Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food.
Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.
People wonder why I love Africa so much. I say this is where I was born and raised. My roots are in Africa; that's were I developed.
Most countries in Africa have the capacity to be great agricultural producers, but they do only subsistence production. So a family will produce for themselves and nothing more. Why? Because of the systems: The markets are not there to go beyond.
Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.
It's been argued that of all the animals humans have domesticated, the horse is the most important to our history. For thousands of years, horses were our most reliable mode of transportation.
My roots are African. The birds I remember, the fruits I ate, the trees I climbed, they're African.
Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.
If humans evolved in a tiny area of Africa, they only saw plants and animals within a 100-kilometre radius for a million years. When they began to migrate, there would have been different animals and plants - and potentially a lot of allergy issues.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.