Nile game such as buffalo. Lake Victoria was first sighted by Europeans in 1858 when the British explorer John Hanning Speke reached its southern shore while traveling with Richard Francis Burton to explore central Africa and locate the great lakes. Believing he had found the source of the Nile on seeing this "vast expanse of open water" for the first time, Speke named the lake after the then Queen of the United Kingdom. Burton, recovering from illness and resting further south on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, was outraged that Speke claimed to have proved his discovery to be the true
Hamites races were too broad to have stemmed from a single common ancestor, but were instead consistent with separate racial origins. In his "Crania Aegyptiaca" (1844), Morton analyzed over a hundred intact crania gathered from the Nile Valley, and concluded that the ancient Egyptians were racially akin to Europeans. His conclusions would establish the foundation for the American School of anthropology, and would also influence proponents of polygenism. In the second half of the 19th century, the British explorer John Hanning Speke would further popularize the ancient Hamitic peregrinations in his publications on his search for the source of the Nile