For those of you who aren't aware, technically, Salsa dancing originated as Mambo danced to Salsa music. Many folks today refer to Mambo as "dancing on '2'". But, in reality, Salsa is actually Mambo "danced on '1'".

This is an interesting historical take on the orgigins of Mambo, reproduced from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/news/Winter95.txt

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Cachao, Mambo, and Descarga: A Latin Music Legend

By Morton Marks
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On September 15, 1994, Cachao and his orchestra played a special
concert at the Library of Congress in celebration of Hispanic
Heritage Month. The event was cosponsored by the American Folklife
Center and the Hispanic Division, in partnership with Crescent
Moon/Epic Records. Morton Marks prepared the following notes for
the program.
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Israel Lopez, el Gran Cachao, has played a pioneering role in the
development of Cuban music for almost sixty years. He was born into
a musical family in Havana in 1918. His older brother and sister
were already musicians, and thirty-five of Cachao's relatives
played the bass, which became his instrument of choice. A prolific
composer, arranger, and instrumentalist, Cachao is a virtuoso
bassist who developed the percussive and harmonic role of this
instrument in Cuban dance music. By the time he was nineteen,
Cachao and his brother Orestes had invented the mambo, which was
first played over a Cuban radio station in 1938. The mambo gave
rise to a new way of structuring Cuban dance music, and its effects
have been felt inside and outside of Cuba down to the present.

Most North Americans probably associate mambo with the big
bands of the 1940s and 1950s, led by Machito, Tito Puente, and
others in New York, and by Damaso Perez Prado in Mexico City. These
represent the merging of Afro-Cuban song style and rhythmic
approaches with the riffs, instrumentation, and voicings of North
American swing bands.

But the mambo in Cuba has very different origins. It emerged
from the charanga orchestras of flute, strings, piano, and
percussion that appeared at the very end of the nineteenth century,
and from the danzon, a late-nineteenth-century Cuban dance with
roots in the courts and salons of eighteenth-century Europe. The
gradual transformation of the contredanse into the Afro-Cuban mambo
is a perfect illustration of the process of creolization or
Cubanization, the intermingling of European and African musical
approaches that accounts for the tremendous appeal of Cuban music
all over the world.

French dances such as the minuet and contredanse (which had
entered France as the English country-dance) were familiar to the
Havana elite in the late eighteenth century. They came again to
Cuba, this time to the eastern cities of Guantanamo and Santiago,
with the French colonists who were fleeing the Haitian revolution
of 1791. The contredanse became the Cuban contradanza, then the
danza or habanera, and then the danzon. As it became Cubanized, it
changed in several ways: in its original form a collective line or
figure dance, often led by a bastonero or dance master, it evolved
into a couple dance.

Rhythmically, it was affected by Afro-Caribbean features such
as the cinquillo, also known as the habanera or tango rhythm.
Structurally, it evolved into a rondo form, a multi-strained dance
with contrasting themes and instrumentation. The final section
often showed more Afro-Cuban influences. By 1910, in Jose Urfe's
composition "El Bombin de Barreto," the danzon ended with
instrumental solos over a montuno, or repeated refrain, borrowed
from the Cuban son. This movement toward a more Afro-Cuban style is
characteristic of many kinds of Cuban music, and the multi-part
danzon lent itself perfectly to this transitional feature.

In 1937, Orestes and Cachao Lopez were playing cello and bass
for flautist Antonio Arca