smaller amounts in parts of Asia.
Homo sapiens, our species, emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago or more. Most modern sub-Saharan Africans are entirely Homo sapiens, but some West African groups, such as the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Esan of Nigeria, the Mende of Sierra Leone and the Mandinka of the Gambia, inherited between 2% and 19% of this ghost DNA.
Each culture listed has oral traditions of otherworldly beings coming among their people and sometimes intermixing, which is also described in the Ethiopian Bible and in West African cultures.
This ghost DNA could come from a more advanced race of beings who were once among us. Consider the Yoruba Orisha and Irunmole, or the Mande connection to Kemet, which held advanced science and esoteric wisdom. This ghost DNA could possibly derive from beings we now know as the Elohim, the Irunmole and Orisha, the Neteru and others. It is most prominent in E1b1a lineages, but not limited to them.
E1b1b
The populations that spread across the Maghreb, the Levant and Arabia are where E1b1b carriers became indigenous and dominant before the arrival of haplogroup J in some regions. E1b1b is the original lineage of the Afroasiatic peoples, which is why all the Afroasiatic language families, namely Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic, are African language groups.
The reason scientists claim not to know whether the Afroasiatic peoples originated in Northeast Africa or West Asia is because a firm answer would force them to acknowledge that Arabia and the Levant are actually part of Northeast Africa.
Though borders and politics separate them today, places such as Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the western Jordan Rift Valley, the region west of the fault system in Lebanon and southwestern Syria are all part of the African tectonic plate. These regions, as well as the Arabian Peninsula, were originally Northeast Africa.
Geologically, Arabia separated from the African plate 30 million years ago, but it was occupied by African-dominant populations all the way into the Middle Ages.
In his book "The Histories", Herodotus referred to the people south of Egypt, in Arabia and in southern Asia as "burnt faces", or "Aithiops", which easily translates to black.
In "Geographica", the book of the Roman geographer and historian Strabo, he mentions that populations living along the southern Red Sea on both the African and Arabian sides share appearance, culture, civilization, trade and ancestry.
All of the original Afroasiatic peoples share a common ancestry in E1b1b. From Northeast Africa, groups could easily disperse west into the Maghreb, becoming the Iberomaurusian people; east into the Levant or across the Red Sea, becoming the Natufians and South Arabians; and those who stayed centered in the northeast region of Africa would become the early Nile Valley and Horn of Africa civilizations.
DNA analysis has also confirmed ancestral ties between the Pre-Pottery Neolithic culture bearers and the makers of the Epipaleolithic Iberomaurusian culture of North Africa, the Mesolithic Natufian culture of the Levant, the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic culture of East Africa, the Early Neolithic Cardial culture of Morocco, and the Ancient Egyptian culture of the Nile Valley, with fossils associated with these early cultures all sharing a common genomic West Eurasian and Near Eastern component.
Ferreira et al. (2021) and Almarri et al. (2021) found that ancient Natufians cluster with modern Arabian groups, such as Saudi Arabians and Yemenis, which derive most of their ancestry from local Natufian-like hunter-gatherer peoples.
The E1b1b Expansion
Today in Africa, E-M215 is distributed in its highest frequencies in the Horn of Africa and North Africa, specifically in Somalia and Morocco. This distribution is derived from the Red Sea culture of the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia.
The early ancestors of E1b1b would go on to become the famous kingdom of Sheba, known as Saba and inhabited by the Sabaeans, who descend from the legendary Qahtan, also known as Joktan, son of Eber in the Bible, from the line of Shem.
It is often debated whether the kingdom was in Arabia, Ethiopia or both. East African Sheba is Kushitic and South Arabian Saba is Semitic, and researchers have had a hard time piecing it together. But in reality, Northeast African Kushites and Levantine and South Arabian Semites have been intermixing since ancient times.
From the genealogy of Noah: Ham fathers Cush, Canaan, Phut and Mizraim. Cush's line forms ancient Kush, Mizraim forms Kemet, Canaan forms the Levantines, and Phut settles Libya and the Maghreb.
From the line of Cush is the first time we hear the name "Seba", which is where the Arabic "Saba" is derived from. Seba is one of the sons of Cush, alongside Sabtah, Sabtecah and Raamah. The sons of Raamah were Sheba and Dedan, which is the second appearance of the name Seba or Sheba from the line of Cush.
The country of Raamah is usually assumed to be somewhere in the region of Yemen. Sheba was a son of Raamah, and his descendants are often held to be included among the Sabaeans. Dedan, son of Raamah, is also a region of the Medina Province of Saudi Arabia. However, there was also an Israelite city called Ramah, somewhat closer to Tyre, where the Phoenicians lived.
From the line of Shem, he fathered Elam, Asshur, Arphaxad, Lud and Aram. Arphaxad would father Selah, Selah would father Eber, Eber would father Qahtan, and Qahtan would father Sheba.
From the line of Cush, Seba is only four generations away from Noah and appears a second time in the fifth generation. From the line of Shem, the name Sheba does not appear until the seventh generation, which is three generations after the son of Cush and two generations after the son of Raamah. This means that Sheba or Saba would have started between Sudanic Kush and Ethiopia, as the Kebra Nagast stated.
Qahtan
According to Arab tradition, the Qahtanites are from South Arabia and are pure Arabs, unlike the Adnanites, who are from the north of Arabia and descended from Ishmael through Adnan. The pure Arabs are the al-ʿAriba, and the Ishmaelites as well as other mixed Arabs are the al-Mustaʿriba.
Arab tradition maintains that the legendary ancestral figure named Qahtan and his 24 sons are the progenitors of Yemen, who controlled the part of the Arabian Peninsula known as Qahtani.
In the Arab tradition, Qahtan is the great-grandfather of Saba through his son Yarub. Yarub fathers Yashjub, and Yashjub fathers Saba. All Yemenite tribes trace their ancestry back to this Saba, through either of his two sons, Himyar or Kahlan. The descendants of Kahlan are the Sabaeans, and the descendants of Himyar are the Himyarites.
Saba, 1200 to 800 BCE
From Ethiopia, the Sabaeans would have expanded into southern Arabia around 1200 BCE, which is why Yemen and Oman retain the memory of Saba, or Sheba, as well. Among South Arabians and Abyssinians, Sheba's name carried prestige, as it was widely considered to be the birthplace of South Arabian civilization as a whole.
The Sabaeans had a long history of seafaring and commerce. A Sabaean presence in Africa was noted in antiquity with the founding of the kingdom of Dʿmt in Ethiopia in the 8th century BCE. The 1st-century CE work Periplus of the Erythraean Sea described how the Arabs controlled the coast of "Azania", the East African coast north of Somalia.
The Quran mentions trade with Sheba: "And We placed between them and the cities which We had blessed [many] visible cities. And We determined between them the [distances of] journey, [saying], 'Travel between them by night or day in safety.'" The Old Testament Book of Ezekiel reads: "Dedan traded in saddle blankets with you. Arabia and all the princes of Kedar were your customers; they did business with you in lambs, rams and goats. The merchants of Sheba and Raamah traded with you; for your merchandise they exchanged the finest of all kinds of spices and precious stones, and gold."
The Chinese explorer Faxian, who passed through Sri Lanka in 414 CE, reported that Sabaean merchants and Arabs from Oman and Hadhramaut lived in ornate homes in settlements on the island and traded in timber.
The Sabaeans, like the other South Arabian kingdoms of their time, took part in the extremely lucrative spice trade, especially in frankincense and myrrh. Conquest and trade is how Saba would rise in power.
Between roughly 400 and 200 BCE, rival kingdoms grew: Himyar, Qataban, Hadramawt and Awsan. Around 115 BCE the Himyarite Kingdom formally emerged in southwest Yemen. In the 1st century BCE there was increasing competition between Saba and Himyar over trade routes, ports, caravan taxation and Red Sea commerce. In the 1st century CE, Himyar gradually weakened Saba militarily and economically. Around 275 CE, Himyar conquered and absorbed Saba under King Shammar Yahriʿsh, which is often seen as the effective end of independent Sabaean dominance.
In the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, Himyar unified much of Yemen and became the major South Arabian power. Himyar would take over the frankincense and myrrh trade, as well as all the ports and trade routes formerly controlled by Saba.
In 2019, Sabaean inscriptions were found in Somaliland and Puntland, as well as a Sabaean temple whose inscriptions say its construction was ordered by the admiral of Sheba's fleet.
In 2025, Alfredo González-Ruibal said: "we can perhaps discern two different models: a proper colonialist one along the northern Somali seaboard, with direct intervention of the state and aimed at the extraction of resources, and a diasporic model in the northern Horn [where Dʿmt was located], led by élites who soon mixed with local people, while maintaining ties with their ancestral homeland".
If the goal was the extraction of resources, it is possible that Himyarite merchants may have settled Punt as well as Berbera.
In antiquity, Berbera was part of a chain of commercial port cities along the Somali seaboard. During the early modern period, Berbera was the most important place of trade in the Somali Peninsula. Berbera was part of the classical Somali city-states that engaged in a lucrative trade network connecting Somali merchants with Phoenicia, Ptolemaic Egypt, Ancient Greece, Parthian Persia, Saba, Nabataea and the Roman Empire. Somali sailors used the ancient Somali maritime vessel known as the beden to transport their cargo.
Sahel and Maghreb Migration
In the 8th century, Jewish, Arab, Persian and East African traders would form a confederation that would spread from Somalia and Ethiopia to Morocco and the Senegambia. Naturally, along the journey across the Sahel and the Maghreb, some would settle and some would migrate farther before settling.
In Somalia they would settle Berbera. In Ethiopia they would likely mix with the Agaw people, and this is possibly where the confederation would adopt the name "Zaghawa", which may be derived from the Geʿez phrase "Ze-Agaw", meaning "of the Agaw".
The Agaw peoples in general were historically noted by travelers and outside observers to have practiced what some described as a "Hebraic religion", though some also practiced Ethiopian Orthodoxy, and many were Beta Israel Jews.
Cosmas Indicopleustes also noted in his Christian Topography that a major gold trade route passed through the region "Agau". The area referred to seems to be an area west of the Tekezé River and just south of the Semien Mountains, perhaps around Lake Tana.
Dispersal Point
Once the caravan entered the Darfur region of Sudan, they would make western Sudan, eastern Chad and southern Libya their base, and split up into two directions.
Maghreb: the Northern Zaghawa
Those who went north of Darfur into Libya would spread throughout the rest of the western Maghreb, becoming Berber tribes like the Sanhaja and its subgroups, such as the Zawawa, the Lamtuna (Almoravids), the Gudala, the Masinissa and the Tuareg, and also producing later Mediterranean dynasties such as the Zirids, the Hammadids and the Fatimids, the taifas of Alpuente and Granada, the Kingdom of Ait Abbas and the Kingdom of Kuku.
These groups would all be predominantly carriers of E1b1b, specifically E-M81 and E-L19.
In the early 8th century, these E1b carriers in the Maghreb would conquer different parts of Europe, but had their greatest strongholds in Iberia.
During the caliphate of the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid I, the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad led an army of 7,000 that landed at Gibraltar on April 30, 711, ostensibly to intervene in a Visigothic civil war. After a decisive victory over King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete on 19 July 711, Tariq, accompanied by his mawla, governor Musa ibn Nusayr of Ifriqiya, brought most of the Visigothic Kingdom under Muslim rule in a seven-year campaign. They crossed the Pyrenees and occupied Visigothic Septimania in southern France.
Most of the Iberian Peninsula became part of the expanding Umayyad Empire, under the name of al-Andalus. Following the Muslim conquest of Spain, al-Andalus, then at its greatest extent, was divided into five administrative units, corresponding very roughly to modern Andalusia; Castile and León; Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia; Portugal and Galicia; and the Languedoc-Roussillon area of Occitania.
The small army Tariq led in the initial conquest consisted mostly of Berbers, while Musa's largely Arab force of over 12,000 soldiers was accompanied by a group of mawālī, that is, non-Arab Muslims who were clients of the Arabs.
In 734, the Andalusis launched raids to the east, capturing Avignon and Arles, and overran much of Provence. In 737, they travelled up the Rhône valley, reaching as far north as Burgundy.
This is also connected to trade routes operated by the E1a- and E1b-carrying Jewish merchants called the Radhanites.
The Moors would rule parts of Europe and North Africa for roughly 800 years before being deposed by their European Christian subjects in the late 15th century. After they fell, some would return to North Africa, relocate to other European countries, or be forced to convert to Christianity and sometimes accompany Spanish explorers as navigators, auxiliaries and translators.
Eastern Sahel
The Zaghawa who settled Chad, Libya and Niger would become the Toubou. According to a study published in The American Journal of Human Genetics (Haber et al. 2016) that examined Y-DNA haplogroups from samples obtained from 75 Toubou men, haplogroups associated with paternal Eurasian ancestry were present at rates of 34% for R1b (R1b-V88), 31% for T1a and 1% for J1. The North African-associated haplogroup E-M78 was present at a rate of 28%, while E-M81 appeared at a rate of 5%.
The Somali merchants from Berbera would bring in T1a, Mustaʿriba Arabians brought J1, East and West Africans brought E1b1a, and al-ʿAriba Arabians and local North Africans would bring in E-M81 and other E1b branches.
These same haplogroups would spread into other Zaghawa kingdoms and nations as well, but the further west into Africa one goes, the more dominant the E lineages become.
Kanem-Borno: the Central Sahelian Zaghawa
The Zaghawa who settled in western Sudan, Chad, southern Libya, Niger, northeast Nigeria and parts of Cameroon would form the Toubou people.
In the same regions, another branch of the Zaghawa would form the first dynasty of Kanem-Borno in the 8th century, called the Doguwa, according to the royal chronicle known as the Girgam.
According to the Girgam, Kanem-Borno descends from the Himyarite Jewish ruler Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan al-Himyari, through the Doguwa ruler Susam, also known as Sef, who was likely a great-grandson or nephew of Yazan. Once these Yemenite Jewish groups intermixed with the peoples of greater Africa, their children would likely adopt a religion that was a mixture of Judaism syncretized with traditional African cosmologies, until Islam took over the region.
They are predominantly carriers of E1b1a and R1b.
Hausa: the Central Sahelian Zaghawa
From the Zaghawa of Kanem-Borno, it is possible that a piece of the proto-Hausa would emerge, known as the Maouri, a subgroup of the Hausa. The Maouri are considered part of the "Habe", meaning the pure Hausa groups prior to other admixtures. They would settle in Niger and Nigeria.
They are animist and worship the Doguwa spirits, which could be a continuation of the ancient Kanem-Borno religion that the Doguwa dynasty practiced or syncretized with.
The early Hausa had Jewish links, which is why their symbol, the "Arewa knot", resembles Solomon's knot, as well as the Star of David or the Merkaba; but like Kanem, they had a mixture of traditionalists who worshipped the Doguwa spirits as well.
Like their Kanuri and Kanembu brethren, the Hausa are R1b- and E1b1a-dominant.
Mali: the Western Zaghawa
Kukiya: the Zaghawa who went into Mali would give rise to the Yemeni Jew Za al-Yaman, who first founded the small town of Kukiya. Kukiya dominates a stretch of river between two rapids, making it an important stopping point on the trans-Saharan trade routes linking Borgu, Hausaland and other sub-Saharan regions with North Africa.
Gao would be the next settlement and become the foundation of the Gao empire, where Za al-Yaman would establish the Za dynasty. The migrant group that arrived in Kukiya and Gao with Za al-Yaman would likely intermix with the natives of the land and form the Songhai people.
The Songhai Empire has been variously rendered in texts as Zagha, Zaghai, Zaghaya, Sughai, Zaghay, Zaggan, Izghan, Zaghawa, Zuwagha, Zawagha, Zauge, Azuagha, Azwagha, Sungee, Sanghee, Songhai, Songhay, Sughai, Zanghi, Zingani, Zanj, Zahn, Zaan, Zarai, Dyagha and possibly Znaga. Songhai's proper pronunciation is actually "Zaghay".
The funerary stelae record the names and dates of kings, some of whom claim descent from an ancestor named Zaghe. These are all tributary names to their Zaghawa ancestry.
Remember that "Zaghawa" could possibly be derived from the Geʿez phrase "Ze-Agaw", meaning they were "of the Agaw people". The Geʿez phrase "Ze-Agaw" is pronounced "Zeh-Gao" in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The Gao empire in Mali that the Zaghawa formed could possibly be derived from the word "Agaw", but with the "A" being dropped and becoming "Gaw", or Gao.
Gao is also traditionally known as "Kawkaw". This is because Za al-Yaman likely came from the Himyarite royal house of Kawkaban. During his generation, the capital of Himyar had already moved to Sana'a a few centuries prior.
Sana'a has been home to Jews since the Babylonian exile, as well as through many other eras of refugees, including those who assimilated into Himyar after the Bar Kokhba revolt. There is a town in Yemen called Shibam Kawkaban, also known as Shibam Himyar, located within the realms of Sana'a. This is likely where Za al-Yaman and the royal house of Kawkaban resided.
This is also why the Zaghawa have the alternative name Zakhawa: the "Khawa" is derived from "Kaw", which becomes "Gao".
When Za led his people within the Zaghawa confederation to Mali and established Gao, there was also a settlement called Gao-Sanay. Sanay could be the Africanized version of "Sana'a", again pointing to their ancestral origin. So Gao-Sanay would symbolize the merging of the Agaw (Gao) and the Himyar of Sana'a (Sanay).
Remember that the Zaghawa started their expansion in Africa from Somalia, in the city of Berbera. The name Berbera comes from the Somali phrase beri-beri, meaning "occasionally". Before it became a major port city, Berbera was a seasonal settlement, only inhabited during cooler months.
The Zaghawa people of Sudan, Chad, Libya and elsewhere refer to themselves as Beri. The Zaghawa-Kanuri people of the Kanem-Borno empire are sometimes referred to as "Barebari". The Zaghawa of Borgu in Nigeria and Benin call themselves "Bariba", and the Zaghawa of Songhai refer to themselves as "Ber" or "Beri". So from Somalia to Mali they have maintained this name all the way through.
The al-Maqrizi Narrative
Another source that tightens the lid on this Zaghawa expansion theory comes from the Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, who wrote in the 15th century:
"El-Maqrizi, who wrote in the fifteenth century, says that in his day all the nations between Abyssinia on the south, Nubia on the east, Barkah on the north, and Tekrur on the west were called Zaghai; and that the kingdoms of Kanem and Bornu, founded between the regions of Haoussa and Zaghai, were occupied by the Zaghai." — Cooley, 1841, p. 98, footnote 157
"Abyssinia on the south" is the Songhai ancestor's homeland. "Nubia on the east" is the Zaghawa of Sudan. "Barkah on the north" are the Zaghawa of Libya. "Tekrur" refers to the Zaghawa in Senegal who settled and formed the Tukulor branch of the Fulani.
"The kingdoms of Kanem and Bornu, founded between the regions of Haoussa and Zaghai, were occupied by the Zaghai." We currently theorize that the Hausa emerged out of Kanem-Borno, but it is known that Kanem-Borno was founded by the Zaghawa.
The name Songhai is a foreign pronunciation used by explorers, travelers, merchants and colonizers. Songhai, or Songhay, is actually "Zaghay" or "Zaghai", the people al-Maqrizi is referring to.
The Zaghawa from Sudan to the Senegambia would become Sahelian Moors. They would even participate in the Moorish expansion into Europe and found the city of Azuaga in Spain. This is why both E1b1a and E1b1b can be found in Europe dating to the Moorish era.
The Muslim geographer and traveler al-Idrisi mentions the settlement in the 12th century, alluding to it as a hilltop fort (حِصْن زُوَاغَة, HiSn Zuwāghah). This is the first writing that mentions Azuaga by name. It would appear that at that time the people of Azuaga were of the Berber tribe al-Zuwaga, hence the name. Azuaga still has a surviving portion of its 11th-century castle.
During the colonial era, Azuaga ranked seventh in Extremadura in the number of people who went to the Americas. This is more significant than it might at first sound, because Extremadura was a major force in the conquest of the Americas.
Some African American and Afro-Latin communities did not arrive through the transatlantic slave trade, but as Moriscos, or Moors who converted to Christianity from Islam after their defeat in 1492. Some converted sincerely, but most still practiced Islam and Judaism behind closed doors.
When the Alhambra Decree declared that they convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom, much of their wealth and assets were seized by the King of Spain, and this would fund the Spanish expeditions to the Americas. This is why 1492 is the same year that the Moors fell and the same year that the Spanish arrived in America.
The Moriscos had already made trade relations and even settlements in the Americas, which is why the Spanish used them as aids to communicate with the people and to know the land. Many Moriscos would escape the Spanish settlements in America and assimilate into Native American tribes, or form independent communities that would make up a portion of those who became known as "free people of color".
Conclusion
E1b represents the Nile Valley peoples and the greater Northeast Africa; the early Maghreb, Levantine and South Arabian populations before haplogroup J; the Bantu expansion; the dominant haplogroup of modern West and Central Africans; the Moors of North Africa, the Sahel and Eurasia; the Lançado Jews who were exiled from Iberia and settled in West and Central Africa; African American and Afro-Caribbean peoples; and many Latin Americans and Afro-descendant communities in El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic descended from North and West Africans.