Now you should compare them to the summary of more recent research concerning the earliest history of Africa in chapter 2 of AiWH. Then write your Unit Three Essay on this topic: To what extent do the latest scientific and historical views of human origins in Africa support Louis Snyder’s views on “racial differences” of a half century ago? Be as specific as you can by referring to your required reading and study materials. Africa is the birth place of mankind and mother to several different cultures and even though we humans came from this particular continent, the idea of racial differences still emerged. Early perceptions agree that racial differences did not exist.
Europe wanted to set up and colonize in Africa, mainly because of Africa's raw materials it was purely economic. . (Iweriebor, 2011) The African's did not take kind to this, and it provoked not only African political responses but also diplomatic responses and military resistance. A lot of treaties of protection for the leaders of African societies, states, and empires went out. There was a lot of controversy about these treaties and eventually the military had to step in.
During the period of 1500 B.C. to 600 B.C. up to 1492 A.D. Paleoanthropologists studied the evolution and prehistory of humans has concluded that the origins of humanity lie in savannah regions of Africa. All people today are very likely descendants of beings who lived in Africa millions years ago. West Africans looked to the Americas as a source of trade, commerce, a place to settle and a place to build new civilizations.
Africa’s Current Barriers There are many reasons why Africa is considered an impoverished continent, but there are three that stand out against the others. Africa is not fully developed because of past history, disease, and agricultural issues. Africa lacks many things such as organization, power, and rule which also contribute to these three main issues. One reason that Africa is poor and wrecked is because of colonialism. Some of the first civilizations started in Africa, and forever after other civilizations wanted to conquer Africa as a means of showing their global superiority.
Since the Congo was relatively unknown to most Europeans, Leopold II turned to Henry Morton Stanley, the man responsible for opening up Africa for colonization when he successfully crossed Africa from east to west. With Stanley’s help, it was possible for Belgium to colonize the central African country. Leopold II believed that a colony had to make money for the mother country. Unlike the other colonizing countries, he did not believe in investing in colonies to maintain them. For Leopold II, the end always justified the means, and the end was always money.
These falls have historically made movement from the coast to the interior difficult, but the great river systems have also provided the interior of Africa with routes of communication. We have already noted the origins of humankind in East Africa where some of the earliest fossil remains of proto hominids have been found. Even before the appearance about 300,000 years ago of Homo sapiens, the ancestors of modern human beings, other hominid species, such as Homo erectus, had moved outward from Africa to Asia and Europe. Africa, therefore, holds a special place in the development of the human species. It was the scene of human origins.
Java man was the “missing link”, he proclaimed. All over the world, people started to hunt for traces of our distant ancestors. With every new fossil they found it became ever clearer that there was not just one “missing link” but a whole chain of them between apes and modern man. Comparison of the fossils that Dubois found on Java in the nineteenth century with other finds from Africa has revealed that what Dubois found was actually a Homo erectus. In 1972 Mary Leakey’s son, Richard, and Alan Walker were looking for fossils near Lake Turkana in Kenya.
Many of Africa’s inhabitants are of indigenous origin, which contributes to the scientific notation that Africa was the birthplace of all human species. People across the continent are remarkably diverse in just about any measure: language, religion, politics, economics, and “lifestyle” backgrounds. For this reason, it is imperative to follow the anthropological guiding principles in gaining the proper understanding of African cultures. In an ethnological study, two indigenous cultures of Zaire’s Ituri forest are examined. The symbolic and structural aspects of the division between the Lese and Efe, along with relations of inequality are discussed by Grinker--from the perspective of the Lese.
What is the relationship between the African Culture and its Music? The African Culture is that like of no other in the world; it's the diverse mix and extent of its uniqueness and how different it is from everything else; it’s a one of a kind. The fact that all the other continents have been advancing while certain areas of Africa have remained the same as they were hundreds of years ago, is probably the biggest difference that Africa has to all the other continents of the world. Africa’s music is authentic, and tribal. Every song is unique to its country, but all the music shares the same characteristics.
Geography is unfair I agree with Ian Morris' idea that geography is the ultimate decisive power of human history. At the beginning of human history, the earliest man, homo sapiens, evolved in Africa between 200,000, then spread across the world in the last 60,000 years. This dispersal made humanity’s genes different, but some deeper parts of body did not change a lot (such as head shape or lactose tolerance). The western culture and eastern culture were not that big of a difference before the sixth century BC. Many western and eastern sages wrestled with much the same questions about life and society.