Is that a rhetorical questions or you genuinely seek to expand your knowledge?
In case it’s the latter, then your slant of:
> northern Mediterranean/Nile influenced groups
is weird. Many European cultures were influenced by the Romans, who were influenced by the Greeks, who were influenced by other cultures. The flow of ideas across time and space is what actually gives rise to civilizations.
So what if an African civilization was influenced by another civilization? Does that make it less meaningful?
As for what civilizations Africa had, you can read about Kerma/Napata/Kush/Nubia, Aksum, Kongo, Swahili coast, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Egypt, etc. However, I suspect you have your mind made up, hence the dismissive “Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?”
There's lots of people in this thread demonstrating exactly what this Great Zimbabwe project is about. The history of Africa that many of us have been taught is basically "there were a bunch of black people living in mud huts forever, and then the White Man came and gave them civilisation". This is an ideological and inaccurate portrayal history designed to make African people look backwards. In actuality, despite a challenging climate, various African groups built cities and civilisations.
The idea to use European civilisational and technological development as the measure for all other places is also absurd, because you could sample various points in time where e.g. Britain was a place of warring tribes with pointy sticks while China or the Middle East had thriving civilisations. Real life history is not a game of Civ where everyone starts at the same point and races through a bunch of predetermined milestones.
Why do you think everybody is just stacking technologies on top of a shared pool? That's a post-globalisation concept.
African people discovered plenty of technologies including metal forging - but they were less technologically advanced than Europeans when they were invaded. Why? Because the material situation in Europe is ideal for technological development. The climate is temperate, food is abundant, the Romans went everywhere dumping their own advanced tech on everybody, probably other factors a historian could elaborate. There are plenty of alternative explanations to the one you're implying, and the one that's been historically taught, which is "black people are not capable of developing civilisation or technology".
Edit given you appended "at any point in time": basically no milestone technological development has happened anywhere for quite some time now, excluding computers and the Internet. Everything's incremental now. Plus for much of that time many African countries have either been trying to recover from colonialism or been caught up in civil war (which should be expected when a power vacuum is created). I would say that mobile money is a good candidate for a meaningful invention though, and that came out of Nigeria.
The "uncomfortable truth" (that black people are socially or intellectually inferior to white people) /is/ the established idea. We're only just now looking for alternative explanations because it turns out black people are regular people too and can function perfectly well within our "superior white civilisation", assuming they're not too busy being lynched or pushed into ghettos.
White superiority (dare I say, white supremacy?) has only just become uncomfortable instead of the accepted truth, because the evidence points to other explanations, and we've recently noticed what racial ideology leads to. It is not those looking at material explanations and examining African culture and development that are dogmatically clinging to ideological explanations - it's those who still think that colonial propaganda and white savior mythology represent a disinterested examination of the evidence.
This conversation has been done to death, there's no value to be had from racial ideology because it's been disproven for a long time.
To be clear, this isn't a discussion - I'm trying to hand hold you into thinking about your positions. I have nothing to learn from the "race realist" position; I've seen the arguments for and against and it's really easily disproven. You may think that the "race realists" are holding onto the secret truth that's been suppressed by the woke postmodernist academics, but the reality is that you've fallen for some online conservative propaganda and the academics are just trying to find the truth.
> Jared Diamond posits the first theory, as well, in Guns, Germs, Steel.
No, he doesn't. GGS explicitly rejects any sort of pseudo-racial theory of civilizational superiority. The entire book is a methodical dissection of why different regions experienced different paces of development in the pre-colonial era, with climate, geography, and endemic food species being the leading factors.
As long as someone doesn't change their point, if someone wants to make their comment more clear by simplifying phrasing or adding more detail or examples, it's fine by me.
I'd rather a fleshed out idea than a off the cuff rough draft. That's actually one of the best parts of digital communication.
But that's what I was saying as well - that civilisational development is not driven by some concept of racial traits, but that it's driven by material conditions.
Racialized theories of civilization are, on face value, absurd (and, well, racist). GGS goes to significant lengths to debunk them, including thoroughly collapsing the racial categories that colonial and post-colonial Westerners use.
The question of whether race or location is the causal factor seems to just be different dimensions of the same thing, no? Given that they pretty much correlate though most of history.
Out of 55 countries in Africa, if you exempt the mediterranean countries, out of the free flow of ideas across time and space on the African continent throughout history, what major technological advancements emerged from continental Africa?
Inoculation, iron metallurgy and myriad practices in agriculture including rice cultivation and terraced irrigation. There are also technologies not adopted that are still pretty cool, including talking drums.
In case it’s the latter, then your slant of:
> northern Mediterranean/Nile influenced groups
is weird. Many European cultures were influenced by the Romans, who were influenced by the Greeks, who were influenced by other cultures. The flow of ideas across time and space is what actually gives rise to civilizations.
So what if an African civilization was influenced by another civilization? Does that make it less meaningful?
As for what civilizations Africa had, you can read about Kerma/Napata/Kush/Nubia, Aksum, Kongo, Swahili coast, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Egypt, etc. However, I suspect you have your mind made up, hence the dismissive “Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?”