Why didn't Africans ever establish any society on par with the ones in Eurasia?

[Applejack is Best Pony]

You're asking for answers to a completely different question to what OP is asking.

I don't think it's completely different, but I guess that's for the OP to decide.

 

[A Spanish Inquisitor]

Couldn't the Mali or Ethiopians buy horses and cows and what not from Arab merchants?
Or why couldn't they domestic the local fauna? Like Zebras, Rhinos, Hippos etc.

As to why they couldn’t buy horses, I imagine by the time Europeans came to Africa with horses to sell, they were already far more advanced than Africans so the sale of them still wouldn’t have allowed them to catch up in civilisation.

For domestication, some animals are harder and more dangerous to domesticate than others, I think people have tried Zebras, but they’re too wild iirc. Other animals are simply too vicious.

 

[Afinepickle]

I think people have tried Zebras

Zebras are straight up impossible to domesticate. They have two modes: 1. Pants shitting terrified 2. Murderous rage.

 

[John McAfee]

North American natives didn’t have horses

Apache, and Comanche were exclusively horse centric tribes.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Guns, Germs and Steel advanced the theory that the number one reason Africa did not form societies on par with Europe and Asia is because the incidence and resilence of highly contagious diseases would kill off any population that grew too large. European and Asian cities up until fairly recently in history were fucking disgusting cesspools of filth, constantly frothing over with plague. In Africa the diseases are/were so hostile that keeping that many people alive in one place for long enough was impossible.

It's a book that starts with the presumption that every people is interchangeable and it's only circumstance of location that led to the results. Almost every claim in it is wrong.


The unrivalled extent of the Eurasian landmass allowed the proliferation of many different civilisations, between which information could be exchanged allowing far greater cross-fertilization of cultures.

Wrong!
Europe is isolated from Central Asia by the Alps, the Urals, the Caucasus, the Russian Steppes, the Taiga and the Anatolian plateau.
East Asia is divided from Central Asia by the Thar desert the Himalayas the Gobi desert and the Tian Shan mountains.
Sub-Saharan Africa lies as close to the Fertile Crescent, regarded as the cradle of civilisation, as Western Europe and far closer than China.

A diverse abundance of potential food crops is necessary in order for settled agricultural communities to flourish.

Wrong!
The Inca created a complex civilisation based on the cultivation of two food crops, the potato and maize. Large agricultural communities, like Cahokia in North America, flourished on the exploitation of maize. Western European agriculture was overwhelmingly based on wheat production, China's on rice.

The European biome contained a greater variety of domesticable crops than Africa and America and these crops were more nutritious.


The European biome contained a greater variety of domesticable crops than Africa and America and these crops were more nutritious.

Wrong!
America had indigenous food crops which were more nutritious than European staples. Beans, corn, squashes and peanuts are superior to wheat and, if grown in rotation, create a self-replenishing agricultural cycle.
Far from having no viable indigenous staples, Africa had okra, rice, sorghum, millet, the bambara ground nut, black-eyed peas, watermelons and numerous gourds and tubers, as well as immensely useful plants such as the oil palm and the tamarisk. African slaves actually introduced rice cultivation to the United States. The standard refrence on this subject is, "Lost Crops of Africa".

Eurasia had more domesticable large mammals than Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas.

Wrong!
Africa has indigenous breeds of sheep, goats and cattle which were spread from the Sudan to the Cape by 200AD. The South Americans domesticated the llama. The North Americans, like the Aboriginals of Australia, almost hunted their domesticable mammals to extinction. Why didn't Europeans hunt horses, cows and sheep to extinction?

Only urban civilisations can develop the levels of technological skill and social organisation required for military conquest.

Wrong!
The two greatest conquerors in history, Atilla the Hun and Ghengis Khan came from nomadic tribal civilisations. Rome was overthrown by nomads.

 

[KID NAMED SCHWARMAPUNK]

@Lemmingwise
So what reason was there for Africans for not developing advanced influential civillisations?

 

[Cyclonus]

Because dey did not kno de wae.

 

[YHWH's Strongest Soldier]

Apache, and Comanche were exclusively horse centric tribes.

But only after reintroduction by European settlers. The first case of Amerindians actually riding horses was when the Spanish started giving them to Aztecs in the 16th century and they were adopted by North American tribes somewhat later. They were previously present on the continent but went extinct like 15,000 years ago. I can't remember the exact reason I was taught but Wikipedia says they died either due to Climate Change or overexploitation by humans.

 

[A Spanish Inquisitor]

Apache, and Comanche were exclusively horse centric tribes.

Been a while, but horses aren’t native to America, so they could only have been horse centric after settlers arrived in the 16th century. Not enough time to build a whole civilisation.

 

[MaxPayne]

Lower IQ, lower impulse control. Higher time preference. Higher frequency of the MAOA warrior gene

• A substantial amount of the human genome has been subjected to natural selection since the races diverged. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1317879/

• Over 2000 genes have been subject to recent (post out-of-Africa) evolution. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html
• Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression. Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840
• Germanic/Nordic people have lower time preference than any other group. Source: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1481443
• Africans have higher rates of a gene associated with violence. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1913922/

Also interesting on the subject of different racial groups having different admixtures of proto human DNA

https://twitter.com/robertsepehr/status/1374881908513927168?s=19

 

[User names must be unique]

Racism, Not the racism of white outsiders but Africa's own racism and crab mentality. Take a look at the ethnicities of some African countries Nigeria alone has about 250 recognized ethnic groups most tracing their lineage to prehistory. Not only is there conflict between ethnic groups but whenever there's a problem in the country people don't rally for the country but around their own ethnic groups.

Imagine if England constantly had squabbles and uprisings from the multitude of Celtic groups, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Normans, etc. They'd never have amounted to shit.

 

[Applejack is Best Pony]

Racism, Not the racism of white outsiders but Africa's own racism and crab mentality. Take a look at the ethnicities of some African countries Nigeria alone has about 250 recognized ethnic groups most tracing their lineage to prehistory. Not only is there conflict between ethnic groups but whenever there's a problem in the country people don't rally for the country but around their own ethnic groups.

Imagine if England constantly had squabbles and uprisings from the multitude of Celtic groups, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, Normans, etc. They'd never have amounted to shit.

You're not wrong about the tribal squabbles of negroes, but regarding England: it's easy to say this in hindsight because the Anglos genocided all of the people who weren't on board with being their subjects.

 

[Spooky Doot Skelly]

Guns, Germs and Steel

I read this shit and it is so dumb. Almost everything the guy says in the book is misinfo

Zebras are straight up impossible to domesticate

lmao no

 

[Idiotron]

Based on what I've read, the soil is harder, dryer and not as good for crops as the European and Asian soil.
The animals they naturally have there aren't good for farming.
The weather is also bad for farming or at least not as good as in Europe and Asia.
That's more than enough reasons because you need to be able to mass produce food in order to have a stable society.

 

[soy_king]

Like i said in another post, why couldn't the Mali or Ethiopians just buy them from Arab merchants?

The Sahel kingdoms and tribes in those areas have strong horse cultures and had fairly well-developed societies (for Muslims at least). The Hausa, Fulani, Borno, etc. were centralized kingdoms with good cavalry. Hell, the Sudan kicked British and Egyptian ass for 13 years before they were defeated.

As to the other nations not having horses, horses can't survive in the jungle, as they're highly susceptible to tropical diseases like sleeping sickness and the tsetse fly. Zebras are too skittish too domesticate.

SS African culture did have cattle and made them the primary currency throughout their societies. It's how ex President of South Africa Jacob Zuma could purchase his 10th wife for 20 cattle.

 

[User names must be unique]

You're not wrong about the tribal squabbles of negroes, but regarding England: it's easy to say this in hindsight because the Anglos genocided all of the people who weren't on board with being their subjects.

Only the celtic leadership and soldiers, the majority of civilians were just assimilated or moved east. There's plenty of cultural and genetic evidence that suggests the Anglo Saxon "invasion" was a lot less bloody than historians used to think.

 

[Applejack is Best Pony]

Only the celtic leadership and soldiers

...So, everyone who resisted them. That's what I said.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Melanin concentration may directly correlate with aggression

That's a pretty weak statement. What even is the point of the word "directly"?

I may directly be in the same country as a terrorist.

So what reason was there for Africans for not developing advanced influential civillisations?

I think it's the wrong question.

History is filled with extinct species and people. The better question is, why didn't africans go extinct like other people and species? Why do they thrive without influential civilisation? Why was the subjugation of the americas so much more succesful than that of africa?

 

[Spunt]

The answer is actually cats. Cute kitty cats:

The reason settled civilisation as we know it flourished in the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates valleys and not in sub-Saharan Africa is because those places were less hospitable (to mankind at the time), not more. The floodplains of big rivers in hot, dry climates are very fertile, but only for part of the year. As a result it's almost impossible to sustain any meaningful number of hunter-gatherer people or nomadic herders in those areas because people and their animals would just starve during the winter. Whereas places like the Serengeti have year-round grassland due to the wet climate and volcanic soil, so you can herd your cattle and goats all year provided you keep moving, and enough wild animals and plants that you can hunt and gather, again provided that you keep moving so you don't bleed the land dry.

To take advantage of desert flood plain soil, you need proper agriculture. You need to stay in a fixed place to tend crops, then you need to store those crops in the dry season. This forces massive technological innovation - irrigation, architecture, feeding, organising and deploying people to make all this happen, a proper army to defend a fixed point because you can't just run away when enemies draw near. You need government, generals, military tactics, a bureaucracy, trade - all the things that make civilisation possible as we know it.

It wasn't laziness or stupidity that meant the sub-Saharan populations didn't do that - it was a lack of necessity. A goat herder on the Serengeti doesn't need crop rotation in the same way I don't need a car that burrows under the ground. It would be a waste of resources to develop one, unless we were forced to live underground by our environment at some point. They were fine the way they were, and were not forced to develop new tech the way their Nile cousins were. Long-term, of course, this fucked them over because urban civilisations were far more efficient at warfare, technology, industry, trade and building big populations, which resulted in these civilisations stomping all over tribal ones 90% of the time that they met. The times when the nomads won (the Huns, the Mongols), they could only sustain success by conquest, pillaging the products of more advanced civilisations to maintain their momentum. Their entire way of life was a pyramid scheme. Once they had no more lands to conquer (or their run of victories was halted), they either fell apart (the Mongols) or were forced to urbanise themselves (the Goths and Visigoths).

And civilisation needs cats. When the proto-Egyptians first started storing grain for the dry season, they came across a new and massive problem - vermin. If mice and rats get into your grain stores, they will breed to plague numbers and cause famines. Vermin control is essential for civilisation.

Cue kitty.

The local Saharan desert cats suddenly found a new source of tasty, tasty mice and moved in with the humans. The ancient Egyptians took this as a sign of favour from the Gods, who were sending them these cute, friendly, furry pest exterminators to prevent their grain stores from being destroyed and literally keep them all alive. This is why the ancient Egyptians literally worshipped cats. They venerated the cat-headed Goddess Bastet, and families would mummify their cats on death when they couldn't afford to do this to their own relatives. The penalties for harming cats in ancient Egypt were generally harsher than the penalties for murder, and in context this was for a really good reason.

Pictured: the saviour of civilisation and bane of spear-chuckers everywhere:

 

[KID NAMED SCHWARMAPUNK]

I think it's the wrong question.

History is filled with extinct species and people. The better question is, why didn't africans go extinct like other people and species? Why do they thrive without influential civilisation? Why was the subjugation of the americas so much more succesful than that of africa?

Humans are resilient?