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Research shows Africa's borders were not entirely arbitrary, shaped instead by negotiations involving precolonial territories and geographical landmarks.
Hidden within Kenya's scenic landscapes, ancient mancala boards etched into rock surfaces tell a tale of communal play and cultural continuity from over 5,000 years ago.
This may have driven the evolution of upright apes
The pandemic has messed up many things including the academic and social growth of school children.
We take it for granted, but for hundreds of millions of people, water is a scarce treasure.
Fewer people are using fires to manage land, which means less pollution.
Millions rely on tropical forests in Africa, such as the Guinean Forests. Thanks to satellites, they can be easier protected.
UN says more funding is required to help the most-affected countries and avoid widespread famine.
Africa is exhibiting remarkable resilience through the pandemic.
Many African countries have no intensive care beds to speak of, besides many other shortages.
The transatlantic slave trade was at its height between 1750 and 1850. Now, a new study analyzing the genomes of people with African ancestry has confirmed this and provides more insight.
Extreme weather has fueled a plague of millions of desert locust
Researchers show how cultural changes in Africa over the past 10,000 years can be tracked using the size of eggshell beads.
Roughly 14% of respondents said they had to bribe to obtain care at least once in the past year.
Ashes to bananas.
It's a surprisingly rich history.
Finally a 'wall' we can all support.
Take a bite out of this story.
Improvise, adapt, eliminate.
There are not many people I dislike as intensely as ivory poachers.
There's some good news, but also a lot of bad news.
Scientists find massive cemetery complex in the plains of Kenya.
A tiny fingerbone is re-writing the story of human dispersal out of Africa.
This isn't the last piece of the puzzle -- in fact, it's the very first.
Even when you'd think he couldn't possibly stoop any lower, there he is, defying all odds.
Not bad for such a small thing.
Worldwide, more and more people are starting to move from rural areas to urban areas. But nowhere is this as prevalent as in Africa.
Africa's elephants might become endangered soon because of widespread poaching.
We just bought some more time.
Sad news comes from African wildlife parks again: three rangers were killed in Democratic Republic of Congo’s Garamba wildlife park. Two others were wounded, including the park manager. Just yesterday we were writing that African park rangers risk their life on a day-to-day basis to protect animals in natural parks, and now this tragedy was reported […]
One study estimates that over the next 35 years, nine African countries would have to spend $98 billion to $261 billion to buy drugs and prevent infections.
The complete genetic code book of a person who lived 4,500 years ago in Ethiopia was completed by US researchers. Although much older genomes have been sequenced, like those of 38,000 year-old Neanderthals, samples from African forefathers have proven difficult to sequence as the DNA is often destroyed by accelerated decay, driven by tropical conditions. As such, this is the first time a complete genome retrieval was performed from an ancient human in Africa. In this light, the findings are very important: they suggest even older DNA could be retrieved - maybe even millions of years back to the age of other species of the homo genus.
“Having seen the devastating effects of Ebola on communities and even whole countries with my own eyes, I am very encouraged by today’s news,” said Børge Brende, the foreign minister of Norway, which helped fund the trial.
After placing no less than 225 camera traps, a group of researchers has collected a massive database of 1.2 million photos documenting the secret live of the animals that roam Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. The shots offer a raw, unedited glimpse that wouldn't had been possible otherwise; genuinely up close and personal. So personal that some of the lions and other beasrs in the park went a step too far and tried to eat the cameras. At time, the only thing that was left of the camera was plastic shreds, but luckily some memory cards survived. How often do you get to see the last shot made by a camera? With a lion with a fully open jaws staring right at you, no less.
Archaic homo sapiens left Africa, the wellspring of humanity, some 60,000 years ago migrating North, via a route passing through what is known today as Egypt, rather than South, through the Arabian Peninsula, as previously proposed. The findings were reported by an international team of researchers which used novel techniques to produce whole-genome sequences from 225 people from modern Egypt and Ethiopia (six modern Northeast African populations). This is far from the last word, but the picture the researchers paint seems to be consistent with other evidence, such as early human-made tools and human fossils found on the proposed route (Israel), and is in better agreement with what we already know about the genetic mixture of all non-Africans with Neanderthals.
Most of the time, the so-called civilized world would just rather turn a blind eye towards what is happening in Africa; right now, I'd like to shed some light on what it's like to be an albino in Africa, and more specific, Tanzania.
Over the past few years there has been much talk about the importance of scientific development in Africa. With the international development agenda, including the new Sustainable Development Goals, increasingly recognising the critical importance of science, technology and innovation in human, social, and economic development, the battle for advanced science is beginning to be won. […]
The Ebola virus causes a highly infectious disease that can reach fatality rates of up to 90%. It causes a great deal of suffering, spreads really easily and if it’s not treated very early on can kill most people. It’s darn scary , but ever since it surfaced in 1976, when the first outbreaks in […]
In some parts of the world you can find fences that stretch for hundreds of miles, delimiting protected areas or those populated with humans. The basic reasoning is that these fences are put in place to protect the local wildlife by preventing the spread of diseases, poachers and by helping helping managed endangered populations. The […]
Millions of years ago, the wild savannas of Africa were teeming with carnivore wildlife, much more diverse than what we see today: lions, hyenas and other large-bodied carnivores. Paleontologist Lars Werdelin at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm suggests the carnivore species decimation that began roughly two million years ago can be attributed […]
New, more precise carbon dating of artifacts found in South Africa, such as poison-tipped arrows or ostrich eggs, have been found to be 44,000-year-old. The technology and social behavior at play suggest that modern human culture in the area may have emerged some 20,000 years earlier than previously thought and supports the theory that all modern […]
Africa proves yet again that it’s the cradle of the hominid family, and in consequence the human species. Scientists have found foot fossils in Ethiopia that don’t match those of any kind of hominid discovered thus far, dating from 3.4 million years ago, making the specimen contemporary with Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis specimen, of vast […]
The leading theory that explains why zebras are striped (remember the age old riddle? black stripes on white or white stripes on black?) is because it offers them protection against predators, by providing camouflage, as colour blind animals confuse the strips with tall grass in the savanna. A team of researchers from Hungary, however, offer a different, […]
Casey Holliday, a University of Missouri researcher, was looking through some of the hundreds of unlabeled items kept in a storage facility when he come about a remarkable find – a skull fragment from an ancient croccodile, dating back from the late Cretaceous, around 95 million years ago. What’s really interesting about the find is […]
Nairobi, Kenya is home to one of the world’s biggest slums, more than one million people living in subhuman conditions in the African state capital. I’ve seen and read a lot of reports from there, and other African states alike, and the situation is indeed dire. Imagine having nothing to eat – now imagine having […]
