Africa

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Bushveld Igneous Complex

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Platinoid metals, gold, chrome, copper, nickel, tin, iron ore, flourspar, vardium lie in this layered igneous rock intrusion. This geological feat led to the foundation of several economies throughout Africa, including Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Sierra Leone, who depend on the mineral wealth found in it's mines.

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Carl von Linne

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Von Linne coined hte term Homo sapiens in 1775, and came up with the Genus species cataloging system.

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Cro Magnon Man

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When found in 1868, archeologists determined cro magnon man as the first evidence of modern humans. Archeologists discovered him the Dordogne region of southern France.

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Gunter Brauer

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Brauer decided, using fossil evidence, that modern humans evolved in East Africa.

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Linguistic Categories of Africa

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Of the 20 linguistic groups found in the world, the four most distant are all from Africa. They inclued Khosian spoken by the !Kung San bushmen, Niger-Congo spoken by Bantu peoples, Nilo-Saharan, sploen by Maasai and other pastoralists, and Afro-Asiatic which is spoken by Ethiopians and North Africans. The distinctness between these four categories and the rest of the linguistic groups in the world helps to prove that not only did these languages evolve independently, but that they most likely developed before any other language on earth.

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Law of the Minimum

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The resource in smallest quantity will alone determine the success or failure of an organism. Jusuts von Liebig invented the concept in the mid 1800s. The concept helps to explain why societies in Africa have collapsed or never developed in certain areas because of the lack of only one certain resource.

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Intertropical Convergence Zone

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The ITCZ can be located 23.5 north and south of the equator. Airmasses meet along thes lines which cause the bimodal seasons of africa - the rainy and dry season.

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Hunting-Foraging-Gathering

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The earliest societies in Africa most likely hunted, foraged, and gathered in order to feed themselves. Foraging, whcih includes scavenging, finding eggs, and fishing brought in the most calores to their diet. Hunter-forester-gatherer societies forced members to stay mobile, and so no tools developed in these groups, but they did gain an incredibly thorough knowledge of nature.

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Katanda

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Africans in this area used specialized tools and preplanning in order to maximize the amount of catfish they could catch in it's short 2 day season. This way, the society could smoke the fish and eat them for the rest of the year. This way of life developed because of the cooler and dryer climate that developed due to the Wurm Glaciation

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Wurm Glaciation

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Scientists consider the Wurm Glaciation which occured 18000 years ago the last ice age. It covered one-third of the earth's surface with glaciers, which caused sea levels to drop 130 meteres. In Africa, the ice age caused the continent to face much dryer and cooler conditions than before. These new conditions forced societies all over Africa to become more resourceful and innovative, and during this time, African societies invent the digging stick weight and the projectile point, which indicates that hunting became much more important. The ice age also forced Saharan societies to migrate out of the area because of its decreased rainfall. Many of them moved to the Nile River, where the first comprehensive insance of an organized food-production system developed.

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Cattle

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Cattle made it possible for pastoralists to inhabit areas such as Sahara because they could eat vegetation that humans would find inedible, and then supply the pastoralists with edible meat and dairy. Since, however, cattle only provided pastoralists with meat, it caused interdependent relationhips to develop between pastoralists and agriculturalists such as in Nabta Playa, west of the Nile.