afican contribution to civilli

            AFRICAN CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD HISTORY.
             "The events which transpired five thousand years ago, five years ago or five minutes ago, have determined what will happen five minutes from now. Five years or five thousand years from now. All history is a current event." [John Henrik Clarke].
             History is a fundamental part of everyone's life. The knowing of history is the knowing of ones self, ones identity and ones future. History came into being at the dawn of our existence. Once we could hold rational premeditated thoughts and had lifted ourselves from the reflex behaviour of the animal, history was and is an inevitable must in our future. It is the learning from experience, the study of history that has enabled us to grow into the complex social sophisticated beings that we are today. Ancient civilisation did not begin in what we think of as the West. It did not start in London or Paris, Berlin or Rome; it grew out of Africa, a place that was thought of as a place bearing primitive savage cultures and people till the middle of the last century. In this essay I shall be looking at and discussing the real importance the ancient African peoples and civilisations had on our lives today. I will do this by examining how Africa spawned the first modern humans and how Africa saw the birth of civilisation, trade, tool making and the basis of how we have come to be in the present day.
             Africa has played a part of crucial importance in the early human development, according to recent findings in the African Continent a huge part of our history has had to be rewritten. The evidence for the earliest development of the ancestors of us, Homo sapiens comes insistently from Africa, just as Darwin over a century ago said it would. Leaky, an Anthropologist/ historian examined our origins and the birth of civilisation and gave Africa three firsts in the respect of Africa being the originator. He concluded firstly that it was the African continent that saw the emergence of early primitive humans as we know them today and that occurred during the Oligocene period, between thirty and forty million years ago.