Your journey
Africa Curious
0
XP earned
0
day streak
0
entries read
—
best Africa 100
Badges
Read next
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.
Sahara