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315,000 Years Ago
The earliest known humans emerge and live on the African continent.
All human beings today belong to the Homo sapiens species, and it is widely accepted amongst researchers, historians, and scientists, that all of human history began on the continent of Africa. The exact location in Africa is a topic of constant debate as remains have been found in various locations throughout the continent, such as Ethiopia, Kenya, and Morocco, though researchers suggest it was most likely in the Horn of Africa. The oldest known remains of our species to date has been found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and dated about 315,000 years ago.
250,000 Years Ago
Modern humans begin to disperse and migrate out of Africa.
Early modern humans expanded to Western Eurasia and Central, Western and Southern Africa from the time of their emergence. Evidence of migration out of Africa, via a partial skull, was discovered in the Apidima Cave in southern Greece and is dated more than 210,000 years old. There were several waves of migrations, many via northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula about 130,000 YA (Years Ago), though most of these early waves appear to have mostly died out or retreated by 80,000 YA.
c. 200,000 - 130,000 Years Ago
Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend, lives in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Mitochondrial Eve (the name alludes to the biblical Eve) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman. In 1987, geneticists compared the mitochondrial DNA (genetic information passed from mothers to their offspring) of people from different populations around the world and find that they all link in an unbroken line to Mitochondrial Eve. This does not mean that she was the first woman, nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species." It only means that she is the most recent female ancestor to which all living humans are linked. She was believed to have lived in either East Africa or Botswana.
c. 10,000 BC - 6,000 BC
Due to a tilt in the Earth’s axis, the Sahara transforms from a humid region rich with grasslands and water, to an arid desert, prompting Saharan Africans to migrate to the Nile Valley.
The earliest Egyptians were indigenous Africans who were drawn to the Sahara when it was a humid region rich in grasslands and with plentiful water. There was a widespread Saharan Neolithic culture. However, during this same period (c. 10,000 - c. 6,000 BC), the Earth's axis tilted, causing the Saharan climate to slowly transform from humid to arid, prompting Saharan Africans to migrate to the Nile Valley to take advantage of its fertile floodplains.
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Home / Full timeline / Leontyne Price makes her opera debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She would go on to have a storied career, winning 13 Grammy Awards and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Leontyne Price makes her opera debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She would go on to have a storied career, winning 13 Grammy Awards and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.; ?> Leontyne Price makes her opera debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She would go on to have a storied career, winning 13 Grammy Awards and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

1961 (Jan 27)

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Leontyne Price debuted with New York's Metropolitan Opera in Il Trovatore, and an unprecedented forty-two-minute standing ovation followed her performance. Price soon established herself as "the Stradivarius of singers," and when the New York company moved to its new quarters at Lincoln Center, director Rudolf Bing honored Price with an invitation to open the new opera house in the world premier of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. One season after her debut, she opened in the title role of Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West and launched a prolific recording career en route to becoming one of the world's leading sopranos and the first Black singer to gain international stardom in opera. By 1969, Price had appeared in more than one hundred Metropolitan Opera productions. Mary Violet Leontyne Price was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on February 10, 1927. At the age of nine she attended a concert by Black American vocalist Marian Anderson and decided to devote her life to singing. After receiving her bachelor's degree in 1949, Price was awarded a four-year, full-tuition scholarship at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where she studied voice with Florence Page Kimball. After a two-year jaunt in a revival of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, the diva made her concert debut at New York's Town Hall, where she impressed audiences with her facility with modern compositions. Numerous NBC telecasts followed. The first telecast, Puccini's Tosca, distinguished Price as the first Black singer to perform opera on television. In 1957, conductor Kurt Herbert Adler, who had seen Price perform in Tosca, invited her to sing the role of Madame Lidoine in Dialogues of the Carmelites with the San Francisco Opera. That same year, the San Francisco Opera's lead soprano in Aida had an emergency appendectomy, and Adler asked the Mississippi soprano if she knew the opera. Price, whose perfect Verdi voice eventually came to define the role of Aida, recounted: "That was being in the right place at the right time." Price has won thirteen Grammy Awards, and in 1965 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. In 1980, she was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts, and five years later she received the first National Medal of the Arts. Price performed at the White House in 1978 and 1982, and she opened the convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Constitution Hall with a concert honoring Marian Anderson, who, in 1939, had been barred from appearing in Constitution Hall by the DAR because of her race.

References:

  •  • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.
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