Tropical Africa Essay

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Environmental Effects on Tropical Africa’s Culture The ability to adapt to the environment is a necessity for cultures to be able to survive. Most everything they did depended on the environment and where they were located. The environmental factors in Tropical Africa helped to shape the culture in many ways including, the climate’s effect on society, trade and engineering, and social environment. The Trade and Engineering in Tropical Africa shaped its environment culturally. The areas societies were located in gave them certain trading resources. The resources they were able to trade helped them gain wealth. Trade helped them gain new resources, ideas, and concepts. The people of Zimbabwe were able to adapt to there surroundings. They had a new ways of building, for example King Lalibela had various churches carved out of volcanic rock. This was ingenious because no matter the weather conditions these buildings were literally part of the earth and the weather could do little to it. (Document 7). They also built enclosures with surrounding rock walls with one entrance only. The idea behind this was to impress all their guests by the architectures royalty. (Document 6). Trade and engineering was not the only environmental effect on Tropical Africa’s culture. The weather and climate had a great effect on society in Tropical Africa. They lacked hot and cold seasons of temperate lands so they had their own cycle of weather patterns caused by the wind. The winds pushed different air masses, which changed the weather on the land. The extreme wind patterns caused these societies to have adapt to the climate they lived. Since this document was a map of the wind patterns you could clearly see how the affected the life of the people living here. (Document 2). Since there wasn’t much rainfall and they had to find other ways to feed themselves, which came from herding
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