Cushitic pastoralists also used to drink blood and mix it with milk, a practice even the ancient Greeks described. Guess who else did this?
Soldiers preferred to ride lactating mares because they could use them as milk animals. In times of desperation, they would also slit a minor vein in their horse's neck and drain some blood into a cup. This they would drink either "plain" or mixed with milk or water.[25] This habit of blood-drinking (which applied to camels as well as horses) shocked the Mongols' enemies. Matthew Paris, an English writer in the 1200s, wrote scornfully, "...they [the Mongols] have misused their captives as they have their mares. For they are inhuman and beastly, rather monsters than men, thirsting for and drinking blood..."[24]
Humans are running the same source code wherever we are, to be honest. We manifest many of the same patterns and outcomes given the same conditions:
Jokes aside, Northeast Africa and South Asia are like weird mirror images in many ways. NE Africa is to Africa what the subcontinent is to Eurasia. Basically, they are both extreme hotbeds of human genetic diversity where the many genetic components of their continent heavily coalesce.
In a very loose way you can think of very northern South-Central Asians like Pashtuns, Balochis and Sindhis as equivalent to Egyptians in NE Africa then North-Sudanese and most Horners are equivalents to most other Desis who are intermediates between the native East Eurasian ("Australoid") Hunter-Gatherers and West-Eurasians whereas the more native tribals are like equivalents to our native Nilotes and Omotics. Both regions even have vestiges of genetic components and/or groups from far flung parts of their continents like the legit East Asians and East Asian admixture in eastern parts of South Asia or the ancient San-like admixture in the Horn associated with our native HGs. Then you have Afro-Asiatic which is a large language family shared with many people outside of Northeast Africa (though it most likely originated in our region) as a sort of parallel to Indo-European in the subcontinent and then you have the large mostly native language families in the form of Nilo-Saharan and Dravidian.
It's even cool how the ancient MENA in our respective regions are polar opposites within the ancient MENA genetic continuum. Desis are mostly Iran-Neolithic~Caucasus HG admixed/biased whereas we Northeast Africans are mostly Anatolian Neolithic~Natufian admixed/biased. Those two continuums are basically the two opposite ends of the prehistoric Middle East. The former being Ancient North Eurasian admixed and the latter being more WHG-like admixed. This also contributes to the uncanny valley situation when looking at some Horners and Desis like South-Central Indics in terms of appearance. We look clearly very different but there's a sort of queer similarity because their native HG ancestors and our proto-Nilotic ancestors would have also looked similar but clearly different whereas our ancient MENA ancestors also would have looked vaguely similar but still clearly different. The uncanniness would have probably been even more freaky if native South Asian HGs had Afro-textured hair the way their Andaman relatives do.
But yeah, the two regions are in many ways weird reflections of one other. Both even concidentally birthed two early river civilizations. The Indus Valley Civilization and Ancient Egypt/Nubia. So many weird parallels.
I mean look at agriculture and pastoralism. The last few ice-ages happen and make animal and plant resources scarcer and scarcer and, coincidentally, 7 different locations across the globe discover agriculture independently of one another within the exact same 5,000-10,000 year span which is like a blip in human evolutionary history. As far afield from each other as the Western Sahel, Papua New Guinea and Eastern China...
We are not nearly as "different" as we like to think.
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