Africa in Global History

A Handbook

Toyin Falola, Mohammed Bashir Salau, Toyin Falola, Mohammed Bashir Salau

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783111353333
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110678147
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

No detailed description available for "Africa in Global History".

Chapter 1 Human Origins, Early Societies and Migration to 1000 CE

Peter J. Mitchell

Abstract

Africa has the longest history of any continent. Combining archaeology with other disciplines, notably genetics, linguistics, and the palaeoenvironmental sciences, provides the basis for understanding that history. H. sapiens evolved in Africa by 300,000 years ago and the oldest evidence for behaviour signalling complex cognition and symbolic thought is also found there. These innovations likely provided the basis for subsequent human expansion into the rest of the world. Building on millennia of adaptation, African societies successfully survived the climatic challenges of the late Pleistocene and in some parts of the continent began to engage in food production from at least 8000 years ago. Pastoralism based on non-native livestock species spread rapidly across the continent’s north, with crops of Middle Eastern origin also introduced to the Nile Valley, the Maghreb, and the highlands of Ethiopia. South of the Sahara, on the other hand, a variety of indigenous agricultural systems developed, expanding in combination with livestock as far as South Africa by early in the Christian era. The processes by which iron-working was invented/adopted in sub-Saharan Africa remain obscure, but knowledge of metallurgy spread rapidly, helping to form the basis on which towns and complex societies began to appear in regions such as Mali and Nigeria by 1500 years ago.

Keywords: Human evolution, hunter-gatherers, food-production, metallurgy, complex societies.

Introduction

Africa is where we began, the continent on which Homo sapiens evolved. With the longest history of any landmass, it offers unparalleled insights into the human evolutionary story, but its significance reaches far beyond accounting for our origins in deep time. Home to some of the world’s most diverse societies, Africa’s populations elaborated rich artistic traditions that they painted and engraved on the continent’s rocks or sculpted in clay, stone, and wood. They domesticated an extraordinarily wide range of plants, many of which spread far beyond the continent’s shores, while incorporating plants and animals with distant origins of their own into their economies. Additionally, they devised distinctive forms of subsistence, technology, social organisation, urbanism, and interaction that frequently followed uniquely African pathways, distinct from the trajectories pursued in other parts of the world.

Map 2: Africa. © Peter Palm, Berlin.

This chapter provides a background to these themes, from the earliest evidence for tool use to the close of the first millennium AD, a time when towns and cities had already appeared in several regions of the continent and most Africans supported themselves by farming with iron tools, even while stone artefacts and ways of life focused on pastoralism or hunting and gathering remained important for many. This discussion draws primarily upon the results of archaeological fieldwork, complemented by input from other disciplines: palaeoanthropology (especially significant for our knowledge of human evolution); Quaternary science (for reconstructing past environments); historical linguistics (informative on many non-tangible aspects of past societies, but with a much shallower time-depth than archaeology); written historical sources (universally recent in date and largely confined to North and Northeast Africa); and the genetics of people, plants, and animals (still largely inferred from living populations, but including ever more studies based on ancient DNA). Taken together, and enriched in some cases by oral history and comparative ethnography, work in these fields is producing an ever richer, more finely textured view of Africa’s past and its connections with other parts of the world.

1 Human origins

Humans form part of a broader hominid family that also includes chimpanzees, bonobos, and – more distantly – gorillas and orang-utans. Comparative studies of human and chimpanzee DNA place the split between these lineages anywhere from 12 to 6 million years ago (henceforth ‘mya’), although hybridisation likely continued for some time.¹ By 4.4 mya evidence of bipedal locomotion is found in fossils assigned to Australopithecus anamensis, a species that shows strong continuities with later hominins, i. e. the narrower group to which modern humans and their immediate ancestors belong. A wide variety of hominin taxa is recognised in the ensuing Plio-Pleistocene period (4.4 – 1.8 mya), all much more capable of upright walking than any living ape. Two broad trends can be identified. Some species, namely the ‘robust’ australopithecines of East and South Africa, evolved larger teeth, jaws, and associated muscles and crania, consuming hard, coarser, more fibrous plant foods in the increasingly arid, open environments that emerged ~2.6 – 1.8 mya. Conversely, from about 2.3 mya other fossils hint at the evolution of larger brains and reduced dentition, traits associated with the emergence of the genus Homo, although clear evidence of this is limited before 2.0 mya.²

Chimpanzees use and make a wide diversity of tools.³ Early hominins probably did so too, but most of the organic materials that they may have used have not survived. Artefacts from the site of Lomekwi 3 in northern Kenya, on the other hand, show that by 3.3 mya at least some populations were making tools from flaked stone.⁴ Cut-marked bones from highland Ethiopia dating to 2.6 mya indicate that one early use for these artefacts was to access the meat and marrow of animals. However, such bones are rare before 2 mya and stone tools were probably also used to pound plant foods and work wood, among other activities.⁵ In any event, the capacity to make and use stone artefacts evolved before Homo itself, and may even have been practised by more than one hominin line, just as polished bone fragments were probably used as tools in East and South Africa by robust australopithecines and Homo alike.⁶

The current understanding, however, is that only the genus Homo exited Africa into other parts of the Old World. Often termed ‘Out-of-Africa 1’, this process had certainly begun by ~1.8 mya, when fossils assigned to the significantly larger-brained and habitually bipedal species Homo ergaster occur at Dmanisi, Georgia, although recently excavated stone tools from central China dated to 2.1 mya suggest that it may have started significantly earlier.⁷ In any event, by 1.0 mya H. ergaster and its close relative H. erectus were widely distributed across tropical and sub-tropical regions of the Old World, often – though not alw...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Human Origins, Early Societies and Migration to 1000 CE
• Chapter 2 Africa in the Mediterranean World
• Chapter 3 Tran-Saharan Networks to 1800
• Chapter 4 Africa and the Indian Ocean World to 1800
• Chapter 5 Africa and the Atlantic World, 1400 – 1860
• Chapter 6 Africa and Europe in the Nineteenth Century: The “Legitimate Trade” Era and Christian Missionaries
• Chapter 7 The European Conquest of Africa, 1879 – 1914
• Chapter 8 Impact of African Colonial Experience 1914 – 1940
• Chapter 9 Africa and the World Wars
• Chapter 10 Nationalism and Decolonization in Africa, 1918 – 1975
• Chapter 11 South African Apartheid and Resistance: A Global History
• Chapter 12 The Geopolitics and Geo-economics of Apartheid South Africa and the Cold War: A Global History
• Chapter 13 Diseases and Medicines in African History
• Chapter 14 Africa and the Globalization of Religion in the Contemporary Era
• Chapter 15 Africa and the Cold War
• Chapter 16 Africa and the USA
• Chapter 17 Africa and China
• Chapter 18 Foreign Aid to Africa Since 1940
• Chapter 19 Globalization, African Popular Culture and Hip Hop: An Embedded History
• Chapter 20 Contemporary Globalization and Africa
• Notes on Contributors
• Index