A very good point. I don’t claim to have any knowledge of the ethnic composition of ancient Egypt. But I do know that the way skin color is thought of can be pretty different in different places. In Cameroon, people were always telling me things like “Go ask Amadou- the black one…” Of course to me, everyone was black. But what I lumped together as “black” was seen as a whole range of skin tones.
Sure, those states absolutely had those maritime ties, but were those states south of Axum actively out on the ocean, trading? I’d always had in mind Arab and Indian traders who made stops along the Swahili coast, not Sub-Saharan Africans out on the sea lanes going to India and Egypt. I honestly have no idea why I think that; maybe I made a bad assumption. But I thought the traders in question were Arabs and Indians, not Africans.
Yes, at least to some extent.
Well, they were actually all of the above, all mixed into a cultural stew pot - the word Swahili of course derives from the Arabic word for “coast.” This entry on the Kilwa Sultanate goes into a little detail on the cosmopolitan blended Arabo-Perso-Bantu culture that eventually emerged. That loose state was snuffed by the Portuguese, who themselves were largely ( north of Sofala anyway ) driven out ~200 years later by the Omani Arabs who, fair to say considering the lingering ties to the Arabian peninsula, were probably a bit more explicitly Arab than their Swahili predecessors. But the earlier Swahili state does seem to have been rather more deeply multi-ethnic.
No. Almost everyone goes with a “pre-Clovis” hypothesis now, and only a fringe few think those pre-Clovis people were from Europe. There are indisputable pre-Clovis sites like Monte Verde in Chile and there is no evidence those people came from Europe.