As soon as the Earth became habitable, there was an Olofin Aye at Ode Ife which became Otu Ife and the first Olofin Aye was Oduduwa. That is what is in Yoruba theology and history as handed down orally over millennia. There was no time there were no Yoruba Kings and there was no time the Yoruba were full time hunter gatherers. However hunters used to go on long term hunting expeditions and some still do so today but in the past when population was smaller and game plentiful, it was more common, it was a profession and those hunters were as nature savvy and aligned as any other people anywhere in the world. They were also as wild as any nomad. They used to live as nomads in the wild for lengthy periods before returning home. The traditional Oyo/Ijesa settlement pattern is a capital city surrounded by smaller towns and villages under the capital but with each one having Ogboni lodges and local administration reporting to the capital. Since the Yoruba have been living like this for over ten thousand years then it can be assumed that the ancestors of Nri Igbos used to live like this in the past since there is clear evidence of language similarity with the Yoruba and it is only words like Eze for King and many others that we have no idea from where it entered their lexicon and we also have our own words not shared with them as well. Those unshared words were gotten from extant groups that mixed independently with the new groups formed after the parent stock of YEAI separated maybe five thousand years ago. YEAI is Yoruba Edo Akoko Igboid. It is obvious that the Nri Igbo deliberately made it a policy not to build cities so that they will not need to have Kings and their policy was break up a village to found a new one immediately the population shoots over like two thousand people. They multiplied rapidly in the forests over centuries as a result of establishing village after village. However they soon started encountering people with a more complex and hierarchical social organisation from all directions including from the Benin empire the Igala the Ibibio, the Idioma, the Edoid and etc. Overtime these people adopted the Igbo language not by force but because they had to deal with the Igbos and the Igbos were many. I mean the Igbos with the Nri culture. The Nri Igbo do not need to be more than thirty percent of total population to be able to effect this language change. The Anglo Saxons that stamped the English language on Britain were not more than thirty percent of the total population at the time according to DNA tests. The Egyptians that brought Kemitic Egyptian component of Yoruba may not be up to that percentage of total population when they arrived West Africa. There are many such examples. Therefore Igbo speaking people can possibly align into traditional states that does not reckon with present borders within Nigeria and there will be a workable unity if there is mutual respect. Any federating unit should have its own security and should also be able to pull out of the union at any time. People who are not Nri should not be compelled to observe the Nri culture as that is not their culture and the ones practicing Edoid, Ibibioid or Yoruboid cultures too should not impose it on the Nri groups. It is also possible that non Igboid groups in the SE are practicing the Nri culture because there are Yoruboid and Idomoid ethnic groups in some SE states where the Nri culture is predominant. There is no reason for people who already speak Igbo not to join an Igbo country if they remain in control of their land.

Ibo history only started with Things Fall Apart by Achebe.

Huh