AFRICA: THE BEGINNING OF HUMANITY

Can you tell which is a modern human skull, and which is one of the earliest human skulls?

Scientists found fossils from the earliest humans in Africa. So we know the earliest humans came from Africa. We found human bodies that are more than one million, five hundred thousand (1,500,000) years old.
The earliest people we know anything about lived in the Sahara Desert about ten thousand (10,000) years ago. The Sahara is a desert today, but 10,000 years ago, it had plenty of rain and plants. We know about these people because of their cave paintings. When the Sahara area started to dry up and become desert, the Saharan people traveled to other places and disappeared.

The Sahara Desert in the north of Africa. It is about 1/3 of the continent of Africa.


Sand dunes in the Sahara desert.

Dark-skinned people first appeared south of the Sahara desert. Light-skinned people first came into Africa from Asia, and spread out across the Nile River Valley and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Darker skin helps protect people from the sun in places where there is hot, bright sun. Light skin helps people’s bodies make the vitamins they need in places where there is not much sunlight. The earth is hottest near the Equator, the imaginary line that goes around the middle of the earth. The Equator goes right through the middle of the continent of Africa.