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Historian 14/03/08(Sat)00:01 No. 14199
14199

File 13942332636.jpg - (665.95KB , 1600x1703 , africa-physical.jpg )

What would Africa be like today if they never have had contact with outside civilizations?


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Historian 14/03/08(Sat)00:05 No. 14200

According to political correct theories they would have developed into the same advanced stages as Europe and Asia if it was not for their white oppressors.


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Historian 14/03/10(Mon)12:11 No. 14203

Like Australian aborigines


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Historian 14/03/11(Tue)06:10 No. 14205

no contact ... so no Romans?

there would be no Egypt trading with Mediterranean... no Spanish-Moors interactions

... so if Africa was completely isolated for all of time? Well I suppose Egpyt would have made a super-power and united all of Earth


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Historian 14/03/11(Tue)11:09 No. 14206
14206

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>>14205
Technically if Africa was isolated for all time there would be only Africans.

Without any way of migrating, homo erectus, homo neanderthalensis, and all the previous waves of hominids would never have left, therefore there would only be people in Africa.


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Historian 14/03/18(Tue)02:49 No. 14214

>>14200
Right, but one should be more interested in reality.

For the sake of being mildly realistic, let's say that "Africa" is just "Sub-Saharan Africa including Ethiopia"

I'd say that the vast majority would be very much the same.

I really don't think Ethiopia would develop much more seeing as they had benevolent contact with the outside for a very long time and still did not become so advanced.

West Africa would literally have never had any civilization as their sorry excuse for civilization was literally just a gold-export-management bureau that catered to Mediterraneans.

As for the rest, yeah, there's no reason to assume they'd have anything at all going for them. Theoretically Ethiopia could become more but there's no solid reason to say it would and that would just be butterfly effect stuff.


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Historian 14/03/25(Tue)19:52 No. 14219

>>14199
It would be even shittier


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Historian 15/04/05(Sun)15:26 No. 14567
14567

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africa had civilization at the level of the middle east at 3000 BC before the colonial era. so, if it wasn't influenced it would be at the level of the middle east in 2500 BC basically. a few small simple polities without defined borders.


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Historian 15/04/07(Tue)02:43 No. 14568

Impossible to say.

We know that ancient Egypt had extensive relations (often hostile) with the peoples of the interior part of the continent, and traders from India and Arabia have worked along the east coast for thousands of years. When one says 'contact with outside civilization', we are all supposed to think immediately of exploitative European colonization, but the actual story of Africa is much more complex, and much more ancient, than the arrival of the EWM (Evil White-Man).

Indeed, I would like to pose an alternative question...what would Europe (and therefore all European-based societies such as the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) be like today if we had never had contact with outside civilizations? Europe was fairly isolated before the Crusades dragged them screaming and kicking out of the Dark Ages...and it was contact with Muslim civilization that did it.

I think that any culture truly isolated from all others would be doomed to eventual stagnation and decay, and would one day be reduced to the level of grunting, illiterate savages.


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Historian 15/04/07(Tue)03:41 No. 14569

I don't think Africa would have developed to our level of technology because of the general lack of iron and coal deposits in proximity.
The lack would mean no steam power, no steam power means no industrialization, no industrialization means no decent technology, no computerization, no mathematics, etc.
Coal deposits are found in South Africa and iron is found mostly in the west-sub-Saharan region (the bulging part).
Even before that, there were no horses, which meant no manner of traversing easy distances, which has all kinds of infrastructural implications as well as agricultural malus.
The lack of writing was also a big problem, since you depend totally on oral tradition, which gets distorted over the generations. It also means your education is going to be pretty limited, which we all know how it affects a person's IQ.


China, for example, never developed transparent glass for some strange reason, so they never got eyeglasses, which deprived scholars 10-20 years of work, which when added up means quite a lot. Such an inventive people as the Chinese (with also such a huge population), yet they never had glass, never saw the need for it either, it seems.

So if by some manner, Africans could develop all that, perhaps in a couple of centuries or millenia, they would have, there was nothing stopping them.
But if left alone, they wouldn't have developed it by 2015, because most didn't have writing to begin with in the early 1800s. Let's say a genius African develops a system of writing in the year 2000 and teaches it to his confederation of tribes, and another African tames the zebra. Judging by how Eurasian civilization developed (Starting with the Sumerians developing writing at around 3200BC), we can assume that Africans would have, more or less, developed our society (unless they ran into a scientific dead-end like the Chinese did, due to a deficit in mineral deposits, or some other unfathomable reason), by the year 7200AD, give or take a millenium.
For example, Mesoamericans developed writing around 600BC, and they were pretty much at the level of technology the Roman Empire had by the time Colombus made it there.

So in my opinion, what matters is the time at which that bright spark flashes in a tribesman's mind to perform the first great intellectual leap: writing. After that, it's basically a rollercoaster.


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Historian 15/04/07(Tue)22:11 No. 14570

>>14569
>>14569

One historian proposes that the primary reason chinese did not develop ground glass was that their glazed china was of a far finer quality than the Europena Earthenware.

That is, fine china occupied the same cultural niche as fine glasswork did during the Roman Empire (Including Byzantium), but this placed the Chinese at significant disadvantage when Europeans discovered that glass could be ground into lenses.

This implies not only spectacles, as you mention, but also microscopes, telescopes, prisms, etc- with all the consequent scientific advances.

I read a book abook about this very sheck, but my memory is shot. Cant rememeber the guys name, Im sure a moment research could turn it up though.


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Historian 15/04/15(Wed)09:17 No. 14574
14574

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>>14199
The most populous continent on the face of the earth.

Breeding like negroes, + no exporting millions of its people to damn near every corner of the globe, multiplied by the millennia it'd been doing that... = holy fuck, the overpopulation boggles the mind.

Also, that would imply homosapiens which hail from the great rift plains never interbreed with neanderthalensis or denisovan man, which means, no white people, & no asians, which means...

the entire world just sits around banging on skin drums and dancing all day. Oh sure, it sounds nice, but who would build the machine guns and the bombs and neutron bombs and bioweapons? Neanderthals, that's who. If Africans never made contact with outside civilizations, we would all be dead.


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Historian 15/04/15(Wed)09:24 No. 14575

>>14574
>2,500,000 BC

lol I just noticed this. Whomever made that empire map, has a pretty hilariously out of whack idea of how long different races of homosapiens have been distinct and living in those regions. Unless that map was made before the era of genetics I suppose... But I mean, wow.


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Historian 15/04/25(Sat)03:22 No. 14586

>>14575
That history map is arbitrary in its manner of depiction. And serves no real function.


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Historian 15/04/30(Thu)08:59 No. 14596

>>14586
>serves no real function

I don't know about that. It does lay out quite a lot of the more commonly known empires all at once before your very eyes, reminding you that there have been more than just the couple they bovvered to teach johnny in public school. So that's one purpose.


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Historian 15/05/02(Sat)01:46 No. 14597

>>14596
considering other sources of information available to the public school johnny, i wouldn't say it's necessary though. an uninterested johnny would hardly look at such an image and decide to study it to gain information. an interested johnny, however, would derive information from better sources, and will already have the information conveyed from the image from somewhere else (possibly from the thing that gets johnnies nowadays interested in history - video games)


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Historian 15/08/17(Mon)00:24 No. 14724

Africa is a continent where it's people would be nothing without outside intervention- this is not because of its inhabitants skin color but rather how large and abundant the damn continent is and how easily you can live as a human without having to worry about unfavorable weather
The most successful civilizations have had to go through the hardest times be it war, famine, drought, climate change you name it but this is simply not the case in most of africa


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Historian 15/08/24(Mon)13:40 No. 14732

>>14724
only one problem: it is not the Inuit who developed civilization, but people living in most fertile land and in a good climate.

In Africa you have places with harsh climate (Beduins on Sahara Desert), places where drought is more common than anywhere else (Ethiopia), there were empires living in constant war in Western Africa and it didn't help.


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Historian 15/09/07(Mon)01:00 No. 14743

>>14732
I just think that there is a cycle of need for advamncement advancement and laziness that has always applied to humans

European people can't get a break
try to trade with Asia to improve living standards
>plague
Build massive empires
>Horse archers
>sand people mad jelly and attack
>plague
Try to retain power after eliminating all struggles from their people
>the simplicity of the world of no struggles they made destroys them

I feel that life in ancient africa breeded laziness because all they had to worry about were simple things and this subsequently made rulers perhaps even societies with non-existant critical thinking skills

Mansa Munsa
>all that gold
>lemme just make it rain
>people are still impoverished because of him

Dingane
>No we ain't using no damn fire arms to fight the Voortrekkers
>Range? who needs range? keeps shortened spears from Shaka's rule*

>user was banned for this post


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Historian 15/09/07(Mon)20:37 No. 14745

I'd guess they'd be having Industrial Revolution or be approaching it. But that, of course, is nothing but a conjecture.


For example, Africa might've become more advanced than modern society.

If old Egypt didn't have to become isolationist during Broze Age Collapse, it might've went on and expanded, uniting most of Africa (not unlike Roman Empire). Consequently, it would've had an easier transition to the iron metallurgy. Might've happened as early as 5th century B.C.

Then is would be just a question of time, until an advanced monotheistic religion (and from it - atheism and scientific method) would've developed. IIRC there were a few monotheistic religions not related to Abrahamic, so no problem there.

With some luck, Africa would've had it's scientific revolution by 1000 A.D. or earlier, giving it a (relative) headstart on Industrial Revolution. 500 years later - they put human in space.



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