Why is Africa less developed than Europe & Asia?

Hercules56

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Hercules56
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European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.

Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have developed none of this.

I have read many theories as to why this is, some suggesting that the warm climate year-round did not push cultures to struggle survive like the cold winters of Europe and Asia did, and this somehow inadvertantly caused Euros and Asians who develop more sophisticated societies than those areas where climate did not force people to think hard or die.

Is there anything to this?

I am not knocking native cultures, just trying to understand why things are the way they are.
 
I've wondered the same thing. I haven't read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, but there could be some insight there.

I kind of cringe at dividing civilization strictly by continent though.
 
Venom said:
I've wondered the same thing. I haven't read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, but there could be some insight there.

I kind of cringe at dividing civilization strictly by continent though.
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I understand how Colonialism devastated African societies, but that doesn't deal with pre-Colonial Africa.
 
Hercules56 said:
I understand how Colonialism devastated African societies, but that doesn't deal with pre-Colonial Africa.
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I don't know how developed they were, but I remember reading about the Kingdom of Ghana and Empire of Mali, Munsa Musa, and all that in high school, so certainly there were rich and powerful guys.

But like you mentioned I think the warm climate may have played some role in squelching permanent settlements.

Perhaps the ability to wage war in certain ways and be more successful in the battlefield thereby being able to absorb neighboring nations more rapidly and building ideas was more difficult with the equipment they had? Who knows.
 
First off, it kinda sucks there; not only are most people too busy feeding themselves to sit on their asses finding the melting point of copper, but when things hit rock bottom, it's way harder for a civilization to recover. That's also why most of the really great European civilizations popped up in southern Europe--it's hard to lie around inventing geometry and building aqueducts when you're freezing to death.

So it's to the credit of everyone involved that a few major civilizations did, in fact, exist outside of that big Mediterranean horseshoe where all our favorite stuff happened. The Mali Empire was so wealthy and cosmopolitan that it even impressed the Ottoman Sultans--and further south than that, the Kingdom of Benin thought of Renaissance-era Spain as a little backwater they bought bronze from. These were highly advanced cultures--who just had the bad luck to be in Christendom's way when it figured out how gunpowder worked.

And then, yes, colonialism happened--but that was neither the beginning nor the end of other, luckier parts of the world kicking Africa around. During the height of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, several countries deliberately destabilized the regions they were getting most of their product from, so as to ensure a steady supply of POWs from both sides of a conflict. And even after colonialism officially stopped, plenty of major powers still tried to mess with African politics--this democratically elected president was too left-wing, that paramilitary group was exactly the right kind of Christian, that sort of thing.

It's also worth remembering that African history isn't just a cavalcade of victimization and hard knocks. They've hit some historic lows in the last few hundred years, but it's nothing other parts of the world haven't experienced. A thousand years ago, northern Europe was the benighted third world, right down to being a prime source of slaves for more advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean and the middle east--admittedly, the whole business was substantially less horrific in scope, but that was mostly because laissez-faire capitalism and race theory hadn't been invented yet.
 
Jontg said:
First off, it kinda sucks there; not only are most people too busy feeding themselves to sit on their asses finding the melting point of copper, but when things hit rock bottom, it's way harder for a civilization to recover. That's also why most of the really great European civilizations popped up in southern Europe--it's hard to lie around inventing geometry and building aqueducts when you're freezing to death.

So it's to the credit of everyone involved that a few major civilizations did, in fact, exist outside of that big Mediterranean horseshoe where all our favorite stuff happened. The Mali Empire was so wealthy and cosmopolitan that it even impressed the Ottoman Sultans--and further south than that, the Kingdom of Benin thought of Renaissance-era Spain as a little backwater they bought bronze from. These were highly advanced cultures--who just had the bad luck to be in Christendom's way when it figured out how gunpowder worked.

And then, yes, colonialism happened--but that was neither the beginning nor the end of other, luckier parts of the world kicking Africa around. During the height of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, several countries deliberately destabilized the regions they were getting most of their product from, so as to ensure a steady supply of POWs from both sides of a conflict. And even after colonialism officially stopped, plenty of major powers still tried to mess with African politics--this democratically elected president was too left-wing, that paramilitary group was exactly the right kind of Christian, that sort of thing.

It's also worth remembering that African history isn't just a cavalcade of victimization and hard knocks. They've hit some historic lows in the last few hundred years, but it's nothing other parts of the world haven't experienced. A thousand years ago, northern Europe was the benighted third world, right down to being a prime source of slaves for more advanced civilizations in the Mediterranean and the middle east--admittedly, the whole business was substantially less horrific in scope, but that was mostly because laissez-faire capitalism and race theory hadn't been invented yet.
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You have a point.

If this was during the Dark Ages we'd be talking about backwards Europe was and how enlightened Africa was.
 
Hercules56 said:
European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.

Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have developed none of this.
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Sub-Saharan Africa? Jared Diamond argues that the lack of environmental pressures played a large part. The living was hard but consistent. Europe, experiencing far more unpredictable climate changes, forced innovation.

I also believe that the lack of trade with the rest of the world hurt southern Africa. Ocean currents make it very hard to get from southern Africa to, well, anywhere. Trade brings new ideas and new ideas are the fuel for progress.

Northern Africa had a good chance of beating out Europe, as they both benefited from Middle Eastern and Eastern influence. But they lost militarily and were pushed out of Europe in the 15th century and that was the end of that race.
 
Jodie said:
Another factor is the higher incidence of disease burden in African countries. This article discusses the link between lower IQ and disease burden in countries like those in central Africa. That's certainly not the only factor, famine also plays a part in that too.

http://www.newsweek.com/why-do-some-nations-have-lower-iq-scores-74797
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Was disease really that big a factor in the difference in development between contemporary societies back then though?

Eurasia had repeated outbreaks of bubonic plague, yellow fever, smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria even all across the continent.
 
Yes, it did. Those diseases you cited generally kill the host. Africa, Cameroon in recent history, has the distinction of being ground zero for the evolution of the HIV virus isolated in that area and is a perfect example. HIV has decimated the African continent. The central countries in Africa give rise to more pathogens that infect, but not necessarily kill the host, that cause irreversible issues with growth and development.

http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0000412

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001706X03000299

You should read this book "Disease and Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa":

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=2u8m7pPQ_WwC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=sub-saharan+africa+%22disease+burden%22&ots=pJYJDtad3_&sig=Zt1i80pUxRqv_Y_SG55afLtPLpw#v=onepage&q=sub-saharan%20africa%20%22disease%20burden%22&f=false
 
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Hercules56 said:
European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.

Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have developed none of this.

I have read many theories as to why this is, some suggesting that the warm climate year-round did not push cultures to struggle survive like the cold winters of Europe and Asia did, and this somehow inadvertantly caused Euros and Asians who develop more sophisticated societies than those areas where climate did not force people to think hard or die.

Is there anything to this?

I am not knocking native cultures, just trying to understand why things are the way they are.
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As mentioned above, Jared Diamond does give a plausible argument (although it is one with some holes), that geography plays a huge role in which cultures thrived and which did not (or did not thrive to the same extent).

Basically, the availability of domesticable crops and animals plays a large part in the extent to which cultures can have successful agricultural revolutions, and that those cultures which develop large enough surpluses will be able to have classes of people who can develop writing and other innovations. The climate plays an important part as well, with Eurasia having wide temperate zones with a broad north-south axis. This is also useful for trade among groups that may have different innovations and different crops and animals.

It basically amounts to Eurasian people having more opportunities to build on what they had.
 
A lot of historians don't like Jared Diamond, because GG&S dramatically oversells geography as a factor in the way the modern world is arranged, while ignoring individual and state action as a historical driver. It's true, and important to remember, that environment plays a major role in shaping societies, but reducing history to who had access to what resource glosses over a lot of other major factors--and there's an argument to be made that it also erases a lot of shenanigans that shouldn't be forgotten. Yes, the Mongols were honed into an unstoppable army by life on the steppe, but they chose to obliterate another civilization and kill millions of people. Yes, a lot of European countries became extremely powerful during the renaissance--but what they did with that power, and the ideology they cultivated to justify it, was just as deliberate and malicious as what the Visigoths did to Rome or the Normans did to England.
 
Again as others have pointed out we really have to (at the very least) differentiate between Northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

To call Egypt "less developed" is laughable. I don't think a lot of people really get the time scale of ancient Egypt.

The Great Pyramid at Giza was completed in 2560 B.C. That is... stupidly long ago for a structure of this size that was built well enough to still exist today and was the tallest building on the planet for next 3871 years. Woolly Mammoths were still alive on Wrangel Island 500 years after the Pyramids where built. Cleopatra lived closer to now than to the building of the Pyramids. The Pyramids were older to the Ancient Greeks then the Ancient Greeks are to us.

But on to Sub-Sahara Africa. Yeah mostly I follow Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" theory, it's all about the map not the players.

Lack of easy access to domesticable animals, very limited choices for ports or trading routes, the Nile being the only fertile river valley (which most very early civilizations formed around), availability of surface metals, that there is only one narrow land strip attaching it to the rest of Afro-Eurasian supercontinent.
 
Hercules56 said:
European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.......
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Demonstrating that you know absolutely nothing at all about Africa.


I am not knocking native cultures, just trying to understand why things are the way they are.
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Yes you are, and demonstrating your own ignorance at the same time.
 
Jontg said:
A lot of historians don't like Jared Diamond, because GG&S dramatically oversells geography as a factor in the way the modern world is arranged, while ignoring individual and state action as a historical driver. It's true, and important to remember, that environment plays a major role in shaping societies, but reducing history to who had access to what resource glosses over a lot of other major factors--and there's an argument to be made that it also erases a lot of shenanigans that shouldn't be forgotten. Yes, the Mongols were honed into an unstoppable army by life on the steppe, but they chose to obliterate another civilization and kill millions of people. Yes, a lot of European countries became extremely powerful during the renaissance--but what they did with that power, and the ideology they cultivated to justify it, was just as deliberate and malicious as what the Visigoths did to Rome or the Normans did to England.
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Sure it oversells things, but when it comes to questions of why the Europeans behaved as they did in terms of colonization etc..., we have to first acknowledge that they had the opportunity which, say, many African civilizations, Australian aboriginal civilizations and New Guinean civilizations did not have to begin with.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I don't think a lot of people really get the time scale of ancient Egypt.

The Great Pyramid at Giza was completed in 2560 B.C. That is... stupidly long ago for a structure of this size that was built well enough to still exist today and was the tallest building on the planet for next 3871 years. Woolly Mammoths were still alive on Wrangel Island 500 years after the Pyramids where built. Cleopatra lived closer to now than to the building of the Pyramids. The Pyramids were older to the Ancient Greeks then the Ancient Greeks are to us.
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When you put it like that, I can only think of one explanation for those pyramids having been built so long ago.

It must have been aliens!
 
I am entire speculating here, but:

it might be the case that the traits of humans across the globe follow a distribution similar to molecules in an electrophoresis-separation.
In other words, it might have been the least conformists, the outcasts, the malcontent who left Africa first while the established powers who controlled the land would stay.
This pattern would repeat itself wherever humans settled: once there is a stable power structure, the most adventurous/desperate would leave for new lands and shores because they couldn't get along with their fellow humans.
Even across the Americas we can see such a distribution: I mean, seriously, who would go prospecting for gold if there are cities with all amenities of the time available?
So the most willing to take risks and suffer insecurity and discomfort - in other words the early adopters, the innovators - would accumulate the farthest away from the cradle of humanity.
It's just an idea, and I wager it would be impossible to prove.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
I am entire speculating here, but:

it might be the case that the traits of humans across the globe follow a distribution similar to molecules in an electrophoresis-separation.
In other words, it might have been the least conformists, the outcasts, the malcontent who left Africa first while the established powers who controlled the land would stay.
This pattern would repeat itself wherever humans settled: once there is a stable power structure, the most adventurous/desperate would leave for new lands and shores because they couldn't get along with their fellow humans.
Even across the Americas we can see such a distribution: I mean, seriously, who would go prospecting for gold if there are cities with all amenities of the time available?
So the most willing to take risks and suffer insecurity and discomfort - in other words the early adopters, the innovators - would accumulate the farthest away from the cradle of humanity.
It's just an idea, and I wager it would be impossible to prove.
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Is this arguing for a kind of founder effect in which the populations which split off from Africa had a slightly higher proportion of "go getters" than the populations who remained in Africa?

I would think that is unlikely, because if we look at the various populations who left, those who ended up in places such as Australia, New Guinea and, to lesser extents, in the Americas, ended up with a similar lack of industrial (and other) development.
 
Niger had an ironworking civilization comparable to that in Mesopotamia in 1000 BC. The Portugese encountered the powerful Kingdom of Kongo in the 15th century. There's the earlier Zimbabwe culture as well.

I don't think we should necessarily judge civilizations by their ability to build large monuments. Moreover, Africa (which is and has historically been sparsely populted) is not exactly unique in what at least appears to be a relative paucity of great monument-building civilizations. The Eurasian steppe was roamed by nomads and seminomads for milennia. Even if we look at Europe, most of it was not that "impressive" in this regard before the Roman Empire.

So what we tend to think about is Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. The thing is, these are some of the most ideal places in the world to settle an early civilization. I know less about historical Indian agriculture, but in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, the flooding of rivers provided an environment where building city-states to control irrigation proved extremely advantageous due to combinations of various factors.

So in a sense, the counterexamples are a bit cherry-picked. And I think that a good counterquestion might be to look at why in the world humans were so fixated with stacking stones in some places...
 
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Hercules56 said:
European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.

Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have developed none of this.

I have read many theories as to why this is, some suggesting that the warm climate year-round did not push cultures to struggle survive like the cold winters of Europe and Asia did, and this somehow inadvertantly caused Euros and Asians who develop more sophisticated societies than those areas where climate did not force people to think hard or die.

Is there anything to this?
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Could be a combination of geography with a spark of the right philosophy early on. Don't know.
 
angrysoba said:
When you put it like that, I can only think of one explanation for those pyramids having been built so long ago.

It must have been aliens!
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Are you channeling Von Däniken or Hancock?

(and I only see your second sentence now that I'm replying to your post ;))
 
The Great Zaganza said:
it might have been the least conformists, the outcasts, the malcontent who left Africa first while the established powers who controlled the land would stay.
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The problem is timing. Even the meagerest beginning of what would eventually become history's famous civilizations began not much more than 10 millennia ago, as little farming villages, and most of what we generally think of as "history" only goes back about 3-5 millennia. The colonization of everywhere that isn't central & southern Africa happened more like 60-70 millennia ago. So the descendants of the original migrators spent, depending on how you look at it, somewhere around 50-65 millennia not doing anything really different yet.

TubbaBlubba said:
The Portugese encountered the powerful Kingdom of Kongo in the 15th century.
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Farming in the Congo left a large amount of their farmland fallow at any given time, whereas farming in all three centers of Agriculture in Asia was more likely to keep using most fields and just rotate between different crops. The latter was more productive, but Congo soil doesn't seem to have been robust enough for it. Either that, or it would work, but the people there hadn't developed it yet because they had gotten a later start on farming than Asia had.
 
Delvo said:
Farming in the Congo left a large amount of their farmland fallow at any given time, whereas farming in all three centers of Agriculture in Asia was more likely to keep using most fields and just rotate between different crops. The latter was more productive, but Congo soil doesn't seem to have been robust enough for it. Either that, or it would work, but the people there hadn't developed it yet because they had gotten a later start on farming than Asia had.
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Interesting. Do you know what crops they used? Asia had the advantage of native crops that happened to be very suitable for riverbed farming.
 
MikeG said:
How about you contribute on the subject of the thread rather than about me, or face a little input from the mod team.
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How amusing, since your entire contribution was about other posters. How can you ask me to contribute when you don't? I've already commented on the topic. You told them they were ignorant. Presumably you know more, so how about you inform them? Isn't that the point of the forum?

And now you bring forum management into this? Beam in your eye, Mike.
 
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Jontg said:
A lot of historians don't like Jared Diamond, because GG&S dramatically oversells geography as a factor in the way the modern world is arranged, while ignoring individual and state action as a historical driver. It's true, and important to remember, that environment plays a major role in shaping societies, but reducing history to who had access to what resource glosses over a lot of other major factors--and there's an argument to be made that it also erases a lot of shenanigans that shouldn't be forgotten. Yes, the Mongols were honed into an unstoppable army by life on the steppe, but they chose to obliterate another civilization and kill millions of people. Yes, a lot of European countries became extremely powerful during the renaissance--but what they did with that power, and the ideology they cultivated to justify it, was just as deliberate and malicious as what the Visigoths did to Rome or the Normans did to England.
Click to expand...

angrysoba said:
Sure it oversells things, but when it comes to questions of why the Europeans behaved as they did in terms of colonization etc..., we have to first acknowledge that they had the opportunity which, say, many African civilizations, Australian aboriginal civilizations and New Guinean civilizations did not have to begin with.
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That's my understanding of Diamond as well. He overstates his point a bit but it seems to me more of an attempt to explain what put Europeans in a position to be such ********, not an attempt to justify or explain away there assholishiness. In the end, his is really a just so story. Its compelling and has some explanatory power but we can't really know if its the correct explanation.


Aside from the burdens of disease and geography, my understanding is that there were a number of fairly large African Kingdoms and civilizations that just didn't leave much behind on account of not building a lot of stone structures. So much of what they did build, rotted away.

I suspect strongly that Europeans just had lucky timing. Civilizations have waxed and waned all over the world, it just so happened that the Europeans were hitting a high point when the technology to spread around the globe had arrived.
 
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At first glance it appears that much of Africa is tropical, or semi-tropical, unlike say Northern Europe, though I'm fully aware it may be a lot more complicated than that
 
Hercules56 said:
European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.

Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have developed none of this.
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Do the Nok, Ghana Empire, Mali Empire, Yoruba and Igbo city states, Benin Empire, and Great Zimbabwe count?
 
Hercules56 said:
European & Asian cultures developed advanced civilizations, philisophies, architecture.

Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have developed none of this.

I have read many theories as to why this is, some suggesting that the warm climate year-round did not push cultures to struggle survive like the cold winters of Europe and Asia did, and this somehow inadvertantly caused Euros and Asians who develop more sophisticated societies than those areas where climate did not force people to think hard or die.

Is there anything to this?

I am not knocking native cultures, just trying to understand why things are the way they are.
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For the same reasons that rural Albania or Lappland are less developed than Paris France.

Oh and adding a map for Henri who I am sure doesn't know anything about African climate

Africa-climate-zones.jpg
 
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Jerrymander said:
Do the Nok, Ghana Empire, Mali Empire, Yoruba and Igbo city states, Benin Empire, and Great Zimbabwe count?
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They even had the temerity to leave some stone buildings behind. Obviously.........that must have been aliens.

-

Anyone who thinks that Africa didn't ever develop any great architecture should look at the Malian empire(s), and what they built along the Niger River (oops, I went and mentioned a fertile river). The architecture of Mauritania is stunning too, and even trading oases/ towns right out in the middle of the Sahara such as Chinguetti had stunning buildings as well as one of the oldest universities in the world.
 
MikeG said:
They even had the temerity to leave some stone buildings behind. Obviously.........that must have been aliens.
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"They"? I thought Great Zimbabwe refers to the remains of a walled settlement/fortress/somesuch, so-called because it is a particularly large example of a structure referred to as a "zimbabwe".
 
TubbaBlubba said:
"They"? I thought Great Zimbabwe refers to the remains of a walled settlement/fortress/somesuch, so-called because it is a particularly large example of a structure referred to as a "zimbabwe".
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They. The Shona who built it. I don't understand your confusion. And it was a city, not just a fortress.
 
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Jerrymander said:
Guess who made this

https://www.google.com/search?biw=1366&bih=662&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=0li5Wu3uN46Oggf-grMQ&q=head+of+ife&oq=head+of+ife&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0.50943.52931.0.53104.11.11.0.0.0.0.137.1144.0j10.10.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.10.1142...0i67k1j0i24k1.0.xLqoN7vPMlA#imgrc=-mkDMQUizYEw-M:
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The Head of Ife is beautiful but I think it gets a bit too much press merely for resembling mediterranean sculpture art in style. I find Kongolese ivory carvings fascinating myself.
 
Belz... said:
So it was a good idea to get the hell out of there, then? ;)
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Who knows what was going on at the many different times humans left Africa? They ended up running into the Neanderthal and becoming modern Europeans.
 
Henri McPhee said:
At first glance it appears that much of Africa is tropical, or semi-tropical, unlike say Northern Europe, though I'm fully aware it may be a lot more complicated than that
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I think this is part of the answer. Plus (some mentioned earlier)
- more choice of plants and animals.
- several rivers that could be used to help grow crops.
- people living on one river could communicate with people living on other rivers.
- total size and population.
- diseases had a great impact in Africa. Though epidemics had a major impact in Europe, such as the Black death.
- knowledge and use of metals (bronze was rare in Africa, not in other places), wheels and other technology.
- Chinese and Europeans were the only people who went on long two way sea voyages to unknown places.
 
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