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Comment by reinhardt | Hacker News Reader

This is an empirical judgement: http://kuvaton.com/kuvei/evolution5.jpg

Feel free to google Great Zimbabwe, Old Ghana, Mwene Mutapa or Timbuktu. I could give you a tonne of other examples but your ignorance, I fear, is incurable. All the same, Rome != Europe, and Africa is not a fucking city. And how - what I presume to be a - German, interprets the feats of a culture whose development is only remotely connected to his own, is something beyond my African capacity to comprehend.

His argument is completely flawed. All areas surrounding the Mediterranean benefited greatly from being able to cover large distances by boat. This allowed trade to flourish and civilizations to prosper in this part. The fertile crescent was the hub of all this, you can trace the origin of European civilization to this point. You could simplify it and say that it went like this: Egypt, Greece, Rome and Europe. Meanwhile, there was a huge dessert isolating Sub-Saharan Africa. You have to keep in mind though that Timbuktu for example didn't spring out of nothing but thanks to Muslims from the North.

Other places were able to get their own civilization thanks to one reason or the other, e.g. Eastern China.

All that has to do with achievements of different societies. Now at the individual level, how do we know whether groups with Caucasian genes would have been able to develop a civilization if they had lived in a place with the same geography and conditions as Sub-Saharan Africans? We can't know.

What we know though is that the conditions are there now for individuals with predominantly Sub-Saharan ancestry to show what they are capable of. Eventually they'll produce someone like Mozart, Newton, Confucius, Sun Tzu, Jabir ibn Hayyan or Abbas ibn Firnas. Or maybe they won't. Perhaps too early to tell.

One of the points I was trying to make was, "Africa" as an entity does not exist, save for in Western and post-colonial Pan African texts. We do not see ourselves as African, identifying primarily as one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of distinct ethnolinguistic groups - tribes, if you will. I am a Luo. I only see myself as a Kenyan when I'm outside the country. African cultures - specifically Black African cultures - tend to have strong oral traditions that do not lend themselves well to transcription using Western templates for historical writing. In my tribe, there's a legend of a man known as Lwanda Magere, who conquered nations surrounding the Luo. This would be our equivalent of Alexander the Great. My guess is you've never heard of this, or the million other similar stories from Black Africa. The Mozart's of your world exist because you developed writing or borrowed it from close by civilizations. It's all about records.

>You have to keep in mind though that Timbuktu for example didn't spring out of nothing but thanks to Muslims from the North.

This would be like calling Sicilly an Arabic city. Timbuktu grew as a center of trade within Black Africa as a result of trade with the northern Arabic and Arabized Berber states. This does not make it any less valid as an example.

PS: May not look like it, but I largely agree with you.

Sicilly is not a city, is an island with a lot of cities. Before the Arabs even existed, Greek colonists founded Syracuse (which is around 2700 years old) the birth place of Archimedes.

>You could simplify it and say that it went like this: Egypt, Greece, Rome and Europe.

Not necessarily. The first big European civilization was the [Cucuteni-Trypillian culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni-Trypillian_culture) which developed north-west of the Black Sea and was quite ahead of what was developing in the Middle East or elsewhere at the time (they had better pottery, barter tokens, biggest settlements in the World - up to 15000 people-, and were possibly the authors of the first writing system, 1000 years before the Summerians).

Fortified church build by a small German village of less than 1000 people around 1100, in Transylvania.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Feheregyhaza2.jpg

Now compare that with anything build by the Great Zimbabwe, Old Ghana or Timbuktu. Don't worry, that fortified church is just one of many.

I'm sorry we didn't adopt Christian architecture, in pre-Christian Africa. I find that to be subjective, simply a matter of taste. We have wildly different cultures so I should expect the same of our aesthetics. I find it absurd that you expect Greco-Roman or Gothic architecture in places that were never at any point under the respective empires. Black Africans did not share European sensibilities, and attempting to use that single, alien yardstick to gauge all civilizations under deprives you greatly from enjoying all the beauty humanity has got to offer. But that's your loss, not mine. I'm only able to appreciate the beauty of the Sistine Chapel because MY education system exposed me to your culture. This doesn't make me view the shrines of the Mijikenda as any less beautiful, nor the temples of my Hindu countrymen and women. Aquired tastes my friend. You're only looking to enforce your world view, and pathetic as I think that is, it's not my place to deny you.

Thanks for the Sicillian clarification BTW. I'll be sure to go there next time I'm in Greece. Oh, wait...

I think there are numerous examples of ancient architecture from even before the age of Rome found in Africa. Particularly northeast-africa.

Africa is just too big and diverse too be lumped into one category. However I did get a good chuckle out of the jpeg.

I do have to agree with the some of the sentiments here. There are examples of Africans who also have the Neanderthal presence in their DNA, again, east-africans. Probably explains why they're so different to other Africans. Though I still don't know whether they're considered sub-saharan africans or not. They are genetically very distinct from surrounding Africans.

Hey. Just a point of correction - East Africans are just as black as people from the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. You may find communities along the coasts, such as the Swahili, with significant Arab ancestry but most inland tribes are not different from their Western or Southern African counterparts. The greatest differences occur between language groups. Take the Nilotes for instance - the linguistic group which my tribe, the Luo, belongs to - we tend to be relatively tall and thin, with very dark skin, as compared to the more stout, lighter skinned Bantu groups. These distinctions also exist between the Western African branches of Nilo-Saharan (the Nilotic parent group) and the Bantu communities in the region. Southern African communities are largely Bantu though. In short, the vast majority of East Africans are what you'd call black, no different from any other black populations.

PS: "Sub Saharan" is rather long. We really don't mind "Black" Africa.

Thank you, that's very interesting. I was more referring to Horners. Ethiopians, Somalians, Eritreans. But that brings up another interesting question for me. How would you consider them? I know outside of Africa they are considered caucasians and have significant caucasian influence ( we're talking at least or over the 50% range.)

Pictures results after googling around a bit:

http://i.imgur.com/sgCSr.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Xt8pQ.jpg

In my opinion, this just shows that humanity is a gradient. Overlapping. It's rather fascinating.

Yeah, it really is fascinating. Sorry, my previous comment didn't talk much about the Cushites. We have a large Kenyan Somali population - close to a million - and an even larger diaspora from Somalia with residency or refugee status, because of the civil war in their country. The Somali myth of origin, if I remember my high school history, goes something like this. A Yemeni man marries the daughter of a man - ethnicity not specified - called Darrod. Assuming Darrod was black in the typical sense, this story might point to a "biracial" origin of the Somali. The Ethiopians on the other hand, have a story about a creator making humans out of clay. Those who stayed too long in the kiln became black and were placed south, those who didn't stay in long enough became white and were placed to the north and the Ethiopians who stayed in for just the right amount of time were placed somewhere in the middle. I read it when I was a kid, so I don't quite remember if it placed any distinctions between the Tigre and Amhara, the most dominant tribes in Ethiopia. I assume it's the same for the Erritreans, as they were essentially a single nation at some point.

Cushites - are "Black" in a political sense, maybe less so in a cultural sense as I've been made to understand that Ethiopians generally don't see themselves as lowercase "b" black.

About the gradient thing, black people have a huge spectrum of different skin colors, even within the same family. My Mum for instance, is light skinned. My sister and I are quite dark. The funny thing is we started out really light skinned as children, perhaps till we each turned three. I've heard some kids start out blonde and end up with dark hair? I find it all quite interesting.

I agree! I have a somali friend. The general somali myth is that they all, the tribes, came from one Somali man and his wife. I think the Somalis generally realize they're not from arabs. And abhor even the suggestion! haha.

But he said that you are correct, if you go in the north of Somalia, where currently, Somaliland is. You will find that many Isaacs ( clan name) think they are descendants of the arab tribe of Mohammed. My friend tells me these people are just confused. And I think we can agree that DNA analyses seem to suggest he's correct.hehe. DNA and linguistic research seems to suggest the Earlier Egyptian,Somali, Amhara and Eritrean populations to be close relatives. With the Somalis having the least influence of surrounding nations ( Arabs, west-africans etc.) Funny how the ones that don't think they're purely Africans, are the ones that in fact, are!

"Particularly northeast-africa."

I hesitate to say this since I had been planning on staying away from this conversation, but northeast africa is not part of sub-Saharan Africa which this article seems to be concerning (at least according to the Discover writeup, which I only skimmed).

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sub-Saharan_A...

Ah ha! Thank you for that,it was enlightening. I have heard before that East-Africans are considered caucasians. Though I don't know this for sure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race Wikipedia for 'caucasian' seems to suggest they are though. Strange!

You're falling way below the usual standards of discourse on this site.

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