846: guinea Apr 2, 2017

There is an abundance of terms that feature the word, 'Guinea', including,  'guinea fowl', 'guinea grass', 'guinea worms', 'guinea (coin)', and the countries 'Equatorial Guinea', 'Guinea', and 'Papua New Guinea', not to mention 'guinea pigs'. All but the last two items of that list relate to Africa, specifically the region of West Africa, south of the Senegal River along the Gold Coast. English gets the word from the Portuguese 'Guiné' which refers specifically to the people of the region, but the etymology of this is uncertain. A leading theory, however, is that it comes from Berber 'Genewah' meaning, 'burnt people'. The terms denoting things outside of Africa, may still relate to this region, but only distantly. While 'Papua' is a native word, the latter half of 'Papua New Guinea' comes from 'Nueva Guinea' coined by Yñigo Ortiz de Retez when he thought that these people looked similar to Africans. While that was not based on anything scientific, some controversial genomic analyses in the last decade have indicated that an early wave of Africans may have migrated to Papua New Guinea tens of thousands of years before the wave of migrants into Eurasia whom eventually branched out and over time populated the rest of the continents.