Early Congo History covers most of the Congo River basin occupied today by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Angola's Cabinda province and northern Angola. 'Congo' and 'Congolese' refer to this area.

The current territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo was occupied by humans in the Paleolithic from at least 80,000 years ago. There were waves of Bantu migrations from 2000 BC to 500 AD moving into the basin from the northwest and covers the precolonial states absorbed or overthrown by the colonial powers. The Bantu migrations added to and displaced the indigenous Pygmy populations into the southern regions of the modern Congo states. The Bantu imported agriculture and iron-working techniques from West Africa into the area, as well as establishing the Bantu language family as the primary set of tongues for the Congolese.

Subsequent migrations from the Darfur and Kordofan regions of Sudan into the north of Congo, as well as East Africans migrating into the eastern Congo, added to the mix of ethnic groups.

Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima (26 January 1935 – 25 May 2009) was an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States.

He is best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus (1976). While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in the African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, or else dismissed as Afrocentric pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures".

Van Sertima was born in Karina Village, Guyana, when Guyana was still a British colony; he retained his British citizenship throughout his life. He completed primary and secondary school in Guyana, and started writing poetry.^{[citation needed]} He attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London from 1959. In addition to his creative writing, Van Sertima completed his undergraduate studies in African languages and literature at SOAS in 1969, where he graduated with honors.^{[citation needed]} During his studies, he learned Swahili and Hungarian.^{[citation needed]} From 1957 to 1959, worked a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services During the 1960s, he worked for several years in Great Britain as a journalist, doing weekly broadcasts to the Caribbean and Africa. Van Sertima married Maria Nagy in 1964; they adopted two sons.

John Henry Clarke MD (1853 – November 24, 1931 was a prominent English classical homeopath. He was also, arguably, the most important anti-Semite in Great Britain. He led The Britons, an anti-Semitic organisation.

Dr. Clarke was a busy practitioner. As a physician he not only had his own clinic in Piccadilly, London, but he also was a consultant at the London Homeopathic Hospital and researched into new remedies — nosodes.

Clarke was a leading advocate of anti-Semitism and served as president of The Britons from its formation^{[citation needed]} in 1919 until his death as an associate of Henry Hamilton Beamish. He wrote several articles on Christianity that have a militant bent. When Beamish became a fugitive and fled England, Clarke became the head of The Britons, and formed with two others a splinter organization, the Britons Publishing Society.

Clarke was keen in his writing and it is even said that he had a desk in his carriage^{[citation needed]}. For many years, he was the editor of The Homeopathic World. He wrote many books, his best known were Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica and Repertory of Materia Medica (i.e., the Clinical Repertory), both of which are recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rules on "Conditions under Which Homeopathic Drugs May be Marketed".

Runoko Rashidi (born 1954) is a writer and public lecturer based in Los Angeles. His academic focus is on "the Black foundations of world civilizations". Many of his claims are disputed, however, as evidenced by various anthropological and DNA studies. He has coordinated educational group tours to India, Aboriginal Australia, the Fiji Islands and Southeast Asia, as well as to Egypt and Brazil.

Rashidi rejects what he says are the claims by European anthropologists that the Negritos, Australoids, Negroids and Arabic peoples are separate ethnic groups. He claims that they are all "Africoid" or "Black". He believes European anthropologists have used "unscientific" and "invalid" methods and that their work was "racially motivated" to divide peoples whom he thinks are Africoid in race. He cites Cheikh Diop's statement on race:

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Since the later 20th and early 21st centuries, academic theorists have generally rejected such definitions of race; instead, they define it as a social construct along a continuum, rather than a strict biological reality. In addition, as the most genetically diverse continent on Earth , the African continent possesses as much ethnic variation among so-called "negroid" peoples as among sister populations outside the continent.