Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader

We've been doing a lot of reading here, as you can see from the growing book list in the sidebar on the right. One of these books is Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader. I borrowed this from Terri and Valery awhile ago, and enjoyed it immensely. It covers the history of Africa from the dawn of geological time through the present day; beginning with geology, it moves into anthropology, archeology, and finally the documentary record, covering not just the history and origins of the people here, but the land and natural history as well. It's a big book, and if, like me, you didn't get much about Africa in school, it's a great way to learn a lot. The earlier stuff on geology is drier, so if you pick up the book, you might want to skip ahead to start with something more interesting.

I plan to buy this book in hardcover when I get home, and reread it. The book is so big that reviewing it in detail, or even sharing its contents in detail, is out of the question. So instead, here is an assortment of information from the book that I found interesting. The book is so comprehensive even these excerpts are only from the first part; they don't include, for example, anything from the startling chapters on the first European interactions with Africa, and African slavery.

Anything quoted from the book is in quotation marks. From the book:

Africa is enormous. Here in Yaounde, it's as far to Johannesburg, South Africa as it is to Paris. “Africa is only the second largest continent, but it contains 22 per cent of the Earth's land surface. The Sahara desert alone is as large as the continental United States. In face, the United States, China, India, and New Zealand could all fit within the African coastline, together with Europe from the Atlantic to Moscow and much of South America." The Nile is the world's longest river.

The Bantu peoples who “colonized virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa” over a span about 3000 years in prehistoric times come from what is now the border area between Nigeria and Cameroon.

The Sahara used to be wooded grasslands and savannah. It was inhabited up until the last glacial maximum dried out the climate 18,000 years ago, and still wasn't fully dried out then. It's drier now, and getting bigger.

People have been eating honey for an awfully long time. There is a bird called the African honeyguide evolved to get the attention of people who show up in an area with an available bees' nest and lead them to it, in order to get a meal of leftover grubs and combs.

Farmers and elephants have been competing in Africa for more than 2000 years. The farmers finally got the upper hand in the 1950s. The plunge in elephant numbers in recent decades may well have more to do with human population numbers than the ivory trade.

Why does Africa seem to have so many threats to human health? People have been here the longest: “The tropical environments of Africa have seen the evolution of the greatest number and diversity of life forms on Earth. Although humans are a relatively recent expression of the continents' fecundity, the array of organisms that evolved to take advantage of their existence is no more than might be expected to result from five million years of co-evolution. Parasites and diseases affecting humans are uniquely prevalent in Africa. The afflictions are numerous; the means of infection bewildering and various.”

“the tropical rainforest is so efficient at keeping available resources at work within the living community of plants that the soils in which they stand are virtually devoid of nutrients... The result of such total self-sufficiency is that the entire system is rooted in sand, and is much less stable that might be supposed.”

Most mammals on the African savannah, where human ancestors evolved, stay cool because they have a muzzle and specialized blood vessels that serve as a radiator and heat exchanger. But this only functions if the brain is small enough. Our ancestors evolved a different cooling strategy (sweating, and walking upright to reduce sun exposure), which removed this limitation on brain size. Big brains require so much energy that our diet also changed: “Our small gut runs exclusively on high-quality foods, principally the rich reproductive nuclei of other organisms – seeds, nuts, tubers and eggs – topped off with significant quantities of protein in the form of meat.”


“the distinctive form of modern humans had evolved between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago, in Africa” and that “the entire population of the modern world was decended from a relatively small group of people that left Africa about 100,000 years ago.” How small? All non-African humans are decended from “as few as fifty” people. And “every human being alive today carries the mtDNA of just one African woman who lived more than 10,000 generations ago.”

When humans left Africa for the first time, there were fewer than a million people in the world.

The oldest primate in the fossil record considered our evolutionary ancestor was found in Egypt and lived 35 million years ago.

Human groups tend towards about 150 as an optimal size. This is related to the size of the neocortex in our brains. This corresponds to the smaller group size of other primates, and their smaller neocortexes. We maintain our bigger groups by using language instead of grooming for social cohesion, which is why about 3/4 of our conversation is about other people and relationships.

Population cycles of boom and bust are common throughout human existence, based on a fluctuating food supply. The story is not one of stable, steady population growth. Large numbers of people have died off every so often when food ran short, often because of climate change. (Anyone else feel a sudden chill...?)

Our ancestors were using fire “not less than 1 million years ago” according to evidence found in South Africa. And modern humans have been around no more than 290,000 years, so our hominid forbears used it for over 700,000 years before we came along and replaced them.

Sites at Katanda, on the Upper Semliki River in Congo, dating back 75,000 to 90,000 years, contain quantities of spears and barbed fishing harpoons. These specialized tools are 35,000 years older than anywhere else. The human invention of the spear here coincided with major climate changes and “a slew of mammalian extinctions.”

The earliest evidence of human agricultural management is 70,000 years old. Not quite farming, probably controlled burning to encourage growth of edible plants, inferred from the scale and nature of the leftovers unearthed.

“the world's earliest-known centralized food-production system was established along the Nile 15,000 years ago” and lasted for 5000 years, when climate change destroyed it thousands of years before the Pharaohs. Increased rainfall upstream severely reduced the size of the Nile floodplain that sustained it.

“The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, in western Asia, about 12,000 years ago, and the most recent appears to have been the goldfish (in China, about 1000 years ago).” Domestic cattle are descented from a monster called the aurochs (the last one died in captivity in Poland in the 1600s), which stood two meters high at the shoulder and had enormous forward-pointing horns. It may have been seduced into domestication by being provided with salt and water. The earliest “incontrovertible evidence” of domestic cattle is 8000 years old. Adult humans are naturally lactose-intolerent and had to evolve to drink milk.

Aksum, an ancient kingdom in modern-day Ethiopia: “From indigenous African roots dating back many thousands of years, and encompassing the full history of hunting and gathering, herding and agriculture, Aksum developed a civilization and empire whose influence, at its zenith in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, extended through the regions lying south of the Roman Empire, from the fringes of the Sahara in the west, across the Red Sea to the inner Arabian desert of Rub'el Hali in the east. The Aksumites developed Africa's only indigenous written script, Ge'ez, from which the written form of the languages spoken in modern Ethiopia has evolved; they traded with Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean and Arabia, and financed their operations with gold, silver, and copper coinage – the first and only coinage known in sub-Saharan Africa until the tenth century, when Arabian coins were used along the East African coast.” Aksum converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD. It met its end through environmental degradation and consequent demographic collapse.

The Aksumites carved stelae, gigantic stone tomb-markers. The biggest, visible today in five huge pieces, weighed over 700 tonnes and was “probably the largest single block of stone ever quarried, carved and set up in the ancient world.”

Coffee comes from Ethiopia.

People lived in peace for 1600 years without centralized authority at a place called Jenne-jenno, which lies on the inland Niger delta. They had plenty of food and a robust trading network, and their city got as large as 27,000 people. Through most of evolutionary history, people lived in small groups in Africa in peace, without the need for states. “But of course, like everything else in human evolutionary history, small peaceful communities in Africa were an ecological expedience.” Peace was an accident.