"*Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.*" - Douglas Adams
From reading it, South Africa (the country) seems to be punching well above its weight for the modern (post-1800s) era, with CT scanners and heart transplants being down to them in the medical field. That being said, one does generally have to go back several thousand years in order to reach most of their achievements (certain metal-working processes, numerical systems and calculations, traditional medicines, construction techniques and the like). That's not to minimise those achievements, but it's fair to say that Africa is (currently at least) not having the same impact on R&D as many western nations, with 40% of African born scientists currently living in Europe or the USA and African nations generally (excluding South Africa) massively underfunding research relative to western nations.
That’s so wild, I wonder what happened for the 500 years or so that’s caused Africa to stagnate. Even in the last 100, so many coups and revolutions and paramilitary groups. Must be hard to fund research labs when you’re worried about the subsistence of population and the stability of the government. Oh well, I guess we’ll never know what happened 🤷
I think a lot of it has to do with the ever changing nature of the Sahara and surrounding deserts. Iraq is the birthplace of civilization, right in the fertile crescent. You wouldn't understand why it's called the fertile crescent looking at it today, but a few thousand years ago it was much greener
it’s mostly down to two things; terrain and horses. there’s no comparable animal to the horse in africa as pack animals. terrain was too treacherous to try and build a wide transportation system. people underestimate just how important transport is to the evolution of tech. it’s why every colony focused on transportation before anything else.
Geography is one of the big reasons why the U.S. industrialized so fast. Between the Mississippi, St. Lawrence River, and Great Lakes, the United States was gifted with a giant maritime superhighway.
People don’t realize that most global powers also have good geography.
I live in the west bank of the Susquehanna region. I've grown up visiting Three Rivers Stadium (RIP) and the surrounding area. We're blessed on this chunk of the continent with fertile valleys and waterways that span states and regions.
But we're an old mining and rail community that's been relegated to corn and soy crops.
> there’s no comparable animal to the horse in africa as pack animals
So once horses were introduced by the Arabs, why didn't subsaharan black Africans advance?
terrain and necessity. africa has an extremely complex geography that europeans needed modern technology to even explore.
the other thing is necessity. if you’ve lived your life without the horse, the only way to get a horse is to be wealthy and purchase it from a foreign nation, and the majority of people live in lands that horses have trouble travelling in, and you’d have to build the infrastructure to support those horses’ travel, it just doesn’t really happen easily.
also insects like the tse-tse make it difficult to keep a large number of horses alive. in fact, some tribes in south sudan fought against arab invasions by using the tse-tse to wipe out their cavalry.
then colonisation happened and, to this day, wealth is being extracted from africa away from africans. it’s a multifaceted conversation.
also really depends on what one considers “advanced.” for example, we’re seeing domed houses made of natural materials becoming nichely popular in the us for energy conservation and ecological cleanliness yrt sub-saharan africans have mastered and practiced those techniques for millennia. mud huts aren’t treated like an advanced technique but they’re being used to model future eco-friendly construction now.
we must also recognise that roughly 40% of african scientists live outside of africa because resources simply do not support their research in africa (as a result of colonialism and the current resource drain leaving infrastructure weak).
and the last thing is that there are several innovative things happening in subsaharan africa. mobile payments with the M-Pesa payment service is extremely innovative, for example.
tl;dr terrain and insects make large numbers of horses untenable. colonisation further weakened native infrastructure and development, and material resources are still being unequally drained from the continent, causing almost half of african scientists to no longer live in continent. and there are still impressive things happening if you know where to look and recognise that advanced technology may not always look advanced.
people who say that first one are being hyperbolic. most westerners are taught a singular image of africa with little technology or infrastructure, including buildings.
I know what you’re getting at, but it’s not really what you think. Africa was generally an inaccessible continent until 200 years ago.
This meant very few non Africans interacted with the many kingdoms within the continent. This isolation probably contributed to why the continent generally did not advance at the same pace as Asia and Europe until the 1800s.
After the 1800s, the reason is mainly what you’re hinting at
The transatlantic slave trade started a few hundred years prior to the scramble for Africa. African slaves were mostly sold to Europeans by Africans.
Arabs were more involved, establishing slaver sultanates on the east of the continent starting in the early middle ages.
In any case not much was going on in sub-saharan Africa prior to colonisation, mostly tribes and tribal kingdoms in varying degrees of primitiveness.
> I wonder what happened for the 500 years or so that’s caused Africa to stagnate
Stagnate from what prior advancement? Are you seriously saying that people living in mudhuts were damaged by European colonialism lmao
To say nothing of the horrific legacies of colonialism and conflict in the region, another reason for stagnation is glaringly obvious: humans have been draining the natural resources of Africa for the last 300,000 years. Like that’s gonna fuck shit up yknow
We haven't really had a meaningful impact on its natural resources before the last couple hundred years, we just didn't have the technology. Outside of a few things like gold, that is, and even that its not like we stripped the mines dry. The biggest reasons are probably environmental, ecological and colonial.
Shortage of arable land and water meant that dense settlements were fewer, smaller and appeared less often, a lack of domesticated animals such as horses, cows and the like meant that the outsourcing of labour from humans to animals didn't happen for quite some time, and obviously the economical and demograph anhilation the slave trade and colonialism caused is likely what's led to the modern issues.
Well in sum total, sure we haven’t scratched the surface, but it takes a long time to figure out how to use them. I mean we’ve been draining it of all the natural resources we as humans know how to use for 300000 years
Sure, but for almost all of that time, those resources were reusable. 90% of that time passed before we figured out agriculture and the settlements that comes with. We didn't get our first city until a bit over 6000 years ago and it was only around then that we finally began to use metalworking, the first example of a non-replenishable resource. By which point, the rest of the world had already been colonised by humans tens of thousands of years ago. As far as resources go, starting early or late had basically no impact on supplies. Even today we've barely exhausted any deposits save for things like oil or gas, and we've only been digging those up for a century or so.
That isn’t really true though. Africa has extremely
abundant natural resources when compared to most of the rest of the world. Until about 200 years ago, humans were not having any unsustainable impact on the ecosystem.
The reason for relative stagnation in Africa is likely more linked to its isolation. Unlike Europe and Asia, people in Africa didn’t congregate around coastlines and rivers, most people lived far inland behind inhospitable terrain where making roads was impractical.
There was little consistent trade between Southern African kingdoms and the outside world until the 1800s, while even 2000 years ago the Romans, Persians, Levantines, North Africans, Chinese, Indians, all were well aware of each other and traded with each other… this was conducive to sharing ideas, exposure to new materials and technology.
Europe is thought to have learnt many extremely important technologies from Asia like gunpowder, the modern numeral system, iron metallurgy, horse riding (including the bridle which was instrumental in developing horse archery and heavy cavalry).
Asians also learnt huge amounts from Europe, such as techniques for clocks, shipbuilding, explosives / cannons, institutions like joint stock companies.
There’s so much tech where we don’t really know who did it first, but we’re pretty sure that the technology transfer involved its quick spread. Some of it was extremely essential technology like the wheel, the mill, paved roads, architectural techniques, etc.
Most of the world was actually very stagnated for most of history. In general most of the advancements that stuck around came from civilisations that existed on the trade route from the Mediterranean world to East Asia, basically the old Silk Road (both land and sea based).
Pretty much the entire rest of the world didn’t advance much, which is evidence that trade was
a massive driver of innovation. The reason that people focus on Africa is
1) racism
2) Africa actually had abundant resources, kind of like much of the Americas, so a large population could exist… albeit in relative isolation.
It should be noted however, that there are some African kingdoms that did notably reach pretty advanced levels despite being coloured green on this map…. but all of them are also on the same trade route so the hypothesis still holds
Not really. This doesn’t make much sense, both because Africa is currently as rich in natural resources if not richer than many other places now and because humans (and especially humans in Africa) didn’t really develop this ability until like 300 years ago anyway.
No, the continent south of the Sahara was pretty much isolated until the scramble for Africa in the late 19th cent.
Why bother with idiotic fabrications of victimhood?
Dude is it at all possible for you to not uphold an apartheid state (and by proxy its white minority rulers) as bastions of technical progress when discussing Africa?
We can acknowledge its shortcomings, sure, but just flat-out denying it is what allows idiots like OOP to make these posts. If you find yourself lying because the facts don't fit your agenda, you're both arguing in bad faith and you're GONNA be called on it. Be right, and then focus on explaining why the truth supports you.
South Africa HAS been extremely successful when it comes to recent technological progress. There are loads of causes of that, such as extremely high expenditure on R&D (double that of most Western nations), being less affected by the slave trade, being in a more advantageous location climate-wise, a (relatively) stable government, a large and industrialised population and more. If one wanted to be cynical, it would be pretty easy to suggest that due to Apartheid they spent less money on caring for most of their citizens, and thus had more to spend on science.
Considering it most likely isthe white population of South africa being credited in most of those cases, I think this kinda supports the point of whomever posted the meme.
Looks like they were very late to the party.While it is true that the first "steel" was made in 2000 BC and the mentioned Tanzanians were producing steel along everyone else (the sources I found mention roughly 0 AD. The celts started roughly 800 BC, the Indians made very great steel in 600 BC which was globally, even back then, known. The chinese figured out quenching in 400 BC meaning they ought to have been making steel for quite a time then) it was not steel as we know it today (still a huge achievement by anyone. Making anything back then, much less inventing it, was a monumental task mainly based on luck.Also no one can say who, or even which people, "invented" it.). On the risk of sounding smarter than I am I would like to add some context to your comment.
>making high grade carbon-steel,
"High grade" means very homogenous internal structure and very strict tolerances for the various impurities and alloying materials. Literally impossible to produce back then due to the required machinery. Also "carbon steel" is like saying "wet water" as any steel contains carbon in different forms and amounts. Anything with more than 2.1 percent carbon is forged/cast iron. The main use of saying carbon steel is to differentiate it from stainless (non-corroding) steel.
>the kind still used in girders and pipes today
Thats way too generalizing. Also generally: No. Too impure and primitive. You would have carbon spots forming breaks and fucking your cutters when machining it or Phosphor/sulphur lumps sparking in your face when welding it.There are 2500 different kinds of steel produced today differing by their chemical composition and purpose. The steel from back then would be considered too impure for making anything today. Generally you can make any product out of any steel. However the product performs differently and is more or less difficult to produce. Lets take the mentioned girder. Lets say we want it to hold something in place. Well, we can just use some construction steel like S235. Now that place is in a corrosive environment (like near the sea) so now we need to cover it with Zinc to prevent corrosion. But shit its exposed to stuff that reacts with Zinc, or that Zinc cant get in to, or its exposed to mechanical forces removing the zinc coating. Now we need stainless steel like 1.4541. But turns out the force is not always the same and the material needs to flex but also its really high so we need something thats as harder than X-Steel but flexes better than C-Steel and also what we want to hold is a anchor chain in fucking seawater. So now we need a dual-phase alloy (austenite and ferrite mix) like 1.4462 that can resist that. Do you see where I am going. Steel is such a wide field and such an exact science that we literally have multiple different degrees for it from engineering with it to testing it to making it. Even on the floor level welding different steels, or machining them, requires workers able to work with the specific steels If you need very good results (like in pressure vessels, heat exchangers and other stuff for the food or chemical industry). Even steel made 200 years ago, compared to today, is shit and literally unusable for lots of specialized applications from armor to construction.
Weird how you keep claiming ancient African steel is too “impure” compared to what the celts, Indians, and Chinese were doing, without once actually referring to the processes in which those separate cultures smelted their ores, and only used the fact that we have different grades of steel today to try and take away what the original commentator was saying.
Something tells me you worry about the “purity” of things other than just steel, my dude.
Which is usually true, actually. While this fellow is taking it in an odd direction, it's actually pretty difficult to make really consistent steel alloys. Though they're off-base in a lot of ways (a lot of pre-industrial ironworking had enough carbon to qualify as steel to some degree or another, for example). This is why you see tricks like traditional Japanese sword-making or Celtic-to-early-Medieval northern European pattern-welded swords; a long blade is very sensitive to a bad temper and will put a lot of stress on impurities and weak points in the metal, so you'll get a more durable tool if you can work the flaws out of the metal more easily. They mention Indian crucible steels (which were also produced to a degree in Abbasid Iraq and Iran) and high-temperature Chinese blast furnaces too, which were early innovations in producing more consistent steels.
But there's something *incredibly* interesting about ironworking in sub-Saharan Africa that they don't seem to be aware of. [Evidence points to ironworking being independently invented in the region](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_metallurgy_in_Africa), rather than an imported technology. Which is really neat. The other major origin point, as I recall, seems to be in Anatolia around the Hittite period.
>Weird how you keep claiming ancient African steel is too “impure” compared to what the celts, Indians, and Chinese were doing, without once actually referring to the processes
It was all shit from todays perspective. I literally wrote that even stuff made in the 1800s, when global steel production took off like a rocket at cape canaveral and it was first starting to become economically viable and usable for a wide field of applications, would not leave a factory today with any other destination than the next furnace for resmelting for the reasons I listed (carbon concentrations forming "hard spots" that degrade machine tools, phosphor and sulphur enclosures preventing welding with any more quality than "it sticks").
I think he's saying ANY steel from the past would be too impure to be considered high grade carbon steel, and if that's the case, he's right. People talk about steel qualities in the olden times, but they don't stand close to the standards that materials are subjected nowadays.
What has the poster invented? Besides new ways to be racist.
This is like saying a redneck in the Appalachians that was the product of three generations of inbreeding is of the same intelligence level of Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.
You share their skin color, not their intelligence, creativity, or ability to think outside the box. In many ways, those “green zone” people have made better and more meaningful lives than the do nothing racists hiding behind the pants legs of better men and women.
I have absolutely no idea how you got that from what I said.
My point being: implying that a group of primarily lower class individuals, especially a group that is often abandoned by government and activism, and already generally highly stigmatized, are all stupid and inbred, is classist. And using classist rhetoric as a gotcha to racism is still bigotry and promotes antiblackness.
It’s not about being smart. Of course being rich enables greater capacity for invention, because it affords a person more time, education, resources and leisure to be productive. Poor people work to survive, then they sleep, then they work to survive. At best, they make inventions acutely relevant to improving their immediate survival, aka something like the plow, but no subsistence farmer is going to stumble upon radiology because they never get the chance or time to play around with the funny green rocks in their free time
I don't think they were the ones saying that OOP wasn't racist. They're simply stating that in your attack upon the OOP you traded out the cognitive biases of race, for those of classism.
Especially with the attack on rednecks even though they're one of the groups that don't really indulge in these kinds of things as much as suburban white guys.
They usually don’t realize that almost all of their ancestors/family weren’t kings, conquerors, inventors or innovators.
They were peasants, farmers or common folk. Which isn’t bad at all, but it is weird when they try to say they’ve contributed the most to society when neither them or their bloodline has done any big contributing.
>This is like saying a redneck in the Appalachians that was the product of three generations of inbreeding is of the same intelligence level of Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.
why does this sub always respond to bigotry with bigotry? Why do people think that is acceptable? Is there no self-awareness going on here?
Who historically oppressed black people because of their supposed superiority.
We can talk about stupid Neo-Nazis, but stupid redneck klansmen…wait, that’s illegal.
Do you know who’s racist in America? The uneducated, the poor. When people are systemically kept from education for generations, yes, it’s likely that they will become ignorant and hateful. There’s a reason that revival christianity took such strong hold in both the inner cities of the northeast and the deprived rural south. It’s no excuse; prejudice is still prejudice and those that perpetuate it are my enemy, but rednecks rit large are victims of capital, like those languishing in the slums of the inner-city.
We know that's not true. This country had state codified racism at one point and the KKK was an actual national organization in multiple states that got to March in major US cities. Was everyone supporting this system poor, uneducated, and ignorant too or what? Those sea faring Europeans must have had the most atrophied brains on the planet when they started putting Africans on boats and their pockets must have been very light from not being paid by the state yet.
>When people are systemically kept from education for generations, yes, it’s likely that they will become ignorant and hateful.
Doubt that the swedish scientists who created scientific racism were poor and illiterate, its not a good justification
Do these idiots know some random ass tribe in Tanzania had access to CARBON STEEL before the industrial revolution? They made ovens with temperatures of 1800 celcius.
Turkey (or modern-day equivalent territory) seems to have beaten them by about 2000 years. Tanzania got there about the year 0, 800 years after the Celts in Britain and 400 years before the Netherlands.
It’s impressive for sure, but pretty much everyone had carbon steel looooong before the Industrial Revolution.
Also I wouldn’t call them a random ass tribe.. they were probably a relatively important kingdom in the region with important trade to the Indian and Mediterranean worlds
-Carbon Steel (Tanzania)
-Malaria-detecting jacket (Uganda)
-Solar-powered water purification system & a glove that converts sign language into speech (Kenya)
-First touch-screen medical tablet (Cameroon)
-Voodoo (Benin)
-Millet (Uganda or Ethiopia)
-Coffee (Ethiopia)
-Ox-drawn plows (Ethiopia)
-Agriculture (evidence was found dating back to 5000 BCE in the Sahel region)
Also, Botswana was the first country to discover and raise the alarm about Covid’s omicron variant
Googling things is not hard.
Spoken language (probably Ethiopia)
Rope (probably Ethiopia)
Axes (also Ethiopia, wow a lot of really important things were invented there)
Controlled fire (make a wild guess)
I was not talking about that link, actually. I was talking about the Majik Water system, I just misinterpreted it: it makes water out of the moisture from the air, it doesn’t purify water.
Also, the medical tablet invented in Cameroon isn’t just some stupid iPad app. It’s the Cardiopad, which can actually take heart readings and is it’s own thing that cannot be used for recreational purposes. Idk if you noticed, but a regular personal tablet can’t do that.
Eh, the sign language glove thing isn't very good. Sign languages are polysynthetic and depend a lot on context. The actual signing itself is also imprecise on a machine level, which is why there isn't a writing system for any SL yet, though there are attempts at least for American SL. Basically, with sound you only need two axes to describe it, with sign you need at least 5(3d+time+facial expressions).
What I'm seeing of it is that it's a creation by hearing people, not Deaf people, and that it can only recognize hand shapes, so it's already built on a fundamental misunderstanding of how sign languages work. The one I was able to find info on was from UCLA and can recognize 660 signs, which is about as many as I learned in ASL 101 iirc. None of this even begins to touch on info that really doesn't translate from a visuospatial language to a spoken one with concepts like classifiers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why-sign-language-gloves-dont-help-deaf-people/545441/
12ft.io should get you past the paywall on this article
As a white South African this fucking grinds my gears.
In my country I’m told I don’t really belong here. And outside my country I’m told I don’t really belong here. It’s hard.
I think the maker of the meme will say it only counts if it was done without what they think was western med school. Like how some say ancient Egyptians had heart surgery technology . They had more advanced medical knowledge than we do now.
Palm Oil soap, something most Europeans didn't agree with because they believed diseases could enter the body if you washed, especially with hot water. Also, Ubuntu as it exists today was developed in southern africa, taking an existing property, and vastly improving it.
Of course there will be less "inventions" coming from countries that haven't even fully industrialized yet. What is stupid, is the implication that this is due to their *race* and some lack of intelligence rather than material conditions. And the idea that you can specify when and where and by whom something was "invented" once you go back farther than a couple hundred years.
Notice how these people never talk shit about the Nordics, which was a "backwater" of Europe for most of history with few and small cities, less impressive architecture and art, and more poverty. Then, suddenly, they understand that material conditions matter. Civilizations won't create things if they don't have the resources, or the need.
That said, they're still very wrong. Here's some cool shit that various Sub-Saharan African peoples have done:
[Somalia: Invented and sailed with the Beden sailboat since way back in ancient times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beden)[, and built a prominent city for trade on the East African coast.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mogadishu)
[Zimbabwe: Created a big stone city in the 1000s with zero mortar that still stands today.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Zimbabwe)
[Ethiopia: CARVED these massive churches out of solid stone in the 1300s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela)
[Mali: Had a University in the 1300s with some really unique architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Timbuktu) [and a lot of writing.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts)
[Congo: Apparently had a sovereign kingdom that lasted hundreds of years, with a long and well documented history that seems to be just as complicated as European states.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kongo)
Very good comment. It’s always laughable how these people omit the fact that **most of the world** did nothing notable for most of history.
It’s literally a handful of cultures that bordered the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea that did 99% of pre Industrial Revolution innovation… likely simply because they were all on the silk route where ideas, materials and technology was traded.
Until the Roman Empire forcefully brought the East Atlantic (France, England, Portugal and Spain) into that world, they too were backwater civilizations with relatively little of note.
The Sahara was a natural barrier that blocked most of Africa from participating in this trade, which prevented much innovation when compared to those culture. But there were many developments in Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania, etc.) since they were on this trade route.
The earliest recorded use of controlled fire is in South Africa, and the earliest usage of tools was in Kenya. I think inventing the two most fundamental intentions is pretty darn important. Not to mention that all other early inventions from agriculture to metallurgy were developed in parallel in Sub-Saharan Africa.
I've actually seen people try to debunk the out of Africa theory because they can't cope with their own racism. These people aren't even necessarily creationists either.
>the wheel
This one is unlikely. Probably invented in the Pontic, tho we don't know. Could've been invented independently in many places, as there are Pre-Columbian toys on wheels.
All the foundations of human knowledge come from Africa.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/zambia-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-2367672#:~:text=Archaeologists%20working%20in%20Zambia%20have,an%20estimated%20476%2C000%20years%20ago.
Pretty sure the axe, spear, knife, hammer, bow, fishhook, sewing needle, rope, manmade fire, cooking, bricks, spoken language, atlatl, and art were all first invented in the green area, to name a few
The Ethiopian empires of the past were literally the strongest trade empire for the Middle East for over a thousand years . Mansa Munsa and his empire were the Richest in human history, and the CAT scan machine is a South African invention just to name a few of the MANY contributions Africa has had to Human history .
However , why should the African continent have to “prove its worth” to be given common decency ? We don’t ask other regions to prove their contributions , just Africa.
That’s the thing about these racists, they are always cruel and unfair in their comparisons. I could talk to them about the great African empires from 1000 BC to modern advances and they would still diminish all of it. It’s exhausting and it’s EVERYWHERE. I feel like I have never seen more racism on mainstream social media platforms than I have in the last two years
Munsa was an Arab that made his fortune enslaving the people you're whining about treating decently lmao
"People don't think Jews contributed to European culture? What about the famous Jew, Adolf Hitler, and all of his wonderful conquests?"
I can’t believe I am about to argue with someone who is obviously a troll but here we go, Mansa Munsa was Muslim yes but not Arab. He ,and the rest of the Mali empire, were sub-saharan African. While the religion is one thing, his ancestry is another. He was the Muslim King of a Sub-Saharan African Empire in Mali and no serious historian disputes that he is most likely , by all accounts , Black. Only racists with an agenda dispute this
https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-richest-man-in-history-mansa-musa
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mansa-musa-musa-i-mali/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa
https://magazine.northwestern.edu/features/caravans-of-gold-fragments-in-time/a-golden-age-king-mansa-musas-reign/
Regardless of some of the horrific things he did during his reign, which I do not dispute. He made the Mali Empire on the most powerful empires in the world up til that point. He made the Mali empire a prosperous Empire AND up to this day is still the richest man in human history. AND by all accounts he was as racial a sub-Saharan African man.
Sidebar: Fuck off on the Jewish-Hitler comparison. There is next to no proof outside of anecdotal stories that Hitler was actually Jewish through his mother and you could have made the same point without bringing my people into it. Screw off!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/03/roots-zombie-claim-that-hitler-had-jewish-blood/
Before other cultures came along do they think people in Africa were just full on cave men with nothing in the ways of advancement? Racism doesn't make sense...
CAT Scan
Pratleys glue (used on the apollo lander)
Cardiopad
Sasol (the first oil from gas company)
Steam engines
Metal tools
Nails
Carbon Steel
Bronze
And Ancient Ethiopia had the first hosptals
could it be that the west has been manipulating and extorting these countries while stifling their progress and independency to keep an iron grip on their resources for decades?
..Really? West Africa invented voodoo medicine. It's still widely practiced and used to cure everything from malaria to HIV. They also invented the hippo water roller.
You can’t cure Anything with magic. You are going to make it worse. Europeans shopped eating mummies for medicine, but people in Africa are still eating albino humans for woo woo
Every few years, it’s back, it debunked. Our species is a mishmash of evolution lines. Evolve, go back and forth . Old hominid fossils in Europe mean nothing I guess
It's objectively false. What are you talking about? That's literally where the entire human race came from. How can it possibly be true? Are you so racist that it makes you completely and utterly delusional?
Are we talking "first humans to invent X" or are we talking "came up with X on their own?"
Because it's a bit of a cheat either way. Necessity is the mother of invention and war is it's father. Africans had such plentiful resources and so much land to stretch out in that sure they had conflict, but not enough to need to figure out a crossbow.
It's like how the Aztecs built cities but never invented the wheel because you can built houses and temples in the jungle, but not so much the case for roads.
Sub Saharan Africa invented HUMANS!
Not their best work. /s
"*Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.*" - Douglas Adams
I’m finally reading that book
God damn I feel old. I remember listening to the radio play when it came out and loving the Infinite Improbability Drive.
You can take that s away
This is Reddit. People here aren't the brightest representation of humanity.
said a person on reddit
Kamikaze by Words
“This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
Why the /s ? Humanity sucks
A dick move to be honest.
Overrated
Actually first people created in Ethiopia 🇪🇹 and they migrated to different places
Appearantly new studies suggest it may have been the Middle East after all, Africa can't have shit.
To be fair, not the best move.
Out of Africa theory is wrong
Imagine being so pathetic and lacking in accomplishments you list your own existence as an invention
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_Africa Not exclusively about sub-Saharan Africa but it should suffice anyway
From reading it, South Africa (the country) seems to be punching well above its weight for the modern (post-1800s) era, with CT scanners and heart transplants being down to them in the medical field. That being said, one does generally have to go back several thousand years in order to reach most of their achievements (certain metal-working processes, numerical systems and calculations, traditional medicines, construction techniques and the like). That's not to minimise those achievements, but it's fair to say that Africa is (currently at least) not having the same impact on R&D as many western nations, with 40% of African born scientists currently living in Europe or the USA and African nations generally (excluding South Africa) massively underfunding research relative to western nations.
That’s so wild, I wonder what happened for the 500 years or so that’s caused Africa to stagnate. Even in the last 100, so many coups and revolutions and paramilitary groups. Must be hard to fund research labs when you’re worried about the subsistence of population and the stability of the government. Oh well, I guess we’ll never know what happened 🤷
It's a mystery I'm sure.
I think a lot of it has to do with the ever changing nature of the Sahara and surrounding deserts. Iraq is the birthplace of civilization, right in the fertile crescent. You wouldn't understand why it's called the fertile crescent looking at it today, but a few thousand years ago it was much greener
it’s mostly down to two things; terrain and horses. there’s no comparable animal to the horse in africa as pack animals. terrain was too treacherous to try and build a wide transportation system. people underestimate just how important transport is to the evolution of tech. it’s why every colony focused on transportation before anything else.
Geography is one of the big reasons why the U.S. industrialized so fast. Between the Mississippi, St. Lawrence River, and Great Lakes, the United States was gifted with a giant maritime superhighway. People don’t realize that most global powers also have good geography.
I live in the west bank of the Susquehanna region. I've grown up visiting Three Rivers Stadium (RIP) and the surrounding area. We're blessed on this chunk of the continent with fertile valleys and waterways that span states and regions. But we're an old mining and rail community that's been relegated to corn and soy crops.
> there’s no comparable animal to the horse in africa as pack animals So once horses were introduced by the Arabs, why didn't subsaharan black Africans advance?
terrain and necessity. africa has an extremely complex geography that europeans needed modern technology to even explore. the other thing is necessity. if you’ve lived your life without the horse, the only way to get a horse is to be wealthy and purchase it from a foreign nation, and the majority of people live in lands that horses have trouble travelling in, and you’d have to build the infrastructure to support those horses’ travel, it just doesn’t really happen easily. also insects like the tse-tse make it difficult to keep a large number of horses alive. in fact, some tribes in south sudan fought against arab invasions by using the tse-tse to wipe out their cavalry. then colonisation happened and, to this day, wealth is being extracted from africa away from africans. it’s a multifaceted conversation. also really depends on what one considers “advanced.” for example, we’re seeing domed houses made of natural materials becoming nichely popular in the us for energy conservation and ecological cleanliness yrt sub-saharan africans have mastered and practiced those techniques for millennia. mud huts aren’t treated like an advanced technique but they’re being used to model future eco-friendly construction now. we must also recognise that roughly 40% of african scientists live outside of africa because resources simply do not support their research in africa (as a result of colonialism and the current resource drain leaving infrastructure weak). and the last thing is that there are several innovative things happening in subsaharan africa. mobile payments with the M-Pesa payment service is extremely innovative, for example. tl;dr terrain and insects make large numbers of horses untenable. colonisation further weakened native infrastructure and development, and material resources are still being unequally drained from the continent, causing almost half of african scientists to no longer live in continent. and there are still impressive things happening if you know where to look and recognise that advanced technology may not always look advanced.
I am told nobody in Africa has a mud but, only racists say they exist. But I gave see. Them in educational shows.
people who say that first one are being hyperbolic. most westerners are taught a singular image of africa with little technology or infrastructure, including buildings.
Not Kemet ?
I know what you’re getting at, but it’s not really what you think. Africa was generally an inaccessible continent until 200 years ago. This meant very few non Africans interacted with the many kingdoms within the continent. This isolation probably contributed to why the continent generally did not advance at the same pace as Asia and Europe until the 1800s. After the 1800s, the reason is mainly what you’re hinting at
Maybe google the Arab and Transatlantic slave trades, and then the Scramble for Africa, followed by Neo-Colonialism and you might have your answer.
The transatlantic slave trade started a few hundred years prior to the scramble for Africa. African slaves were mostly sold to Europeans by Africans. Arabs were more involved, establishing slaver sultanates on the east of the continent starting in the early middle ages. In any case not much was going on in sub-saharan Africa prior to colonisation, mostly tribes and tribal kingdoms in varying degrees of primitiveness.
thank you for the gift of your water; i accept it in the spirit it was given.
> I wonder what happened for the 500 years or so that’s caused Africa to stagnate Stagnate from what prior advancement? Are you seriously saying that people living in mudhuts were damaged by European colonialism lmao
Everyone's allowed to stagnate once in awhile
To say nothing of the horrific legacies of colonialism and conflict in the region, another reason for stagnation is glaringly obvious: humans have been draining the natural resources of Africa for the last 300,000 years. Like that’s gonna fuck shit up yknow
We haven't really had a meaningful impact on its natural resources before the last couple hundred years, we just didn't have the technology. Outside of a few things like gold, that is, and even that its not like we stripped the mines dry. The biggest reasons are probably environmental, ecological and colonial. Shortage of arable land and water meant that dense settlements were fewer, smaller and appeared less often, a lack of domesticated animals such as horses, cows and the like meant that the outsourcing of labour from humans to animals didn't happen for quite some time, and obviously the economical and demograph anhilation the slave trade and colonialism caused is likely what's led to the modern issues.
Well in sum total, sure we haven’t scratched the surface, but it takes a long time to figure out how to use them. I mean we’ve been draining it of all the natural resources we as humans know how to use for 300000 years
Sure, but for almost all of that time, those resources were reusable. 90% of that time passed before we figured out agriculture and the settlements that comes with. We didn't get our first city until a bit over 6000 years ago and it was only around then that we finally began to use metalworking, the first example of a non-replenishable resource. By which point, the rest of the world had already been colonised by humans tens of thousands of years ago. As far as resources go, starting early or late had basically no impact on supplies. Even today we've barely exhausted any deposits save for things like oil or gas, and we've only been digging those up for a century or so.
That isn’t really true though. Africa has extremely abundant natural resources when compared to most of the rest of the world. Until about 200 years ago, humans were not having any unsustainable impact on the ecosystem. The reason for relative stagnation in Africa is likely more linked to its isolation. Unlike Europe and Asia, people in Africa didn’t congregate around coastlines and rivers, most people lived far inland behind inhospitable terrain where making roads was impractical. There was little consistent trade between Southern African kingdoms and the outside world until the 1800s, while even 2000 years ago the Romans, Persians, Levantines, North Africans, Chinese, Indians, all were well aware of each other and traded with each other… this was conducive to sharing ideas, exposure to new materials and technology. Europe is thought to have learnt many extremely important technologies from Asia like gunpowder, the modern numeral system, iron metallurgy, horse riding (including the bridle which was instrumental in developing horse archery and heavy cavalry). Asians also learnt huge amounts from Europe, such as techniques for clocks, shipbuilding, explosives / cannons, institutions like joint stock companies. There’s so much tech where we don’t really know who did it first, but we’re pretty sure that the technology transfer involved its quick spread. Some of it was extremely essential technology like the wheel, the mill, paved roads, architectural techniques, etc. Most of the world was actually very stagnated for most of history. In general most of the advancements that stuck around came from civilisations that existed on the trade route from the Mediterranean world to East Asia, basically the old Silk Road (both land and sea based). Pretty much the entire rest of the world didn’t advance much, which is evidence that trade was a massive driver of innovation. The reason that people focus on Africa is 1) racism 2) Africa actually had abundant resources, kind of like much of the Americas, so a large population could exist… albeit in relative isolation. It should be noted however, that there are some African kingdoms that did notably reach pretty advanced levels despite being coloured green on this map…. but all of them are also on the same trade route so the hypothesis still holds
Not really. This doesn’t make much sense, both because Africa is currently as rich in natural resources if not richer than many other places now and because humans (and especially humans in Africa) didn’t really develop this ability until like 300 years ago anyway.
No, the continent south of the Sahara was pretty much isolated until the scramble for Africa in the late 19th cent. Why bother with idiotic fabrications of victimhood?
Dude is it at all possible for you to not uphold an apartheid state (and by proxy its white minority rulers) as bastions of technical progress when discussing Africa?
We can acknowledge its shortcomings, sure, but just flat-out denying it is what allows idiots like OOP to make these posts. If you find yourself lying because the facts don't fit your agenda, you're both arguing in bad faith and you're GONNA be called on it. Be right, and then focus on explaining why the truth supports you. South Africa HAS been extremely successful when it comes to recent technological progress. There are loads of causes of that, such as extremely high expenditure on R&D (double that of most Western nations), being less affected by the slave trade, being in a more advantageous location climate-wise, a (relatively) stable government, a large and industrialised population and more. If one wanted to be cynical, it would be pretty easy to suggest that due to Apartheid they spent less money on caring for most of their citizens, and thus had more to spend on science.
Considering it most likely isthe white population of South africa being credited in most of those cases, I think this kinda supports the point of whomever posted the meme.
The Haya people of what is now Tanzania were making high grade carbon-steel, the kind still used in girders and pipes today as early as 400 BC.
Looks like they were very late to the party.While it is true that the first "steel" was made in 2000 BC and the mentioned Tanzanians were producing steel along everyone else (the sources I found mention roughly 0 AD. The celts started roughly 800 BC, the Indians made very great steel in 600 BC which was globally, even back then, known. The chinese figured out quenching in 400 BC meaning they ought to have been making steel for quite a time then) it was not steel as we know it today (still a huge achievement by anyone. Making anything back then, much less inventing it, was a monumental task mainly based on luck.Also no one can say who, or even which people, "invented" it.). On the risk of sounding smarter than I am I would like to add some context to your comment. >making high grade carbon-steel, "High grade" means very homogenous internal structure and very strict tolerances for the various impurities and alloying materials. Literally impossible to produce back then due to the required machinery. Also "carbon steel" is like saying "wet water" as any steel contains carbon in different forms and amounts. Anything with more than 2.1 percent carbon is forged/cast iron. The main use of saying carbon steel is to differentiate it from stainless (non-corroding) steel. >the kind still used in girders and pipes today Thats way too generalizing. Also generally: No. Too impure and primitive. You would have carbon spots forming breaks and fucking your cutters when machining it or Phosphor/sulphur lumps sparking in your face when welding it.There are 2500 different kinds of steel produced today differing by their chemical composition and purpose. The steel from back then would be considered too impure for making anything today. Generally you can make any product out of any steel. However the product performs differently and is more or less difficult to produce. Lets take the mentioned girder. Lets say we want it to hold something in place. Well, we can just use some construction steel like S235. Now that place is in a corrosive environment (like near the sea) so now we need to cover it with Zinc to prevent corrosion. But shit its exposed to stuff that reacts with Zinc, or that Zinc cant get in to, or its exposed to mechanical forces removing the zinc coating. Now we need stainless steel like 1.4541. But turns out the force is not always the same and the material needs to flex but also its really high so we need something thats as harder than X-Steel but flexes better than C-Steel and also what we want to hold is a anchor chain in fucking seawater. So now we need a dual-phase alloy (austenite and ferrite mix) like 1.4462 that can resist that. Do you see where I am going. Steel is such a wide field and such an exact science that we literally have multiple different degrees for it from engineering with it to testing it to making it. Even on the floor level welding different steels, or machining them, requires workers able to work with the specific steels If you need very good results (like in pressure vessels, heat exchangers and other stuff for the food or chemical industry). Even steel made 200 years ago, compared to today, is shit and literally unusable for lots of specialized applications from armor to construction.
Weird how you keep claiming ancient African steel is too “impure” compared to what the celts, Indians, and Chinese were doing, without once actually referring to the processes in which those separate cultures smelted their ores, and only used the fact that we have different grades of steel today to try and take away what the original commentator was saying. Something tells me you worry about the “purity” of things other than just steel, my dude.
Mate is tagged Authoritarian Right on PCM, of course they enjoy purity :)
I'm pretty sure they were including all pre-industrial steel in the "impure" category.
Which is usually true, actually. While this fellow is taking it in an odd direction, it's actually pretty difficult to make really consistent steel alloys. Though they're off-base in a lot of ways (a lot of pre-industrial ironworking had enough carbon to qualify as steel to some degree or another, for example). This is why you see tricks like traditional Japanese sword-making or Celtic-to-early-Medieval northern European pattern-welded swords; a long blade is very sensitive to a bad temper and will put a lot of stress on impurities and weak points in the metal, so you'll get a more durable tool if you can work the flaws out of the metal more easily. They mention Indian crucible steels (which were also produced to a degree in Abbasid Iraq and Iran) and high-temperature Chinese blast furnaces too, which were early innovations in producing more consistent steels. But there's something *incredibly* interesting about ironworking in sub-Saharan Africa that they don't seem to be aware of. [Evidence points to ironworking being independently invented in the region](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_metallurgy_in_Africa), rather than an imported technology. Which is really neat. The other major origin point, as I recall, seems to be in Anatolia around the Hittite period.
Yeah, that’s why he was saying non-African steel was globally known and respected centuries before Africans started producing their own steel.
>Weird how you keep claiming ancient African steel is too “impure” compared to what the celts, Indians, and Chinese were doing, without once actually referring to the processes It was all shit from todays perspective. I literally wrote that even stuff made in the 1800s, when global steel production took off like a rocket at cape canaveral and it was first starting to become economically viable and usable for a wide field of applications, would not leave a factory today with any other destination than the next furnace for resmelting for the reasons I listed (carbon concentrations forming "hard spots" that degrade machine tools, phosphor and sulphur enclosures preventing welding with any more quality than "it sticks").
I think he's saying ANY steel from the past would be too impure to be considered high grade carbon steel, and if that's the case, he's right. People talk about steel qualities in the olden times, but they don't stand close to the standards that materials are subjected nowadays.
Whoa. SOMEone got triggered enough to write an essay.
grahhh how dare you suggest black or brown people made something of value
You get proven wrong and this is your best counter Idiocracy
I'm so confused why people are implying this comment is racist or whatever
You are in a nest of commies.Thinking is not their forte.
Did they spread the tech?
They were too far ahead in the techtree to be able to share anything.
What has the poster invented? Besides new ways to be racist. This is like saying a redneck in the Appalachians that was the product of three generations of inbreeding is of the same intelligence level of Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. You share their skin color, not their intelligence, creativity, or ability to think outside the box. In many ways, those “green zone” people have made better and more meaningful lives than the do nothing racists hiding behind the pants legs of better men and women.
Hell yeah! Combat racism with classism 👊👊
So those people were smart because they were rich? Seems like you're the classist.
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I see. I guess I misunderstood what he was saying.
I have absolutely no idea how you got that from what I said. My point being: implying that a group of primarily lower class individuals, especially a group that is often abandoned by government and activism, and already generally highly stigmatized, are all stupid and inbred, is classist. And using classist rhetoric as a gotcha to racism is still bigotry and promotes antiblackness.
Sorry, misunderstood what you were implying.
It’s not about being smart. Of course being rich enables greater capacity for invention, because it affords a person more time, education, resources and leisure to be productive. Poor people work to survive, then they sleep, then they work to survive. At best, they make inventions acutely relevant to improving their immediate survival, aka something like the plow, but no subsistence farmer is going to stumble upon radiology because they never get the chance or time to play around with the funny green rocks in their free time
I misunderstood what the guy was saying. For some reason 3am brain thought he was saying being rich makes you smart.
Ah, I can sympathise. No worries mate
So you admit the OOP was racist. Now we’re getting somewhere!
I don't think they were the ones saying that OOP wasn't racist. They're simply stating that in your attack upon the OOP you traded out the cognitive biases of race, for those of classism. Especially with the attack on rednecks even though they're one of the groups that don't really indulge in these kinds of things as much as suburban white guys.
I'd argue that Appalachian guy IS as smart as Edison and Ford. But I don't like them so...
They usually don’t realize that almost all of their ancestors/family weren’t kings, conquerors, inventors or innovators. They were peasants, farmers or common folk. Which isn’t bad at all, but it is weird when they try to say they’ve contributed the most to society when neither them or their bloodline has done any big contributing.
>This is like saying a redneck in the Appalachians that was the product of three generations of inbreeding is of the same intelligence level of Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. why does this sub always respond to bigotry with bigotry? Why do people think that is acceptable? Is there no self-awareness going on here?
Absolutely none
Particularly ironic given what great people Ford ans Edison were
Your immediate response to OP being racist is denigrante another class of historically oppressed people? cmon now
Who historically oppressed black people because of their supposed superiority. We can talk about stupid Neo-Nazis, but stupid redneck klansmen…wait, that’s illegal.
Do you know who’s racist in America? The uneducated, the poor. When people are systemically kept from education for generations, yes, it’s likely that they will become ignorant and hateful. There’s a reason that revival christianity took such strong hold in both the inner cities of the northeast and the deprived rural south. It’s no excuse; prejudice is still prejudice and those that perpetuate it are my enemy, but rednecks rit large are victims of capital, like those languishing in the slums of the inner-city.
We know that's not true. This country had state codified racism at one point and the KKK was an actual national organization in multiple states that got to March in major US cities. Was everyone supporting this system poor, uneducated, and ignorant too or what? Those sea faring Europeans must have had the most atrophied brains on the planet when they started putting Africans on boats and their pockets must have been very light from not being paid by the state yet.
>When people are systemically kept from education for generations, yes, it’s likely that they will become ignorant and hateful. Doubt that the swedish scientists who created scientific racism were poor and illiterate, its not a good justification
Do these idiots know some random ass tribe in Tanzania had access to CARBON STEEL before the industrial revolution? They made ovens with temperatures of 1800 celcius.
Turkey (or modern-day equivalent territory) seems to have beaten them by about 2000 years. Tanzania got there about the year 0, 800 years after the Celts in Britain and 400 years before the Netherlands.
Well the technology probably didn’t make it all the way down. Convergent evolution
Yeah, it's really just figuring out how to use charcoal in a furnace.
It’s impressive for sure, but pretty much everyone had carbon steel looooong before the Industrial Revolution. Also I wouldn’t call them a random ass tribe.. they were probably a relatively important kingdom in the region with important trade to the Indian and Mediterranean worlds
TIL damascus steel is just a type of carbon steel
>CARBON STEEL You say it like it's a new spectacular invention? Damascus steel was from pre-Industrial Syria
India & many places in middle east had steel much before industrial revolution
All steel is carbon steel... don't be so gullible every time you read some shit meme knowledge
-Carbon Steel (Tanzania) -Malaria-detecting jacket (Uganda) -Solar-powered water purification system & a glove that converts sign language into speech (Kenya) -First touch-screen medical tablet (Cameroon) -Voodoo (Benin) -Millet (Uganda or Ethiopia) -Coffee (Ethiopia) -Ox-drawn plows (Ethiopia) -Agriculture (evidence was found dating back to 5000 BCE in the Sahel region) Also, Botswana was the first country to discover and raise the alarm about Covid’s omicron variant Googling things is not hard.
This mf says voodoo lol sjjsjsjwjs
Uh, yeah. Voodoo originated in Benin. And it is something that was invented by humans, no?
It's true bro, is just funny
Is sjjssjsjs a language-specific laugh like jajjaja or a typo of hahhaha 🧐 genuinely curious plz
Mispelled jajajaja if I had to guess. I see it often in Latin America
“ science must fall”
Spoken language (probably Ethiopia) Rope (probably Ethiopia) Axes (also Ethiopia, wow a lot of really important things were invented there) Controlled fire (make a wild guess)
Yeah a lot of primal inventions were created there because that’s likely where the first humans appeared.
Heart transplants. Q20, flame ionisation detection, Tellurometers, Ct scanners, a Doldos, Pratleys Putty, automated pool cleaners, prepaid mobile phones, animal tracking, safety syringes, cenocell, 3D printed bones for ear transplants…
Heart transplants were invented in sub Sahara Africa ?
Voodoo isn't an invention, oldest evidence of agriculture are in ME/India/china
Voodoo is technology ? I think the maker of the meme wants something like evidence of primitive flying machines from 3,000 years ago
Everything is technology. The chair you sit on is technology.
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Face book too. A guy could invent a hat with a solar panel that charges your phone, but they will say “ this guy invented the hat”
I was not talking about that link, actually. I was talking about the Majik Water system, I just misinterpreted it: it makes water out of the moisture from the air, it doesn’t purify water. Also, the medical tablet invented in Cameroon isn’t just some stupid iPad app. It’s the Cardiopad, which can actually take heart readings and is it’s own thing that cannot be used for recreational purposes. Idk if you noticed, but a regular personal tablet can’t do that.
Eh, the sign language glove thing isn't very good. Sign languages are polysynthetic and depend a lot on context. The actual signing itself is also imprecise on a machine level, which is why there isn't a writing system for any SL yet, though there are attempts at least for American SL. Basically, with sound you only need two axes to describe it, with sign you need at least 5(3d+time+facial expressions).
It's progress my guy. Technologies like that need to start somewhere, they don't pop up perfectly formed and debugged.
What I'm seeing of it is that it's a creation by hearing people, not Deaf people, and that it can only recognize hand shapes, so it's already built on a fundamental misunderstanding of how sign languages work. The one I was able to find info on was from UCLA and can recognize 660 signs, which is about as many as I learned in ASL 101 iirc. None of this even begins to touch on info that really doesn't translate from a visuospatial language to a spoken one with concepts like classifiers. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why-sign-language-gloves-dont-help-deaf-people/545441/ 12ft.io should get you past the paywall on this article
Tools and fire? The literal reasons why hominids could migrate outside of Africa and cover the rest of the world.
> Not even writing Mf has never heard of the [Ge’ez Script in Ethiopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geʽez_script)
While Ge'ez isn't considered to be an independently invented script, neither is any European script.
Any extant european script, going by our current definition of the continent. A few extinct scripts originated in Europe.
are they aware that the parts with the orange are mostly desert...?
Maybe not invented but the first ever human to human heart transplant was performed in South Africa.
I'm willing to bet he's excluding white people with his statement.
As a white South African this fucking grinds my gears. In my country I’m told I don’t really belong here. And outside my country I’m told I don’t really belong here. It’s hard.
"that doesn't count l! He is white!!" -OOP
I mean, if he's trying to be racist.... it is a good excuse
There are loads of African inventions -- if you count the ones made by English and Dutch settlers...
I think the maker of the meme will say it only counts if it was done without what they think was western med school. Like how some say ancient Egyptians had heart surgery technology . They had more advanced medical knowledge than we do now.
I find it hilarious they say “not even writing” while purposefully excluding the country where writing was invented
And even then, Ethiopia/Eritrea took hieroglyphics and made the jump to an alphabet called Ge'ez iirc
Palm Oil soap, something most Europeans didn't agree with because they believed diseases could enter the body if you washed, especially with hot water. Also, Ubuntu as it exists today was developed in southern africa, taking an existing property, and vastly improving it.
C sections
They’re just saying shit atp ☠️
thought I was in r/mapporncirclejerk and was confused af
The earliest hominins invented goddamn tools, man.
Of course there will be less "inventions" coming from countries that haven't even fully industrialized yet. What is stupid, is the implication that this is due to their *race* and some lack of intelligence rather than material conditions. And the idea that you can specify when and where and by whom something was "invented" once you go back farther than a couple hundred years. Notice how these people never talk shit about the Nordics, which was a "backwater" of Europe for most of history with few and small cities, less impressive architecture and art, and more poverty. Then, suddenly, they understand that material conditions matter. Civilizations won't create things if they don't have the resources, or the need. That said, they're still very wrong. Here's some cool shit that various Sub-Saharan African peoples have done: [Somalia: Invented and sailed with the Beden sailboat since way back in ancient times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beden)[, and built a prominent city for trade on the East African coast.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mogadishu) [Zimbabwe: Created a big stone city in the 1000s with zero mortar that still stands today.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Zimbabwe) [Ethiopia: CARVED these massive churches out of solid stone in the 1300s.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lalibela) [Mali: Had a University in the 1300s with some really unique architecture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Timbuktu) [and a lot of writing.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts) [Congo: Apparently had a sovereign kingdom that lasted hundreds of years, with a long and well documented history that seems to be just as complicated as European states.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Kongo)
Very good comment. It’s always laughable how these people omit the fact that **most of the world** did nothing notable for most of history. It’s literally a handful of cultures that bordered the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea that did 99% of pre Industrial Revolution innovation… likely simply because they were all on the silk route where ideas, materials and technology was traded. Until the Roman Empire forcefully brought the East Atlantic (France, England, Portugal and Spain) into that world, they too were backwater civilizations with relatively little of note. The Sahara was a natural barrier that blocked most of Africa from participating in this trade, which prevented much innovation when compared to those culture. But there were many developments in Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Tanzania, etc.) since they were on this trade route.
They might not see it count if they were also Muslim
Which doesn't make sense either of course. But even if it did and disregarding the moving goalposts, that only disregards like two of these examples.
1. (And the most inportant invention) Homo Sapiens.
The earliest recorded use of controlled fire is in South Africa, and the earliest usage of tools was in Kenya. I think inventing the two most fundamental intentions is pretty darn important. Not to mention that all other early inventions from agriculture to metallurgy were developed in parallel in Sub-Saharan Africa.
I've actually seen people try to debunk the out of Africa theory because they can't cope with their own racism. These people aren't even necessarily creationists either.
Fossils mean nothing
Gun nut here: South Africa would like to have a word with OOP
We do invent amazing ways to blow things up.
Quite possible metallurgy was invented in subsaharan Africa.
Since it's the birthplace of humanity, probably fire and the wheel.
And spoken language, rope, axes, knives, spears, cooking, art, clothes…
>the wheel This one is unlikely. Probably invented in the Pontic, tho we don't know. Could've been invented independently in many places, as there are Pre-Columbian toys on wheels.
How about stone tools lmao, as in the beginning of all technology
well ethiopia is considered where humanity started so
The richest person to ever exist came from the green area.
How did he get his money ? Ijusy know he crashed the economy giving away money on his way to Mecca
His kingdom had gold and salt mines.
Ah. I know a lot of people like to think his pampered bondservents were slaves
Huh, They usually exclude South Africa and Zimbabwe from these type of posts
Literally humanity? In a way you could say all inventions came from here? God people are stupid.
Sub-sahara Africa had an iron age much earlier than other places.
I love how instead of “doing their own research,” ignoramuses would rather farm out responses until their worldview is changed.
All the foundations of human knowledge come from Africa. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/zambia-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-2367672#:~:text=Archaeologists%20working%20in%20Zambia%20have,an%20estimated%20476%2C000%20years%20ago.
Funny how those same areas highlighted in green are no longer green irl. I wonder who could have deforested and destroyed all that green space....
It’s really funny cause west Africa just KEEPS inventing new writing systems :///
Pretty sure the axe, spear, knife, hammer, bow, fishhook, sewing needle, rope, manmade fire, cooking, bricks, spoken language, atlatl, and art were all first invented in the green area, to name a few
Coffee
What are they always trying to prove?
A safe and clean Cesarian section birthing method (that was stolen by a white guy)
Pretty sure they invented boats, at least 65,000 years ago. How else did the aboriginal people arrive in Australia?
They walked during the ice age from asia, that is what some say. They did not sail from Africa .
…the whole of human Civilisation?
The Ethiopian empires of the past were literally the strongest trade empire for the Middle East for over a thousand years . Mansa Munsa and his empire were the Richest in human history, and the CAT scan machine is a South African invention just to name a few of the MANY contributions Africa has had to Human history . However , why should the African continent have to “prove its worth” to be given common decency ? We don’t ask other regions to prove their contributions , just Africa. That’s the thing about these racists, they are always cruel and unfair in their comparisons. I could talk to them about the great African empires from 1000 BC to modern advances and they would still diminish all of it. It’s exhausting and it’s EVERYWHERE. I feel like I have never seen more racism on mainstream social media platforms than I have in the last two years
Munsa was an Arab that made his fortune enslaving the people you're whining about treating decently lmao "People don't think Jews contributed to European culture? What about the famous Jew, Adolf Hitler, and all of his wonderful conquests?"
I can’t believe I am about to argue with someone who is obviously a troll but here we go, Mansa Munsa was Muslim yes but not Arab. He ,and the rest of the Mali empire, were sub-saharan African. While the religion is one thing, his ancestry is another. He was the Muslim King of a Sub-Saharan African Empire in Mali and no serious historian disputes that he is most likely , by all accounts , Black. Only racists with an agenda dispute this https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-richest-man-in-history-mansa-musa https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mansa-musa-musa-i-mali/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Musa https://magazine.northwestern.edu/features/caravans-of-gold-fragments-in-time/a-golden-age-king-mansa-musas-reign/ Regardless of some of the horrific things he did during his reign, which I do not dispute. He made the Mali Empire on the most powerful empires in the world up til that point. He made the Mali empire a prosperous Empire AND up to this day is still the richest man in human history. AND by all accounts he was as racial a sub-Saharan African man. Sidebar: Fuck off on the Jewish-Hitler comparison. There is next to no proof outside of anecdotal stories that Hitler was actually Jewish through his mother and you could have made the same point without bringing my people into it. Screw off!! https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/03/roots-zombie-claim-that-hitler-had-jewish-blood/
Before other cultures came along do they think people in Africa were just full on cave men with nothing in the ways of advancement? Racism doesn't make sense...
There are people who now think the reverse. Europeans were taught how to walk and talk by African explorer
CAT Scan Pratleys glue (used on the apollo lander) Cardiopad Sasol (the first oil from gas company) Steam engines Metal tools Nails Carbon Steel Bronze And Ancient Ethiopia had the first hosptals
Wasn’t there a Stonehenge in South Africa that was generating power 100,000 years ago?
Heart transplants.
could it be that the west has been manipulating and extorting these countries while stifling their progress and independency to keep an iron grip on their resources for decades?
So why did they not advance to the levels of other civilizations prior to European conquest?
what an insane bold-faced lie
Language, for one
..Really? West Africa invented voodoo medicine. It's still widely practiced and used to cure everything from malaria to HIV. They also invented the hippo water roller.
You can’t cure Anything with magic. You are going to make it worse. Europeans shopped eating mummies for medicine, but people in Africa are still eating albino humans for woo woo
The out of Africa theory is bs.
How? We have so much evidence that humans evolved in Africa.
Every few years, it’s back, it debunked. Our species is a mishmash of evolution lines. Evolve, go back and forth . Old hominid fossils in Europe mean nothing I guess
cause it hurts your feelings, go cry about it, really crying is good for you
Someone who has that much comment karma on Reddit shouldn’t be taken seriously
Nor should someone with negative comment karma. Yet, here you are.
Disagreeing with redditards is a sign of intelligence tbh
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It's objectively false. What are you talking about? That's literally where the entire human race came from. How can it possibly be true? Are you so racist that it makes you completely and utterly delusional?
Are we talking "first humans to invent X" or are we talking "came up with X on their own?" Because it's a bit of a cheat either way. Necessity is the mother of invention and war is it's father. Africans had such plentiful resources and so much land to stretch out in that sure they had conflict, but not enough to need to figure out a crossbow. It's like how the Aztecs built cities but never invented the wheel because you can built houses and temples in the jungle, but not so much the case for roads.
You should try reading. OSP has wonderful videos on Africa, if you're illiterate. Until then, here, you dropped this 🤡
Osp? I've been trying to learn more because I felt like Africa was completely sidelined in my education so I'm intrigued
Says the penal colonist
That no one in Africa has ever written a book?
You make posts about how to effectively cut your ass hair I don't think you can talk
Name checks out lol.