What Afrocentrics are asking is: by Afrocentric definition, would the Ancient Egyptians be classified in the same racial category as Nigerians, Ethiopians, South Africans, etc?
The answer is yes.
Even if the Afrocentric worldview of blackness is disregarded, the Nubians are still considered the same race as the Tuareg and Badarian (considered to be the true Egyptians because of their predynastic origins in the Egyptian Sahara), with both groups showing strong genetic and ‘cranium’ similarities to Sub-Saharan Africans.
The Eurocentric model tries to downplay the negritude of the Badari by applying its narrow definition of black which transforms the Badari into a ‘racial-hybrid’:
Recent re-analyses of previous studies[ about the Badarians], including Professor Strouhal’s paper, reveal that only West and South African skulls were included in the baseline for a determination of “true negro” though, while the typically elongated East African skull forms were disregarded, assumed not to indicate true blacks.
Further observations were made about the Badari:
The Badarians show a greater affinity to indigenous Africans while not being identical. It is more likely that Near Eastern/southern European domesticated animals and plants were adopted by indigenous Nile Valley people without a major immigration of non-Africans. There was more of cultural transfer.
A conclusion on the predynastic Egyptians the Badarians:
Zakrzewski (2003) studied skeletal samples from the Badarian period to the Middle Kingdom. She confirmed the results of Robins and Shute that Ancient Egyptians in general had “tropical body plans” but that their proportions were actually “super-negroid.”
The narrow Eurocentric classification for blacks is not only erroneous because it’s based on faulty science, but it’s disrespectful because it disregards the way the Indigenous populations classify themselves. For Indigenous Africans, Nubians (modern day Sudanese) are not the pan-racial paragon of “blacks” (i.e. Indigenous Africans) because there is no one phenotype for Indigenous Africans.
As a matter of fact, Africa has more genetic, ethnic and phenotypic diversity than all other continents combined. Moreover, it has been noted that there are 35 skin tones found among Indigenous Africans compared to 8 found among Caucasians.
So, for many Afrocentrics, the fact that the Egyptians painted themselves a deep brown versus the Nubian jet black color is not a determinant in disproving their ‘blackness,’ especially when it’s considered that for these ancient peoples, there were no pan-racial label or identifiers. The division between Ancient Egyptians and Nubians is more of an ethnic difference rather than racial.
A final word on the first human remains found in Egypt: Nazlet Khater man was the earliest modern human skeleton found near Luxor, in 1980. The remains was dated from between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago. The report regarding the racial affinity of this skeleton concludes: “Strong alveolar prognathism combined with fossa praenasalis in an African skull is suggestive of Negroid morphology [form & structure]. The radio-humeral index of Nazlet Khater is practically the same as the mean of Taforalt (76.6). According to Ferembach (1965) this value is near to the Negroid average.” The burial was of a young man of 17-20 years old, whose skeleton lay in a 160cm- long narrow ditch aligned from east to west. A flint tool, which was laid carefully on the bottom of the grave, dates the burial as contemporaneous with a nearby flint quarry. –Thoma A., Morphology and affinities of the Nazlet Khater man, Journal of Human Evolution, vol 13, 1984.