Africa

V

History

At some point between 130,000 and 90,000 years ago the first true human beings, Homo sapiens, evolved in eastern and southern Africa. These Stone Age humans had the same capacity for thought as modern human beings. They were capable of making tools such as hooks and needles made of bone, and precise stone blades. These stone blades could be used as scrapers and hand-knives, or attached to poles and sticks for use as spears or arrows. By 90,000 years ago Homo sapiens had begun to move out of Africa into the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, and beyond. All modern human beings are descended from these original African ancestors.

A

Early Africans

By 40,000 years ago people could be found hunting and gathering food across most of the regions of Africa. Populations in different regions employed various technological developments in adapting to their different environments and climates. The most notable adaptations occurred in response to major climate changes.

A

1

Spread of Languages and Cultures

Between 16,000 and 13,000 bc the climate of much of Africa was considerably drier than it is today. The Sahara expanded north and south at the expense of grassy steppe lands and woodland savanna, and the area of equatorial rain forest shrank. This put pressure upon human hunter-gatherer populations to improve their techniques and to more intensively use locally available food resources. Those who adapted most successfully spread their techniques, cultures, and languages beyond their home areas, while absorbing or influencing other populations. This period gave birth to the four great language families of Africa—Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Khoisan—from which all modern African languages are descended.

From Eritrea and the Red Sea Hills to the northern borders of Sudan, speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages specialized in collecting the seeds of wild grasses, which were ground into flour. Over subsequent millennia their descendants spread their languages and cultures northward into Egypt and westward over the whole of North Africa.

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In the middle Nile region of central Sudan the speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages specialized in hunting large antelope, including the wild ancestors of Saharan cattle. Eventually these people also spread, moving south into East Africa and west across the southern Sahara.

In the savanna woodlands of West Africa, speakers of early Niger-Congo languages hunted with bow and arrow, fished with hook and line, and intensively collected the West African yam. Their languages and cultures eventually spread across the whole of West and Central Africa, and later, even to the southern reaches of the continent.

In East Africa, from what is now Kenya to northern Zambia, speakers of ancestral Khoisan languages made the most successful adaptations of this period. They developed a wide range of small, finely honed stone tools for hunting and many other purposes. Their adaptable tools and tool-making skills enabled the Khoisan to become excellent hunters and to spread throughout southern Africa, and partly explain why, through thousands of years of further climate change, they felt no need to domesticate animals and plants like their northern neighbors.

A

2

Origins of Cultivation and Herding

Between 11,000 and 3500 bc Africa experienced a wet climatic phase, which reached its peak between 9000 and 6000 bc. The Sahara became a grassland steppe surrounded by savanna woodlands, perennial rivers flowed from its mountain ranges, and Lake Chad expanded into a vast inland sea. The environmental changes opened huge new opportunities for Africa’s human populations. Farming originated in this period with the domestication of African plants and animals.

The Nilo-Saharan speakers of central Sudan adopted the grain-collection practice of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors. They applied it to wild sorghum, a tropical grass, which they domesticated and cultivated by 8000 bc. By this time, they had also invented techniques for making pottery, which was used to collect and store food and water. In the same period, Nilo-Saharan speakers domesticated wild cattle in and around the Nile Valley. Between 7000 and 5000 bc they also domesticated pearl millet, gourds, melons, and beans, and spread their farming and herding practices westward across the southern Sahara.

By this time, northern Afro-Asiatic speakers had taken wild seed collecting practices into Egypt, where they domesticated donkeys and pigs. They also spread into the Middle East, where tropical grasses would not grow. Instead, they learned to domesticate wheat and barley, and cultivation of these grains spread back westward through the Mediterranean regions of North Africa. Meanwhile, Cushitic speakers (an Afro-Asiatic subgroup) spread herding and grain cultivation throughout the Horn of Africa and into the central plains of East Africa. In the valleys of the Ethiopian Highlands, the indigenous crops teff (a grain) and enset (a banana-like fruit) were also domesticated.

Niger-Congo speakers in West Africa domesticated the yam and planted it in the expanded zone of savanna woodland by about 8000 bc. By 5000 bc their domesticated crops also included oil palm, raffia palm, peas, groundnuts, and kola nut, and they had also domesticated the guinea fowl. The domestication of West African rice, in and around the inland delta of the Niger, occurred slightly later, during a drier period after 3000 bc. By that time West Africans had developed polished stone axes for clearing woodland and were penetrating the rain forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin to the southeast.

Another important feature of the wet climatic phase was the development of fishing cultures around the numerous expanded lakes and rivers. From Lake Chad to the upper Nile and south to Lake Turkana and the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, fishers gathered in large settlements and traded dried fish for grain and other products from their neighbors.

B

Ancient Nile Valley States

By 3500 bc the favorable wet phase was coming to an end and the Saharan steppe again gave way to full desert. As the desert expanded, herders and cultivators concentrated in areas of perennial water sources, notably the Nile Valley. In what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt, the north-flowing Nile forms a great S-shaped curve and passes through six cataracts (rapids or waterfalls), which are numbered from north to south. In this area, known as Nubia, the concentration of settlements between the first and fourth cataracts prompted the clearing of riverside vegetation and exposure of the fertile floodplain. Large-scale projects such as this required communal labor and, consequently, the development of political and religious authority capable of commanding large workforces. Clan chiefs became kings, with each king acting as the guardian of his kingdom’s god.

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