It's commonly said that Africa has bad soil and no arable land. If this is true...

It's commonly said that Africa has bad soil and no arable land. If this is true, then how is it possible for such a luscious and fertile jungle to thrive?

Other urls found in this thread:

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534707003576
soil-net.com/dev/page.cfm?pageid=casestudies_trf&loginas=user_casestudies
mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/9/841/htm
livescience.com/51631-ancient-amazon-rainforest-agriculture.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Jungles are terrible places to grow crops; did you skip the entirety of school?

Sorry but I don't follow your logic. You put a seed in the ground and it grows. Leftists are trying to say that this isn't the case in Africa when there are jungles clearly proving otherwise.

>It's commonly said that Africa has bad soil and no arable land

That is not commonly said or even said at all because historically most Africans supported themselves by farming.

Why did everything interesting in the ancient times only happen around the Mediterranean? Wasn't eastern Africa the birthplace of humanity?

The topsoil is jungle regions is relatively thin, making it unsuited to large scale pre-medieval farming (advanced crop rotations) and probably right up until fertilizer is invented (1910). Any civilization of comparable size to Egypt or China can not sustain a metropolitan area in a jungle without a floodplain or something else sustaining the agriculture, and it's still less ideal than non-jungle floodplains due to everything else making the place shit-- namely everything trying to kill you. South America still struggles with both those issues even with modern technology.

Come on lad, I know Veeky Forums loves to bait but you'll need a better hook than jungle agriculture.

>Leftists are trying to say...
no leftist is saying shit to you you're literally putting words in peoples mouths because thats what you WANT them to say to vindicate your hatred of black people

and no, jungle soil, despite the apparently verdant growth it has, is actually really poor soil for CROPS. The same applies to the amazon rainforest soil.

I don't hate black people at all. I'm just seeking information. Stop imposing your white-hatred insecurities on others.

Ok thanks for the explanation. I'm still not entirely convinced. I feel like if I went to Africa I could throw together a little pumpkin farm relatively easily but I'll take your word for it.

How have they been farming for the last four thousand years if there is no arable land?

>Stop imposing your white-hatred insecurities on others.
you're projecting agian. i never said anything about white people, faggot. you, on the other hand, are part of a tradition of african shitposting on Veeky Forums with racist overtones. the fact you brought politics into the argument by creating a leftist strawman tells us you have an ideological agenda, not an intellectual one.

African soil is generally shit for crops. The Congo basin is some of the worst.

Are you fucking retarded? This is common knowledge

>interesting
Shart detected.

The problem isn't growing a pumpkin, it's growing a pumpkin in ~10 years of industrious farming. You'll run out of nutrients and be forced to move it or employ advanced farming techniques, or face severely declining yields (that wont support cities, maybe villages) This is also why the most successful early civilizations were based on flood plains (Indus, China, Egypt) because the floods restored nutrients and prevented the locals from collapsing their agriculture to over-farming.

>no explanations for what those numbers even mean

Yeah, come back with an actual fucking image.

>It's commonly said that Africa has bad soil and no arable land If this is true,
It isn't true
>then how is it possible for such a luscious and fertile jungle to thrive?
Africa is only 8% tropical. Fuck off.

Oh you could probably grow your farm just fine. But after you harvest once, the soil is depleted and the plant starves.
So you burn it all down, hope to get some more nutrients on your top soil. you plant another load of pumpkins, and, and now the ground is even more salted, and less nutritious.

Unless you keep growing and killing other plants around and within your crops, the soil will spoil.

Jungles are heavily dependant on high plant death to bring back nutrients into the soil.

Probably salted if you used fertilizer because the topsoil is so thin, so you're not gonna have anything growing on it soon unless you flood the plot.

You could build a farm there just fine, but maintaining it for longer than 2 years will be nigh impossible

Rainforests are old. They're hundred of millions of years old. When you have a dense canopy shielding all the ground from rainfall which usually brings nitrogen and phosphorus + trace minerals for fifty million years, you get ancient, degraded, and poor-quality soil. Like parts of the Australian desert, which also has very old soil.

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534707003576

soil-net.com/dev/page.cfm?pageid=casestudies_trf&loginas=user_casestudies

mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/9/841/htm

Slash & burn. Only problem is, it only generates a thin layer of minerals that is quickly depleted. Thus, you have to burn another patch of forest... and another... and another...

The Mesoamericans learned that if you blend charcoal, bone powder, and manure into the soil and carefully cultivated it, it would retain a thick top layer of fertile earth called terra preta. Modern agronomists are trying to learn how to recreate this in the lab to enable less degenerative farming practices in the rainforest.

>Slash & burn. Only problem is, it only generates a thin layer of minerals that is quickly depleted. Thus, you have to burn another patch of forest... and another... and another...

I mean, how did they maintain agriculture in the Niger river estuary region for this entire time if the land is not arable?

>The Mesoamericans learned that if you blend charcoal, bone powder, and manure into the soil and carefully cultivated it, it would retain a thick top layer of fertile earth called terra preta. Modern agronomists are trying to learn how to recreate this in the lab to enable less degenerative farming practices in the rainforest.

A slash and burn system could then be a sophisticated means of forest management.

>Rainforests are old. They're hundred of millions of years old.

They aren't.... they're quite young. They grow and shrink all the time. Humans like us were alive at times when the rain forests were smaller than they are today.

blah blah, they never figured out how to amend soils while amazionians did. Even polynesians managed to select profitable plants to sustain their needs, in an ultra limited environment. It's just a lifestyle choice, a cultural choice, which is perfect imo. For millenaries they lived an interesting life, with love stories and shits. Cars and nukes are not a necessity.

>a tiny portion of a continent has this specific sort of plant life growing on it
>why can't the continent support all plant life???

Come on, man. Use your brain.

They did develop agriculture and iron tools during these millenaries. They did adopt cattle herding and this lifestyle did spread across most of the continent. In the Sahel, they did start using horses and gunpowder.

Were any of these significant developments when they happened outside Africa?

>Zimbabwe in the second worst category
>despite Rhodesia turning it into the breadbasket of Africa overnight
Sure thing brah

Try half the continent.

>ignoring south east asia and india thriving in lateric landscapes
>ignoring terra preta

>SE Asia

Stagnated in Neolithic-style society for thousands of years until colonized by India. Only major contribution to early humanity is rice agriculture.

>India

India has no significant rainforest outside of the Assam region and the coastal belt.

Out-Of-Africa is not the only game in town.
I personally subscribe to Out-of-Asia and lean toward Multiple-Origins as well.

Idiot

That's mostly dry grassland and desert

>Terra preta owes its characteristic black color to its weathered charcoal content,[2] and was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, and manure to the otherwise relatively infertile Amazonian soil. A product of indigenous soil management and slash-and-char agriculture.

Well, I learned something as well. But this certainly qualifies as advanced agricultural techniques.


As for SEA, it had the benefits of two very advanced neighboring civilizations and was still largely too inhospitable to support cities outside a few regions, and never achieved the ability to rival it's neighbors in population-- though the civilizations there were certainly impressive in their own right.

>Out-Of-Africa is not the only game in town.
>I personally subscribe to Out-of-Asia and lean toward Multiple-Origins as well.

Then humans migrated back into Africa at some point? That would explain why we all have a common ancestor within the last forty thousand years.

...

>I'm still not entirely convinced.
why, do you think botany is a conspiracy to find excuses for why black people in tropical regions never developed intensive agriculture, kys

Just find it kinda hard to believe that the collective minds of one billion people aren't able to come up with something.

doesn't matter how many billions of minds there are, you can't defy the laws of physics, now kys

This is a map of the percentage of land currently being used you farming. It is very misleading.

How do you pick up right where you left off in the same thread 7 hours later? Are you a robot?

>what is Veeky Forums gold

>Leftists
Yes, those damn leftists with the facts

>put a seed in the ground and it grows

Yes, it's just that easy. All plants grow in the same conditions, and require the same nutrients, everywhere. If one plant can grow in a place, an entirely different plant can grow there, right?


Fuckwit.

Is it even /pol/tards at this point or just attention whores making these threads?

Did ya miss Agriculture 101 son?

>invaded Europe, by way of Spain, an old African trick
Fuckin WEW LAD

we had this thread last week and pol was beaten to death
at this point im sure this is the same person who makes the africa threads, and its sole intention is baiting

Jungles are shit for agriculture.

That being said Africa has tons of great land it's just that the r-selectivity of Bantu people causes repeated starvation cycle which was less severe in the times of primitive societies(which leads to initiative like that of Kenyan government promoting return to traditional Masai lifestyle).

Maasai people aren't Bantu, stupid

its arable land percentage

Constant rain flushes out the nutrients. Meanwhile the plants have caught what little nutrients there are. For a new plant to grow, another must die. That's why brazillians burn down forest so they can cultivate it for a year or two.

Yeah sure, that's why Brazil is erazing its jungles to turn them into crops fields...

Modern sub saharans with the exception of the very archaic humans like san bushmen and hadza originate from outside africa so yes humans did migrate back to africa, possibly several times

I'm not that guy but you have really poor reading comprehension

This is false, i am in west-africa and they cultive yam, rice, soursop...

not crop fields, it's to raise cattle, fucking retard

This is nonsense.
livescience.com/51631-ancient-amazon-rainforest-agriculture.html

Wrong, retard

Come on. Weren't right-wingers supposed to be tough country men who know about crops and shit?

But I literally posted last thread that jungles are a wealth of amazing arable land if horticularly managed since it has a shit ton of stuff to burn to produce charcoal. Mix it with the right other nutrients and you produce black earth, a very resistant and fertile cropland.

So jungles require advanced farming techniques to give reasonable yields, when you could just move to Europe and have arable land that doesn't need that to produce a functioning metropolitan society, or set up in the flood plains that were the basis of the earliest civilizations. And no, it's not amazing arable land by any means

. cites 8 million people supported... by the entire Amazon basin and covering 0.1% of it's area. This is amazing arability...? Sounds closer to sufficient arability to sustain medium settlements, but not cities, which is the key you know, actually forming a civilization.

Are you gay?

Can we stop discussing food as if it was Africa's original issue?

Fact: Africans didnt starve until medecine brought by superior whites in the 19th century allowed them to survive more than their negro society produced food for

Fact: During these centuries of non-starvation, Africans stagnated at the same stage of advancement and never invented anything new technologically

The reason why Africa didnt develop clearly isnt food as staevation is a recent problem there
The reason is that they're an unimaginative monkey people

>political bait thread
>all these replies
so this is the power of & Humanities...

>r-selectivity

That is COMPLETE bullshit. R/K isn't even used abymore

>one billion
Population of Africa was considerably lower, mostly because...well, it couldn't support that many. Due to the above.

In the same way modern Europeans are of central Asian descent.