Africa as a Birth Place and Cradle of World and Human Civilization

By any measure, Africa's contribution to world history is immense and diverse. From the monumental pyramids of ancient Egypt to the towering 20th-century figures of Kofi Annan and Nelson Mandela, continental Africa has produced numerous political and cultural moments and people of great historical importance.

On the African continent archaeologists have found the earliest evidence of the evolution of humans. Several sites in Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa have produced fossils of human ancestors, known as hominids, enabling anthropologists to trace the history of humans back to primates living between four and one million years ago. The earliest group, known as australopithicus. was succeeded by a larger species with tool-making skills, Homo habilis. Besides these earliest hominids, skeletal remains of Homo erectus have demonstrated that this more humanlike ancestor was responsible for the migration of primates out of Africa and into Asia and Europe. Modern man, Homo sapiens, is believed to have first appeared in Africa c. 200,000 to 100.000. From tropical Africa, humans spread to all major regions of the world by 10,000. But while the basic physiology of this species is evident from fossils, direct links to the many variations of skin color and appearance of Africans and other peoples today is impossible. Because of this extensive archaeological record, continental Africa, and in particular the Great Rift Valley running through Tanzania and Kenya, is often referred to as the “cradle of humankind.” (Dart, 195-199)

Stone Age cultures developed in Africa as they did throughout the world, sometimes in tandem, other times at vastly divergent speeds. Hunter-gatherer societies flourished throughout the continent by c. 10,000 and detailed documents of their lifestyles are depicted in rock art in the savannah regions. The movement and settlement of these peoples was marked by changes in the environment over millennia. Africa in 7000 was much wetter and more densely forested than it is now. The Kho-San peoples are one of the last remaining traditional hunter-gather communities, and many of their practices bear striking similarity to information collected from archaeological deposits in southern and south central Africa. Neolithic culture eventually gave way to regularized agriculture and pastoralism, which foreshadowed the rise of the first organized farming communities along the riverine systems of northeast Africa in Egypt and Nubia. (MacEachern 357-384)

During the mid-fourth millennium the first centralized agricultural kingdoms arose along the Nile River. Small towns consolidated into two regions, Upper and Lower Egypt. In approximately 3100 Narmer (also known as Menes) conquered the lower region of the Nile Delta and established the first dynasty of ancient Egypt. The kings, known as pharaohs, ruled with divine authority over an authoritarian and bureaucratic state. The wealth for the kingdom came from trade and peasant labor along the Nile Valley and gold in Nubia (present-day Ethiopia). The Egyptians constructed monumental tombs for their kings, including possibly the largest single building constructed by hand, the Great Pyramid at Giza (c. 2500BCE). Among the many legacies of ancient Egypt are ...