Why didn't anything worthwhile happen here? Why weren't there any empires that rival Rome, Persia, or Han China? Why is there a lack of historical records for such a large continent?
>inb4 muh sandcastles
>inb4 muh trade
>inb4 muh ethiopia
>inb4 muh evil whitey
Other urls found in this thread:
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en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
google.co.uk
nationalgeographic.org
twitter.com
The Sahara is pretty big.
What the Sahara didn't block off, the jungles usually did.
You're talking about similar levels of geographical isolation to Australia or the New World.
This thread will not be deleted. There will be several hundred replies. A few will be somewhat insightful, but these will be ignored. 90% of it will be shitposting, memes, incoherent garbage, pseudoscience, memes, /pol/shit, tumblrshit, memes and also memes. No conclusion or consensus will be reached, nobody will leave the thread having learned anything new, no opinions will be changed, absolutely nothing will be achieved.
Once the thread 404's, the exact same thing will happen. And again, and again, and again until this board finally implodes, or far less likely, we get some competent moderation.
Not really
>>inb4 muh evil whitey
I'm getting really fucking sick of this reverse-SJW crusaders who have to act up all uppity before anybody ever even says anything. Go onto youtube comments, chances are somebody will be ranting about "cultural Marxists" and SJWs when nobody said anything nor where anybody going to say anything. Its really fucking stupid.
>inb4 muh ethiopia
Whats wrong about Ethiopia? Or the Nubians, while we are at it.
>Whats wrong about Ethiopia? Or the Nubians, while we are at it.
They were influenced by the Middle East. Unlike Europeans, who of course created all civilization without any influence from anywhere else on Earth.
It's always the go-to civilization that kangz apologists use. They hardly left a lasting legacy or influenced world history in the long run compared to European or Asian civilizations.
>buildings don't count if they're not made of what I like
>trade is irrelevant
>ethiopia didn't exist
>anyone who isn't retarded hates white people
>he said, posting a picture that demonstrated the other man's point
You see how the civilizations in Ethiopia and Somalia actually mattered in the ancient world?
Its pole posting but the hundreds of replies defending savages is leftist posting
No. It's just that there is plenty of habitable and fertile lands for the spread of ideas and an abundance of resources.
>inb4 OP writes off all the legitimate reasons.
Oh wait, I'm too slow.
In the steppe and savanna, you had what were called "cattle kingdoms" that traded for goods with the civilizations further north that were more literate and connected to the outside world.
But yeah, rain forest is a tremendous natural barrier.
Even basic things like ironworking took a long time to diffuse south.
The question itself is retarded. That's why.
>inb4 muh evil whitey
Veeky Forums is /pol/
Veeky Forums was a fucking mistake. The redditors got here before us.
Because only blacks lived there duh, what have blacks ever done really oh right nothing nada squat JACK FUCKING SHIT other than live tribal nomadic primitive lives.
Only logical explanation
/thread
Garmantes, Mali, Ghana, the Swahili city states, Axum, punt, ancient Somali civilization, the Unamed African Great Lakes civilization, whatever weird ethnic group has that old kingship in Zambia, the nok civilization that traded with Rome, great Zimbabwe, etc
This is a 'blacks are inherently inferior, prove me wrong' thread and OP is a total fag.
Hello, Reddit
we've been through this a dozen times, /pol/, it has a shitty climate for agriculture with tsetse flies and rinderpest wiping out cattle
despite this West Africa, muh Ethiopia and trade on the east coast did well (which is how knights got their magnificent ostrich plumes), Mbanza Kongo in the kingdom of the Kongo reached a population of 100000 making use of a variety of crops since it lacked a staple, palm, bananas, yam, millet after the introduction of maize and expansion of trade, nations like the zulu appeared in South Africa
It's one of those loaded questions threads where the op will throw a hissyfit if his viewpoint is not confirmed.
Here's the thing though, the narrative being pushed by YouTube comments is vastly less influential than the narrative pushed by academia and guess which narrative academia pushes? You guessed it: blame whitey.
why did nothing worthwhile happen in this thread?
No not at all. You just say it is so it feeds your persecution complex so even I I were to say anything that offends you, you blame it on "Academia".
Yeah ok user, memes like 'white guilt' and 'white privilege' totally didn't originate in the ivory tower. Next you're going to tell me that my professors didn't tell me to read Frantz 'Kill Whitey' Fanon...
>everyone who doesn't parrot my stormshit and objects to my making every board a spooky /pol/ hugbox is a redditor
ebin
But compare them to AmerIndian and Australian civilizations
Wait, what?
I always believed the whole of Central Africa was rain-forest. From that picture, it seems like a trade network between Ethiopia and the various Western African kingdoms could easily have developed, as well as trade networks between Ethiopia and the Kikongo (with small kingdoms in modern Malawi.
I know it may not have looked appealing, but Eurasian-like civilizations could easily have arose surrounding the rain-forest. The Sahara wasn't even the deal breaker, considering trans-desert trade routes did exist.
Why didn't that happen? Are you telling me the lack of a river connecting the Benue with the upstream Nile was all that doomed the continent? That seems like livable climate for villages and over-land trade routes.
wtf i hate africa now
Since no worthwhile discussion is going to take place anyway, I'm just gonna go ahead and leave this here.
Similar to how Racism only is a thing if combined with institutionalized power? Seriously that's dindu tier logic right there.
He's literally 100% right.
Stuff that is taught at universities and school trumps some autist's comment on youtube, because the first one has a certain gravitas and authority attached to it, while the latter has none
>no worthwhile discussion
What wasn't worthwhile about this .
Civilization needs a large surplus. Even in renaissance Europe ~90% of the population were farmers, you needed 9 men to feed a sailor or a stonemason. It is completely feasible that some parts of the world did not have a very good environment for agriculture and as you would expect would end up being left behind.
>everything that doesn't linebup with my negrocentric fantasies is "stormshit"
Fuck off leftypol
The real question is why has not op doneanything worthwhile in his life
>Human intelligence up to 75% inheritible
telegraph.co.uk
>Human intelligence is highly heritable.
nature.com
>The average African IQ is estimated at 79.
sciencedirect.com
The real question is why an evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence didn't appear in Africa.
Lack of written language?
Stuff could've happened, and we'd never know because of this.
Knowledge from oral history gets lost through the ages.
>I'm a stupid dick who can't resist the validation I get from maymay accusations
>Why didnt that happen?
Because if its not jungle or desert it's pic related.
Plus Africans live in Africa
On the historical records, an article points:
-little or no written history
-lack of trust in oral history
-hard to do field work due to political problems
-historical work is not your priority when people die of hunger
-if you are not only interested in kings then tough luck finding any info
-plus climate is unfit for preservation of many archeological resources
Thus African history depends largely on post-colonial era works of European scholars.
Not this meme again. Africa has the largest stock of unused arable land in the world.
Also many subhuman retards think Africa is mostly covered by desert because they don't understand how the Mercator Projection underestimates sizes near the Equator
Nice meme. Africa is quite shit for farming, its either rainforest, desert, or savannah. The best place to farm is south Africa which is why it was settled so much by Boers, literally farmer.
I know, I can read.
It isn't impossible to traverse savannas, though. And even if it were, you can just move closer to the desert or closer to the jungle, whichever way makes life easier.
A couple of villages a day's distance away from each other close to water deposits and food sources (probably doable in the outskirts of the jungle, and you can even use rivers along the way) and you have a perfectly serviceable trade route.
I know I might be underselling the hardships, but if Swahili speakers could come from the west all the way to the Horn of Africa, it should be possible to do better with actual infrastructure.
Yields are low because farming practices are bad.
>Africa is quite shit for farming
Source? Do you have any evidence that potential yields are lower than Europe because of climate poor soils or whatever?
Just because the land is arable doesnt mean it erases everything else negative about africa talked about in this thread
>"Look guise! i know what de eart actual looks like!"
Man that shit was taught like day 2 of geography in middleschool. I know that Africa has a lot of land but alot of it is big, open, expanses of fucking nothingness.
No rivers, little water sources, little arable land at least for early man to make use of. Theres just nothing there to make sure of. Trade routes follow rivers, coastlines or chains of waterholes.
Rainforest and savannah make terrible farmland and need a lot of work done to them to make them arable. What land is good for farming is mostly given over to coffee farming to supply the world with its coffee which is very profitable but doesnt give anybody any food. Its similar to Brazil except they have less control over raping their rainforest.
>big, open, expanses of fucking nothingness
The US midwest used to be a large expanse of nothingness and nowdays it is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.
>Africa has around 600 million hectares of uncultivated arable land, roughly 60 percent of the global total.
mckinsey.com
Africa has fertile land excellent climate conditions and abundant natural resources. The idea that Africa was always a backwater because of geographical or environmental reasons is a myth popularised by pop science
and is this arable land suitable for grains
>make terrible farmland
No they don't with modern farm practices. Most of the world's soaybeans are grown in savannah biomes
>coffee farming
Why is every cuck here pretending to be an expert? Most coffee is grown in Asia and Latin America. You probably meant cocoa beans. It's pretty clear you have no clue what you are talking about. Also cash crops for export are good for African countries you giant retard.
In subtropical areas. Maize is cultivated all around Southern Africa (South Africa Angola Zambia Zimbabwe etc). Western Africa is excellent for growing rice. Wheat is not very suitable but there are many alternative crops
>A couple of vilages a day's distance away
I think you're seriously underestimating the big nothing that is africa. Im no expert either, and I couldnt tell you how many Kilometers you can travel in a day on flat land, but whatever it is it wont be a couple of villages.
Plus from what I understand about historic African culture (Which is borderline nothing so correct me if im totaly wrong) Africans were pretty nomadic.Even if there was villages then I would guess their tribal culture would fuck up the trade route if there was a feud going on between villages.
Soy beans arent staple food.
Most african crops are coffee, cocoa, cotton, tea, rubber and fruit. Not the staple foods they need but just ways of making the rich richer
>For example, in Burkina Faso 85% of its residents (over two million people) are reliant upon cotton production for income, and over half of the country's population lives in poverty.[8] Larger farms tend to grow cash crops such as coffee,[9] tea,[9] cotton, cocoa, fruit[9] and rubber. These farms, typically operated by large corporations, cover tens of square kilometres and employ large numbers of laborers. Subsistence farms provide a source of food and a relatively small income for families, but generally fail to produce enough to make re-investment possible.
>cash crops are good
Yeah but not for the people, they're hungry, they're poor, but they're growing coffee and cotton
Garamantes wasn't subsaharan. It was oddly Saharan.
You are batshit retarded. Cash crops are good because they enable investement and bring in foreign currency that can be used to import capital goods and upgrade infrastructure and farming productivity. The average nigger farme is poor because he has low productivity and has no money to buy crops from the market. By growing cash crops he can specialise in a crop get a higher income by selling to a market. Niggers are not starving because there isn't enough food around they are starving because they don't have money to buy crops and it is very expensive to move crops because there are no roads. Fucking clueless 16 year old leftist redditor trash
I agree with you about Sub-Saharan Africa having no outstanding civilizations. But face it, Axum was one of the top 10 (if not top 5) greatest civilization during its time.
Pre-industrial economies depend on agriculture and Africa has a very different environment from latitudes where wheat, oats, barley, rye and rice thrive.
Until the 50s there was little demand for industry in much of Africa, it couldn't compete with more temperate locations.
Until the 90s cold war proxy wars stunted progress and echos of those wars and islamism contributed to continuing instability.
Regions that have achieved stability are seeing economic growth that you would expect from a continental region where transportation costs limit access to the global market.
None of this is popsci, you will find most redditors and liberals imagine wealth as being like a big bag of diamonds and evil colonialists came and stole Africa's. Very few academics are interested in nonmeme history and actually look at economics and geography.
If cash crops were so good the population wouldn't be exploited to hell and back and half starving, the wealth isn't distributed, it isn't spread.
You keep contradicting yourself too, first you claim Africa is excellent for farming but they are poor and hungry because they don't make use of the land for food crops, then you say they do make use of it by growing cash craps and that this is a great idea because it gets them rich, while simultaneously saying they are poor and acknowledging that the land is put to the wrong use.
>The US midwest used to be a large expanse of nothingness and nowdays it is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.
keyword NOW. Sure ranchers and farmers existed in the area since the Oregon trail but in less then 100 years the fucking dust bowl happened. Plus what said
>exploited
"exploitation" doesn't exist it's a marxist meme kill yourself.
>the wealth isn't distributed
African countries are extremely poor there is no wealth to be "distributed" you blithering double digit IQ mongoloid redditor. The entire country of Ethiopis has a Gross Domestic Product of 50 billion $ less than most US states.
>Africa is excellent for farming
It is
>but they are poor and hungry because they don't make use of the land
Yes 60% of unused arable land in the world is located in Africa.
>then you say they do make use of it by growing cash craps
They don't use it exclusively to cultivate cash crops I said cash crops are good for Africa
>while simultaneously saying they are poor
They are poor because 90% of them are subsistence farmers that grow staple foods in small farms with terrible productivity and yields.
>that the land is put to the wrong use
No it is not. Every country whether in the Americas Asia or Europe has a mix of cash crops for export and staple food production.
reddit bullshit
Africa has fertile land excellent climate conditions and abundant natural resources. The idea that Africa was always a backwater because of geographical or environmental reasons is a myth popularised by pop science
Wait wait wait, I thought we were talking about why Africa DIDN'T have anything worthwhile happen.
nothimbut cash crops are just one step along the way to development, it is a way to start making slightly more money than you used to and encourage investment which will lead to other things
It's funny how many African countries have a lower GDP per capita today than they did in the 60s right after decolonisation.
If all you're going to do is continually insult someone rather than making an argument then there is no point.
Face it, you contradicted yourself.
See
MAN you do not like to be wrong.
SO tell us Mr. 160 IQ, How do you fix Africa
shouldnt be hard considering its a contenent filled with magic land that can grow all sorts of crops.
P.S. Thank god you came when you did, apparently you're smarter than everyone who lives in Africa
look at the following evidence
the map I posted
>worldkoppenmap.png
another map someone else posted
you can confirm their accuracy as there are countless sources showing the same thing, very different environments from the ones where grain thrived in eurasia
google.co.uk
I will find one
nationalgeographic.org
saharra, sahel, savannah, terrain like this is rare elsewhere, savanna is much hotter than the steppes so disease is a big problem for pastoralists
>How do you fix Africa
As Dr Watson said stop assuming that Africans have the same capabilities and congitive skills as Europeans. It is a scientific fact that they don't.
>The average African IQ is estimated at 79.
sciencedirect.com
When it comes to African agriculture you need to encourage more land to come under cultivation. Move more subsistence farmers to cash crops. You need to mechanise and increase the productivity of staple crops. A good idea is for the state to subsidise the purchase of inputs (fertiliser seeds machinery) for farmers. Some African countries give fertiliser for free to farmers and this has increased food production. Farms run by White people are some of the most productive and profitable in the world. But I wouldn't hold my breath Africa would ever develop and become prosperous. Their IQ is too low.
*farms run by White people in Africa...
Also bonus pic correlation between average IQ and GDP per capita
You fucking faggot, way to start the thread off with your own angst-ridden edge fest of an off topic shitpost, you whore.
I honestly cant tell if you're just that egotistic, or maybe this is bait and you're this guy, or maybe you're just from /pol/. But I can safeley assume you're pulling these facts from you did no in depth research into, nor do you have the experiance to back them up. So me and the other guy you were arguing with are probably just gonna ignore you for the rest of the thread.
What a shit regression, you can't have negative GDP, why not adjust the data to a parabola or something?
>up to 75% inheritible
ehm, 75% times 100 iq is 75 iq
so 25% makes all the difference and these links do not support your point of view
Define worthwhile.
Then think about whether you definition is worth a damn
Don't think anyone will ever read this, but I'll give it a shot...
Most of the historically progressive, developing and human index progressive countries have had their population take themselves out of the food chain and settled before they started advancing.
All but North Africa has had little chance to do this in primitive times due to the largest biodiversity on the planet. Whereas areas like the Sahara desert, Saudi Arabia and Iraq have been amongst the most developing... before Islam, that is. year 800-1,100 A.D. has had one of the highest ammount of scientifical development in human history, even compared to today. This occurred in Baghdad.
That also explains why the currenet development is taking place in nordic countries. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Estonia, Canada, etc.
The realer question is whether or not iq is a good indicator of intelegence across cultures.
could you name some important inventions from these tribes, and if there was none, they were neither relevant or great
>Implying the elites in control of African nations have any incentive to invest capital from cash crops into developing infrastructure and bettering the lives of the masses
>Once the thread 404's, the exact same thing will happen. And again, and again, and again
You must be new on Veeky Forums.
>Why weren't there any empires that rival Rome, Persia, or Han China?
Mani lived in the 3rd century and considered Axum to be on equal footing with Rome, Persia and China
1) Isolated from the rest of the world because of the Sahara and many other jungles.
2) The land was abundant in food and thus no one felt any drive to progress further from basic agriculture.
That's basically it. Asking why someone couldn't Rival Rome or Persia or China is absurd; very few peoples could rival them. Neither snowniggers nor even poo-in-loos could manage to rival these empires.
In case you are wondering there were small Sub-Saharan kingdoms to the north.
Probably because there is no other way to express discontent with this kinda shit and people are getting tired of it.
What, you want people to have an idea hammered down their throats and have zero reaction?
Look at the types of plants African people were growing. Until the colonial area crops from the Fertile Crescent had not been brought down, and African people grew other food sources.
For example, the staple cassava is actually very high in cyanide and those 0.5 billion people who eat it very frequently have chronic mild cyanide poisoning.
You can't really create a civilization when every single person is chronically ill. It just doesn't work.
Had Africa not been colonized, it wouldn't be like this today, there would be civilizations, the societies would have started westernizing slowly through trade with Europeans, they would've progressed naturally instead of being ripped out of their development stage and then left without the capital or infrastructure to support western style development. So yes, actually, in essence it is the fault of European monarchs and leaders, all of whom were white. It's unrealistic to expect that an area that had its capital completely drained and was split up along arbitrary colonial lines to suddenly develop after 50 years. Imperialism doomed them to at least another 50 years of war, collapse, dictatorship, and mild economic development.
Is it the fault of EVERY white person to have existed? Hell no, and most Africans and Black people know that. It's the fault of the leaders, and their system. Sorry, exploitation and imperialism destroy people and countries.
WE don't know what/if they invented anything, we haven't spend enough time and money to find out what they developed. We know they all had written language and agriculture as well as at the very least iron-age development.
To be fair to Africans, Germanics did fucking nothing until the 16th century, and everything they did relied on the Korean printing press. Due to it's remoteness, Sub-Saharan Africa never got that.
...
>everything they did relied on the Korean printing press. Due to it's remoteness, Sub-Saharan Africa never got that
Nice fucking disingenuity.
Comparing Gutenberg's press to the Korean printing press is like comparing an AR-15 to a matchlock
Because they are the missing link between us and monkeys.
>there are some people who think that weather can hinder a people's development
Mongolia has still developed properly, the Vikings were thriving in areas with 2 months of night.
Slavers and imperialists got to it when they were still primitive.
How much do you think they would have developed in 500 years?
Strong European peoples were usually built in 1500+ years.
>What the Sahara didn't block off, the jungles usually did.
More so then the entire Atlantic and Pacific oceans?
Because Mesoamerican Indians managed to create FAR more advance societies then anything in sub-Sahara Africa and they had zero contact with the Old World.
Sorry, but you can't blame the lack of civilization in Africa on geography.
Ah, that's true, his press was based off of the Roman Screw press. Point is, he didn't invent anything.
Persians influenced Greeks who influenced Romans who influenced Europeans
I mean just thinking about the amount that India influenced England just in the past few centuries- no one lived in a bubble.
>Africa is quite shit for farming
Nonsense, that map is showing where farming could be improved, not where farming is possible.
Zimbabwe for example is shown as “blow potential” because when it was Rhodesia, it was _exporting_ food.
>inb4 all the legitimate reasons
Classic tactic OP. Please disembowel yourself.
>Mongolia has still developed properly
I've lived in both Gaborone and Ulan Bator and if you asked me which one I would rather stay in permanently I could not say Gaborone fast enough. Mongolia is the most depressing place I've ever been to, it's a bit of a stretch to call it developed.
They also never developed the wheel, and barely got anywhere with metallurgy. The Aztecs literally drug wheelless wheelbarrows by hand to move everything that couldn't be shipped by boat.
He improved markedly on the previous design too
You are too raycis, whitey!
I was speaking about what happened centuries ago.
And about the current year, I would choose Mongolia over Botswana any day.
Mongolia is developing fast, because the people are intelligent; and furthermore I would live amongst yellow people rather than black ones.
>They also never developed the wheel, and barely got anywhere with metallurgy.
Neither did the Africans, who didn’t use the wheel despite having domesticable beasts of burden, unlike American Indians and only used the most primitive of metal implements (again, the process and designs being imported from Europe/Asia and not native developments).
Africa was in contact with the rest of the world the whole time, yet Africans never managed to do shit with this knowledge.