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re: Why Is Africa Continent Still Full Of “Developing Countries “?
Posted on 1/11/19 at 12:57 pm to jbond
Posted on 1/11/19 at 12:57 pm to jbond
quote:
Why did some regions transition from hunter gatherers to farmers before others?
That's an incredibly complicated question. Some of it had to do with being around the right sort of plants that could be domesticated. Grains like wheat and pulses like peas had to be domesticated for widespread agriculture. African civilizations nearest Mesopotamia developed along similar lines. Lots of domestication was trial and error. Jared Diamond suggests that the East-West axis afforded by Asia was better suited to the development of civilizations, as West Asia specifically was positioned nicely as the crossroads of multiple peoples. If groups of people did not have the right sort of plants to be domesticated, then they couldn't use the time saved through agriculture to develop other technology. The East African Nile Valley and Rift Valley offered plenty of plants and animals, as did North Africa, for domestication, but the Sahara presented a problem because of its size, which by necessity isolated lots of groups from cultural exchange. Even then, there was lots of cultural exchange in East Africa, which was the most highly developed place in Africa for a long time.
The lack of domesticated animals in comparison between Africa and Asia is noteworthy. For example, the horse provided Steppe peoples significant advantage, one they used to push westward into Europe and West Asia, and displace and absorb indigenous groups. If somehow Zebras could have been domesticated, it would have provided whatever group who did the domestication an advantage relative to other groups, while also encourage centralization efforts. That the Zebra is unsuited to domestication due to its defensive nature, as well as the fact that it couldn't support a rider nor is it as as fast and as robust as the domesticated horse, means that Africans had no animal native to the region that could compare.
These are just some of the issues, many of which go much deeper. Many African tribes were highly adapted to their environment and had little reason to change, because their culture was developed around the environment. The major issue is that the biggest east-west axis on the continent is a desert. If not, it would have provided good grazing lands which would have been highly prized had the region not been a desert. To understand how large the Sahara is, it's a region bigger than the US excluding Alaska. That's a massive area that had no real resources.
Posted on 1/11/19 at 6:14 pm to crazy4lsu
quote:
That's an incredibly complicated question. Some of it had to do with being around the right sort of plants that could be domesticated. Grains like wheat and pulses like peas had to be domesticated for widespread agriculture. African civilizations nearest Mesopotamia developed along similar lines. Lots of domestication was trial and error. Jared Diamond suggests that the East-West axis afforded by Asia was better suited to the development of civilizations, as West Asia specifically was positioned nicely as the crossroads of multiple peoples. If groups of people did not have the right sort of plants to be domesticated, then they couldn't use the time saved through agriculture to develop other technology. The East African Nile Valley and Rift Valley offered plenty of plants and animals, as did North Africa, for domestication, but the Sahara presented a problem because of its size, which by necessity isolated lots of groups from cultural exchange. Even then, there was lots of cultural exchange in East Africa, which was the most highly developed place in Africa for a long time.
The lack of domesticated animals in comparison between Africa and Asia is noteworthy. For example
My favorite theory along these lines is that it may have actually been man’s desire for beer that played the biggest role. I know that’s been postulated as to the Mesopotamia region.
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