HISTORY OF AFRICA
The African continent is made up of five (5) regions… West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, Central Africa and Southern Africa. Africa is the second largest continent in the world and covers 6% of Earth’s total surface area and 20% of its land area. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, an island country located at the southeastern coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Africa contains 54 fully recognised countries on its continent.
I’ts evidently that human species arose in Africa millions of years ago, and stayed there for most of its history. Eventually, small groups of people expanded out to give rise to non-African population. This the period between the use of the first stone tools by hominins(Homo) around 3.2 million years ago and the invention of writting systems. The use of marks , symbols and various images appears very early among humans, with the earliest known writting systems evidently appeared around 5,300 years ago but took thousands of years for writting systems to fully and widely adopted. However, in some human cultures, the writting systems were not used until the nineteenth century. Ancient Egypt were among the first civilisations to develop their own scripts and keen to keep historical during the early Bronze Age. The three age systems of human history time periods are the Stone Age, followed by the Bronze Age and Iron Age.
The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make tools with an edge, sharp objects such as knives were made out of stones. These included hand axes, spear points for hunting large game, scrapers which could be used to prepare animal hides and awls for shredding plant fibers and making clothing. The objects were normally partially or entirely made out of stone. People during the Stone Age first started using clay pots to cook food and store things. This period eventually lasted until about (3,300 BCE), when the Bronze Age began. With innovation of the technique of smelting ore is regarded as ending the Stone Age and beginning the Bronze Age. Early in the Stone Age, humans lived in small, nomadic groups. Stone They hunted large mammals, including wooly mammoths, giant bison and deer. They used stone tools to cut, pound, and crush making them better at extracting meat and other nutrients from animals and plants than their earlier ancestors.
It is also believe that humans weren’t the first to make or use stone tools. Some million years ago, an ancient species that lived on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya earned that distinction. It is also believe that, the use of stone tools may have developed even earlier in our primate ancestors, since some modern apes, including bonobos, can also use stone tools to get food.
The first highly significant metal manufactured was bronze, an alloy of copper and tin or arsenic, each of which was smelted separately. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times. An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage. The Bronze Age was a time of extensive use of metals and of developing trade networks. Iron and copper smelting appeared around the same time in most parts of Africa. As such, most African civilizations outside of Egypt did not experience a distinct Bronze Age. iron smelting appears earlier or at the same time as copper smelting in Nigeria (900–800 BCE), Rwanda and Burundi (700–500 BCE) and Tanzania (300 BCE). Copper smelting took place in West Africa prior to the appearance of iron smelting in the region.
Lastly, the Iron Age is the final transition of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. The duration of the Iron Age varies depending on the region under consideration. the “Iron Age” begins locally when the production of iron or steel has been brought to the point where iron tools and weapons superior to their bronze equivalents become widespread. The Sahel (Sudan region) and Sub-Saharan Africa are outside of the three-age system. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where there was no continent-wide universal Bronze Age, the use of iron succeeded immediately the use of stone. Nubia was one of the relatively few places in Africa to have a sustained Bronze Age along with Egypt and much of the rest of North Africa. Iron and copper working in Sub-Saharan Africa spread south and east from Central Africa in conjunction with the Bantu expansion, from the Cameroon region to the African Great Lakes in the 3rd century BCE, reaching the Cape around (400 CE).
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