Is there any way to actually have this discussion on this webzone?
In my western knoledge of history Africa has made no true technological advances for thousands of years. There's Egypt and then what? Why has Africa not been as important to history as Asia/Europe, and in more recent history America. They just seem to have stagnated, even though the country is full of resources. Is it just down to Culture and Religion in that area? The middle east seems to be in a similar state, but that's a desert with damned near nothing in it.
They didn't get to naturally progress like everyone else you idiot. They're living the most comfy, agrarian rich lives, then all of a sudden industrial nazis come in and force them into modern shackles of mentality. Democracy is fine when it comes from the people. You can't expect people of all natural things to respond well to years and years of oppression and disarray and humiliation you closet cuck kek.
Owen Morris
Africa has made significant technological progress on its own particularly in the Sahel, the Great Lakes, the Swahili Coast, the Ethiopian Highlands, the Congo Bain and the Niger Delta.
However, a particular barrier on development and statebuilding has been Africa's absurdly low population density and population prior to modern times. Note that in 1950 there were only 220 million Africans in the entire continent. A century earlier, that number was a mere 80 million.
Such dispersion means that bulk trade is difficult (outside the Sahel, the Nile, the Great Lakes, and coasts), and statebuilding is harder (as entire peoples will simply move if they don't like your government). With no strong centralized state, developments are much more difficult to do.
Daniel Campbell
>They're living the most comfy, agrarian rich lives,
M8 that's not even remotely true. Disease death rates and infant mortality were sky high, and low level warfare had been endemic since the Atlantic slave trade intensified during the late 1600s. The population of Africa stagnated for almost 200 years due to all these factors.
As for agrarian rich, central Africa from Cameroon to Equatorial Congo to South Sudan is full of acidic soil that makes crop growth difficult. Much of Nigeria is swampy as shit, the Sahel is marginal land by and large, and from Southern Angola to the Limpopo river is all dryland or desert. (Sans Mozambique)
Gabriel Roberts
Sub Saharan Africans have an average in of 70 and below. They are legit retarded. That's the real reason.
The Middle East has had some semblance of civilizations but Africa... LMAO
Jayden Phillips
>Is there any way to actually have this discussion on this webzone?
no
Logan Garcia
>Some What do you mean? There were many technological and cultural shifts in Africa from the Early to Late stone ages into for most groups the Iron ages after the Neolithic Subpluvial.
The issues of Africa and the implicit and explicit effects of where African civilization arose is multipronged.
Take a look at the crops of the Equatorial and subtropics: cassava, corn, banana, taro, sweet potato. All of these came from a 1-3k year ago to 500 year ago agricultural expansion that caused explosions in most regions of the continent outside of the Sahel.
The climate is not conducive to significant sedentary population centers, it's not like the temperate and well watered/rained North and unlike Eurasian the crops themselves could not be grown in regions Bantu colonized.
This left Finger Millet a rather finicky crop as the main form of subsistence with lower yields.
The African woodlands centered around Yam, Oil Palm, various vegetables and in Senegal/Sierra Leone/"the bight" rice farms/fonio/sorghum that were in the span of 3kya adapted to seasonally wetter ecotones.
The desert and the deep forests aren't going to be places of development because of these caloric issues and because they are so isolated. The Sahelian and miombo away from the rivers are too unreliable for annual agricultural pursuits. What you are left with is Pastoralism and agro-pastoralist subsistence patterns that are low input, extensive food strategies that link the few but very key fertile regions.
The African continent is really advanced given a 3ky agricultural tradition with all it's pitfalls and challenges. How people can compared Africa to say Asia is a foolish and ignorant proposition. It's comparing apples to oranges.
I recommend "Cattle before Crops" in a PDF to get a better picture for those interested.
Gavin Perry
Isn't South America similar?
Bentley Lewis
No, their agricultural systems centered around terra preta and aboriculture along with one of the most efficient crops on earth: cassava. Which is also a forest growing plant that can exist in the semi-arid to the true tropics. The same is true of Corn/maize and sweet potato. The Inca are a culmination of tran-latitudinal trade and exchange. They developed with the greatest yielding temperate crops the potato.
There are just so many stark differences any person who researches crop/human dynamics could understand. They also have an older agricultural tradition it seems in the available data. Their food systems are sedentary agricultural by default, very intensive, very input rich. This is the opposite of most of Africa.
Luke Baker
Thanks for typing this out, I never really thought about the agricultural aspect. It really is a huge fucking joke to go on about "muh diamonds" and "immense resources" when the soil doesn't fucking grow shit.
Ethan Gutierrez
Yeah. There is a reason why Nigeria is the largest producer of cassava and Africa as a whole south of the Sahara relies overwhelming on New World crops and if not those Asian crops.
Sorghum has only recently be adapted to true tropics conditions and even then it suffers.
African agriculturalists in the new world heavily modified the culinary and physical landscape where possible though, rice farmers from key West African landscapes changed the Carolinas, Louisiana and a few key Latin American regions but save for rice African reliance on sheep, goats and cattle were what revolutionized north and south American foodways.
Luke Young
One can look at at history and see the largest indicator of "advanced" civilization has been "Do we have shit to eat?" Look at the U.S. it has the most fertile, the most cultivated and the most able to be cultivated land on the planet, and can feed itself many times over. It's no mystery why the U.S is prosperous while The Congo or Afghanistan struggle. And even now population explosions are making areas that were only relatively fertile like the Tigris/Euphrates unable to keep pace with regions like the U.S. or southern China.
William Rogers
The north parts actually contributed to sciences and civilization since the Old Kingdom in Egipt until, well, maybe the renascence?
That area was well "connected" and received ideas and people from middle east and Europe so they had some kind of flow of people, products and ideas.
In contrast, sub-Saharan African cultures were isolated: A giant desert, bigger than half the Moon's surface, heavy dense jungle and it was also surrounded by oceans. Despite what one could see at first glance, it was a very isolated area, it didn't receive ideas, products, technologies, migrations or significative contact with other cultures and even between themselves, for centuries if not millennia.
That's one of the reasons (and I think it is the main one) of why the cultures there developed so little.
Hudson Wilson
Given the circumstances I feel for a Pastoralist continent it was quite advanced.
>In my western knoledge of history Africa has made no true technological advances for thousands of years. >no true technological advances for thousands of years.
Carter Martinez
south sudan acidic soil kek.
Isaiah Collins
>Is it just down to Culture and Religion in that area? It comes down to race The whiter north has decent civilisation
Jack Edwards
>. Despite what one could see at first glance, it was a very isolated area, it didn't receive ideas, products, technologies, migrations or significative contact with other cultures and even between themselves, for centuries if not millennia. That's plain wrong m8, Yamna descent people settle there (for example Chad) before the sahara turned impracticable, the Romans mounted expeditions, the berbers had trade with the south since ever, east africa had trade with india and arabia, and after 14th century europeans visited the coast. Than there were parts than no one visited? Yeah, the same happens everywhere in the world, the finss and laps where ignored for centuries if not milleniums, the Meso american did have that a lot worse and did fine, turning they crops from shit to the highest yielding crops in the world, like Maize or potatoes.
William Sullivan
>the finss and laps where ignored for centuries if not milleniums
How many great Lapp or Sami civilizations were there?
Lucas Bell
too long didnt read
Niggers are stupid ok we done here.
>LOOK AT ALL THE EXCUSES I FIND TO EXPLAIN WHY NEGROS COULDNT HAVE MADE CIVILIZATIONS ON PAR WITH EURASIANS OR AMERICANS.
Julian Hughes
I'm Anyways the camel has been in Africa for only about two thousand years, before that it was the donkey and we aren't too sure if the wetter Sahara also meant a much broader tsetse zone. But with camel and oxen the degree of contact is much smaller and not nearly as formed as camelid era trans Saharan trade and contact.
Secondly Yamna were NOT in the Sahara, there isn't a single example of the horse there, what we have is a western Asian derive haplogroup that could be over ten k years old with an extreme bottleneck of only a handful of men from the late Natufian period that has clear Nile contact.
Thirdly we don't know how corn became so large, some researchers believe the sweet stem juice was a continuously bred trait that then provided the energy to create large grains but as we see in sweet sorghum that doesn't translate into the characteristics of all grains.
It still can be grown in true tropics conditions unlike sorghum and the domestication event of corn is not the same as hallmark African grains.
It's comparing apples to oranges.
Cooper Richardson
Also that image is showing modern breeding not mesoamerican breeding or yields
Nolan Cook
>He doesn't know about the Finish-Lorean Hyper war.
Joseph Stewart
Subsaharan africa developed iron working independently.
The biggest thing to understand for why Africa failed to develop is just to look at the population. Central Africa, reaching from Chad down to Namibia, had a population less than the nation of Germany, spread out over an area larger than Europe. It's quite large, but it's really not any more surprising than why the siberians didn't accomplish much.
Levi Green
>The Middle East has had some semblance of civilization >some semblance >some
What were the Phoenicians and Mesopotamia
Henry Stewart
I'm not trying to move goalposts, but noticing that warm water freezes faster isn't exactly creating a technology.
Lucas Collins
Goddamnit
Aiden King
(You)
Connor Morris
I don't know a lot about African history, but wasn't the colonization of Africa partially due to the great East and West African civilizations, other than Ethiopia, collapsing not too long before the Europeans showed up?
Sebastian Carter
What part of European colonization of Africa are you talking about? The first phase was just trading posts along the coastline, so I don't know if the decline of African kingdoms had much of an impact. But the Scramble for Africa in the late 1800s kicked off primarily because of technological advances, most important among them was medicine for malaria discovered in South America.
Nolan Russell
>Subsaharan africa developed iron working independently. Not only that, they also developed ceramics and started agriculture on their own. That triggered the Bantu expansion.
Wyatt Thompson
best books on eastern africa?
Nathan Sullivan
Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873
