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This podcast I'm listening to is annoying the hell out of me. "Around 80,000 years ago, some homo sapiens got adventurous, and left Africa." This simple, subtle turn of phrase promotes the most pernicious myths about Africa and Africans' place in the human story...
...For one thing, there is no reason to suppose people "got adventurous" and left Africa. Nobody knew what Africa was to think about leaving it. People just kept moving into less dense areas a few miles at a time and gradually spread out...
...This idea that the ancestors of non-Africans set for themselves a grand ambition to conquer the world makes no sense in a world without maps. In a world with maps, we can observe that Addis Ababa is closer to Paris and Bangladesh than it is to Lagos....
...Addis Ababa is also closer to Bern, Switzerland than to Cape Town, South Africa. So my West African ancestors were plenty adventurous. As were our Bantu cousins in South and Central Africa...
...But even if your ancestors stayed in the east African rift region, that just meant they were good at their jobs. I'm guessing the best hunter gatherers weren't the ones who had to flee west, north, east and south into terra nullius. The best competitors stuck around and ate...
...What makes it more annoying, is that they then transition directly into talking about abstract thinking and social organization, in a way that implies sequence. First humans left Africa, then they got smart...
...Which is again, not true. The oldest example of representational art was found in South Africa, music is believed to have originated in Africa and been carried abroad...
...Language is believed to have originated in Africa, which still has more languages than any other continent and, as this podcast agrees, language is the basis for abstract thought. The "First we left Africa, then we got smart" model is so common, yet...so wrong...
...I read an article about suicide which speculated that suicide originated outside of Africa because that's the first time people had enough problems surviving to maybe think about ending it all. As I establish in another thread, Africa is not an outdoor grocery store...
I take that on the myth of Africa as an outdoor grocery store in this thread: https://twitter.com/negrosubversive/status/1069959833078718464
...I only dispute this speculation because: 1. It's baseless. 2. While suicide is very unfortunate, it does correlate with a relatively high level of cognition. Implying it arose elsewhere, and with bad evidence, is akin to Jefferson saying we had only transitory emotions...
...This line of thinking: "Humans may have arisen in Africa, but everything human arose somewhere else." Is never directly articulated, because if it were, it would be easily shot down by evidence. It's a way of speaking that is so ingrained it doesn't have to be thought about...
...I suspect it comes from actual myths researchers used to enthusiastically believe, because they didn't want to give Africa pride of place. For instance, it used to be assumed Africans learned iron making from outsiders, now we know they discovered it independently...
...Everything from the pyramids to Great Zimbabwe has gone through a period of being attributed to someone else. Because, as Hegel said: "Africa is the land where men are children." Over two centuries later, we're still enthralled to this bullshit by habit and racism...
...In the present, we have much incentive to think of Africa as a dead zone, an immature continent which birthed an immature version of humanity that was only refined elsewhere. This explains that poverty "we" cannot bear to blame ourselves for...
...It also makes slavery not look so bad. All political battles find a way to play themselves out in history. Those whom we wish to write out of the present, we must also write out of the past. Europe's achievements are exaggerated and Africa's minimized...
...For instance, the pyramids were already 2200 years old by the time Socrates was born. They were 2640 years old when the Roman Coliseum was built. That fact surprises because it is customary to lump together as "the ancient world" without dwelling on the epochal separation...
I talk about this artificial contraction of ancient time here: https://twitter.com/negrosubversive/status/1026654904272580608
...Ok, I'm going to stop this rage thread. Black Africans are the founders of human civilization and we are all their heirs. I know a lot of ya'll hate it, it burns you up inside to think of "The Blacks" originating anything. Get over it. Facts are facts are facts are facts.
