Belong
My Heritage
This is not a DNA test and it will not tell you that you are 14% anything. It starts from the only evidence that is truly yours — what your family remembers — and connects it to the record: the peoples, languages, kingdoms and migrations your thread runs through. Everything stays in your browser.
- 1
Answer what you know
Five questions about your family. Blanks are fine.
- 2
Press “Find out about my heritage”
Your answers are read against the historical record.
- 3
Read your thread
Peoples, languages, kingdoms and migrations — with how sure each part is.
Step 1
What does your family remember?
Answer what you can — every answer makes your reading more specific. Saved on this device only.
Whatever your family calls itself — a people, a clan, a town, a village.
Include the language that was lost, if one was.
Names carry history: profession, place, praise, circumstance of birth.
Oral history is evidence. Write it down before it thins.
Nothing leaves your browser. 0/5 answered.
Next: find out about my heritage ↓Step 2
Find out about my heritage
When you press the button, your answers are read against the historical record and you get a written reading: what is known about your people and language, where your family name and story fit, and how confident each part of it is. It takes about twenty seconds. Your answers are sent for this reading only — nothing is stored.
Answer at least one question above to unlock this.
Step 3
Read the record yourself
Library entries connected to the answers you gave — sourced, with evidence badges.
The First Humans
Africa is not part of the human story. Africa is where it starts.
Every human being alive today descends from populations that lived in Africa. The continent holds the deepest fossil record of our lineage, the oldest stone tools, the earliest evidence of fire, pigment and ornament, and by far the greatest human genetic diversity on Earth. This is not a claim about African pride; it is the settled reading of the fossil, archaeological and genomic evidence, and it reframes every other chapter that follows.
ContinentalOut of Africa — and Back Again
The migrations that populated the planet, and the ones that returned.
Modern humans left Africa in several waves, not one. Some expansions reached the Levant and even Greece and left no living descendants; one succeeded spectacularly and populated Eurasia, Australia and the Americas. Later movements carried Eurasian ancestry back into North and East Africa. And the migrations that mattered most for Africa itself were the ones that never left it.
ContinentalWhen the Sahara Was Green
Lakes, cattle, canoes and rock art where the desert now is.
For several thousand years the Sahara was grassland, woodland and lake. The African Humid Period supported fishing villages, hippo and crocodile, cattle herders and one of the richest bodies of rock art on Earth. When the rains failed, the people who lived there moved to the Nile, Lake Chad and the Sahel — and the map of African civilisation was set.
SaharaTake it further
Ask Africa AI what is known about your people, your language family, or the migration your family describes — and what remains uncertain.
Ask Africa AI about my thread