Education
Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, values and habits. Educational methods include storytelling, teaching and directed research. Education takes place under the guidance of educators and learners may educate themselves. Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational; the methodology of teaching is called pedagogy. Formal education is divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and college, university, or apprenticeship. A right to education has been recognized by the United Nations. In most regions, education is compulsory up to a certain age. Etymologically, the word "education" is derived from the Latin word ēducātiō from ēducō, related to the homonym ēdūcō from ē- and dūcō. Education began in prehistory, as adults trained the young in the knowledge and skills deemed necessary in their society.
In pre-literate societies, this was achieved orally and through imitation. Story-telling passed knowledge and skills from one generation to the next; as cultures began to extend their knowledge beyond skills that could be learned through imitation, formal education developed. Schools existed in Egypt at the time of the Middle Kingdom. Plato founded the Academy in the first institution of higher learning in Europe; the city of Alexandria in Egypt, established in 330 BCE, became the successor to Athens as the intellectual cradle of Ancient Greece. There, the great Library of Alexandria was built in the 3rd century BCE. European civilizations suffered a collapse of literacy and organization following the fall of Rome in CE 476. In China, Confucius, of the State of Lu, was the country's most influential ancient philosopher, whose educational outlook continues to influence the societies of China and neighbours like Korea and Vietnam. Confucius gathered disciples and searched in vain for a ruler who would adopt his ideals for good governance, but his Analects were written down by followers and have continued to influence education in East Asia into the modern era.
The Aztecs had a well-developed theory about education, which has an equivalent word in Nahuatl called tlacahuapahualiztli. It means "the art of raising or educating a person" or "the art of strengthening or bringing up men." This was a broad conceptualization of education, which prescribed that it begins at home, supported by formal schooling, reinforced by community living. Historians cite that formal education was mandatory for everyone regardless of social class and gender. There was the word neixtlamachiliztli, "the act of giving wisdom to the face." These concepts underscore a complex set of educational practices, oriented towards communicating to the next generation the experience and intellectual heritage of the past for the purpose of individual development and his integration into the community. After the Fall of Rome, the Catholic Church became the sole preserver of literate scholarship in Western Europe; the church established cathedral schools in the Early Middle Ages as centres of advanced education.
Some of these establishments evolved into medieval universities and forebears of many of Europe's modern universities. During the High Middle Ages, Chartres Cathedral operated the famous and influential Chartres Cathedral School; the medieval universities of Western Christendom were well-integrated across all of Western Europe, encouraged freedom of inquiry, produced a great variety of fine scholars and natural philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas of the University of Naples, Robert Grosseteste of the University of Oxford, an early expositor of a systematic method of scientific experimentation, Saint Albert the Great, a pioneer of biological field research. Founded in 1088, the University of Bologne is considered the first, the oldest continually operating university. Elsewhere during the Middle Ages, Islamic science and mathematics flourished under the Islamic caliphate, established across the Middle East, extending from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Indus in the east and to the Almoravid Dynasty and Mali Empire in the south.
The Renaissance in Europe ushered in a new age of scientific and intellectual inquiry and appreciation of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press, which allowed works of literature to spread more quickly; the European Age of Empires saw European ideas of education in philosophy, religion and sciences spread out across the globe. Missionaries and scholars brought back new ideas from other civilizations – as with the Jesuit China missions who played a significant role in the transmission of knowledge and culture between China and Europe, translating works from Europe like Euclid's Elements for Chinese scholars and the thoughts of Confucius for European audiences; the Enlightenment saw the emergence of a more secular educational outlook in Europe. In most countries today, full-time education, whether at school or otherwise, is compulsory for all children up to a certain age. Due to this the proliferation of compulsory education, combined with population growth, UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years more people will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far.
Formal education occurs in a structured environment. Formal education takes place in a school environme
Cultural assimilation
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble those of a dominant group. The term is used to refer to both groups. Cultural assimilation may involve either a quick or a gradual change depending on circumstances of the group. Full assimilation occurs when members of a society become indistinguishable from those of the dominant group. Whether it is desirable for a given group to assimilate is disputed by both members of the group and those of the dominant society. Cultural assimilation does not guarantee social alikeness. Geographical and other natural barriers between cultures if created by the dominant culture, may be culturally different. A place, state, or ethnicity can spontaneously adopt a different culture because of its political relevance or its perceived cultural superiority. An example is the Latin language and Roman culture being adopted by most of the people subjugated by Ancient Rome. Cultural assimilation can happen either spontaneously or forcibly.
A culture can spontaneously adopt a different culture. Older, richer, or otherwise more dominant cultures can forcibly absorb subordinate cultures; the term “assimilation” is used with regard to not only indigenous groups but immigrants settled in a new land. A new culture and new attitudes toward the origin culture are obtained through contact and communication. Assimilation assumes; that process happens by accommodation between each culture. The current definition of assimilation is used to refer to immigrants, but in multiculturalism, cultural assimilation can happen all over the world and within varying social contexts and is not limited to specific areas. For example, a shared language gives people the chance to study and work internationally, without being limited to the same cultural group. People from different countries contribute to diversity and form the "global culture" which means the culture combined by the elements from different countries; that "global culture" can be seen as a part of assimilation, which causes cultures from different areas to affect one another.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the Canadian government began a campaign to forcibly assimilate Aboriginals. The government consolidated power over Aboriginal land through treaties and the use of force isolating indigenous people to reserves. Marriage practices and spiritual ceremonies were banned, spiritual leaders were imprisoned. Additionally, the Canadian government instituted an extensive residential school system to assimilate children; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that this effort was violent enough to amount to cultural genocide. The schools worked to alienate children from their cultural roots. Students were prohibited from speaking their native languages, were abused, were arranged marriages by the government after their graduation; the explicit goal of the Canadian government was to assimilate the Aboriginals into European culture and destroy all traces of their native history. In January 2019, newly elected Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro has stripped the indigenous affairs agency FUNAI of the responsibility to identify and demarcate indigenous lands.
He argued that those territories have tiny isolated populations and proposed to integrate them into the larger Brazilian society. According to the Survival International, "Taking responsibility for indigenous land demarcation away from FUNAI, the Indian affairs department, giving it to the Agriculture Ministry is a declaration of open warfare against Brazil’s tribal peoples." Immigrant assimilation is a complex process in which immigrants not only integrate themselves into a new country but lose aspects even all of their heritage. Social scientists rely on four primary benchmarks to assess immigrant assimilation: socioeconomic status, geographic distribution, second language attainment, intermarriage. William A. V. Clark defines immigrant assimilation as "a way of understanding the social dynamics of American society and that it is the process that occurs spontaneously and unintended in the course of interaction between majority and minority groups." Between 1880 and 1920, the United States took in 24 million immigrants.
This increase in immigration can be attributed to many historical changes. The beginning of the 21st century has marked a massive era of immigration, sociologists are once again trying to make sense of the impacts that immigration has on society and on the immigrants themselves. Assimilation had various meanings in American sociology. Henry Pratt Fairchild associates American assimilation with Americanization or the melting pot theory; some scholars believed that assimilation and acculturation were synonymous. According to a common point of view, assimilation is a "process of interpretation and fusion" from another group or person; that may include memories and sentiments. By sharing their experiences and histories, they blend into the common cultural life; the long history of immigration in the established gateways means that the place of immigrants in terms of class and ethnic hierarchies in the traditional gateways is more structured or established, but on the other hand, the new gateways do not have much immigration history and so the place of immigrants in terms of class and ethnic hierarchies is less defined, immigrants may have more
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Elite
In political and sociological theory, the elite are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, political power, or skill in a society. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "those people or organizations that are considered the best or most powerful compared to others of a similar type." American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of the "elite" in his 1957 book The Power Elite as "those political and military circles, which as an intricate set of overlapping small but dominant groups share decisions having at least national consequences. Insofar as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them". Mills states that the power elite members recognize other members' mutual exalted position in society. "As a rule,'they accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work, to think, if not together at least alike'." "It is a well-regulated existence. Youthful upper-class members attend prominent preparatory schools, which not only open doors to such elite universities as Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, but to the universities' exclusive clubs.
These memberships in turn pave the way to the prominent social clubs located in all major cities and serving as sites for important business contacts". According to Mills, men receive the education necessary for elitist privilege to obtain their background and contacts, allowing them to enter three branches of the power elite, which are; the Military Circle: In Mills' time a heightened concern about warfare existed, making top military leaders and such issues as defense funding and personnel recruitment important. Most prominent corporate leaders and politicians were strong proponents of military spending; the Corporate Elite: According to Mills, in the 1950s when the military emphasis was pronounced, it was corporate leaders working with prominent military officers who dominated the development of policies. These two groups tended to be mutually supportive. According to Mills, the governing elite in the United States draws its members from political leaders, including the president, a handful of key cabinet members, as well as close advisers, major corporate owners and directors, high-ranking military officers.
These groups overlap and elites tend to circulate from one sector to another, consolidating power in the process. Unlike the ruling class, a social formation based on heritage and social ties, the power elite is characterized by the organizational structures through which its wealth is acquired. According to Mills, the power elite rose from "the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich". Domhoff further clarified the differences in the two terms: "The upper class as a whole does not do the ruling. Instead, class rule is manifested through the activities of a wide variety of organizations and institutions... Leaders within the upper class join with high-level employees in the organizations they control to make up what will be called the power elite"; the Marxist theoretician Nikolai Bukharin anticipated the elite theory in his 1929 work and World Economy: "present-day state power is nothing but an entrepreneurs' company of tremendous power, headed by the same persons that occupy the leading positions in the banking and syndicate offices".
The power elite is a term used by American sociologist C. Wright Mills to describe a small, loosely connected group of individuals who dominate American policy making; this group includes bureaucratic, intellectual, military and government elites who control the principal institutions in the United States and whose opinions and actions influence the decisions of the policymakers. The basis for membership of a power elite is institutional power, namely an influential position within a prominent private or public organization. A study of the French corporate elite has shown that social class continues to hold sway in determining who joins this elite group, with those from the upper-middle class tending to dominate. Another study of power elites in the United States under President George W. Bush identified 7,314 institutional positions of power encompassing 5,778 individuals. A study of U. S. society noted demographic characteristics of this elite group as follows: Age Corporate leaders aged about 60.
Gender Men contribute 80% in the political realm whereas women contribute only 20% in the political realm. In the economic denomination, as of October 2017, only 32 of the fortune 500 CEOs are women. Ethnicity White Anglo-Saxons dominate in the power elite, with Protestants representing about 80% of the top business leaders, about 73% of members of Congress; as of October 2017, only 4 of the fortune 500 CEOs are African American. In low proportions, as of October 2017, 10 of the fortune 500 CEOs are Latino, 2% are Asian. Education Nearly all the leaders have a college education, with half graduating with advanced degrees. About 54% of the big-business leaders, 42% of the government elite graduated from just 12 prestigious universities with large endowments. Social clubs Most holders of top positions in the power elite possess exclusive membership to one or more social clubs. About a third belong to a small number of prestigious
Propaganda
Propaganda is information, not objective and is used to influence an audience and further an agenda by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information, presented. Propaganda is associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, religious organizations and the media can produce propaganda. In the twentieth century, the term propaganda has been associated with a manipulative approach, but propaganda was a neutral descriptive term. A wide range of materials and media are used for conveying propaganda messages, which changed as new technologies were invented, including paintings, posters, films, radio shows, TV shows, websites. More the digital age has given rise to new ways of disseminating propaganda, for example, through the use of bots and algorithms to create computational propaganda and spread fake or biased news using social media. In a 1929 literary debate with Edward Bernays, Everett Dean Martin argues that, "Propaganda is making puppets of us.
We are moved by hidden strings which the propagandist manipulates." Propaganda is a modern Latin word, the gerundive form of propagare, meaning to spread or to propagate, thus propaganda means that, to be propagated. This word derived from a new administrative body of the Catholic church created in 1622 as part of the Counter-Reformation, called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or informally Propaganda, its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries. From the 1790s, the term began being used to refer to propaganda in secular activities; the term began taking a pejorative or negative connotation in the mid-19th century, when it was used in the political sphere. Primitive forms of propaganda have been a human activity as far back as reliable recorded evidence exists; the Behistun Inscription detailing the rise of Darius I to the Persian throne is viewed by most historians as an early example of propaganda. Another striking example of propaganda during Ancient History is the last Roman civil wars during which Octavian and Mark Antony blame each other for obscure and degrading origins, cowardice and literary incompetence, luxury and other slanders.
This defamation took the form of uituperatio, decisive for shaping the Roman public opinion at this time. Propaganda during the Reformation, helped by the spread of the printing press throughout Europe, in particular within Germany, caused new ideas and doctrine to be made available to the public in ways that had never been seen before the 16th century. During the era of the American Revolution, the American colonies had a flourishing network of newspapers and printers who specialized in the topic on behalf of the Patriots; the first large-scale and organised propagation of government propaganda was occasioned by the outbreak of war in 1914. After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, military officials such as Erich Ludendorff suggested that British propaganda had been instrumental in their defeat. Adolf Hitler came to echo this view, believing that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and the revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918. In Mein Kampf Hitler expounded his theory of propaganda, which provided a powerful base for his rise to power in 1933.
Historian Robert Ensor explains. Most propaganda in Nazi Germany was produced by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. World War II saw continued use of propaganda as a weapon of war, building on the experience of WWI, by Goebbels and the British Political Warfare Executive, as well as the United States Office of War Information. In the early 20th century, the invention of motion pictures gave propaganda-creators a powerful tool for advancing political and military interests when it came to reaching a broad segment of the population and creating consent or encouraging rejection of the real or imagined enemy. In the years following the October Revolution of 1917, the Soviet government sponsored the Russian film industry with the purpose of making propaganda films In WWII, Nazi filmmakers produced emotional films to create popular support for occupying the Sudetenland and attacking Poland; the 1930s and 1940s, which saw the rise of totalitarian states and the Second World War, are arguably the "Golden Age of Propaganda".
Leni Riefenstahl, a filmmaker working in Nazi Germany, created one of the best-known propaganda movies, Triumph of the Will. In the US, animation became popular for winning over youthful audiences and aiding the U. S. war effort, e.g. Der Fuehrer's Face, which ridicules Hitler and advocates the value of freedom. US war films in the early 1940s were designed to create a patriotic mindset and convince viewers that sacrifices needed to be made to defeat the Axis Powers. Polish filmmakers in Great Britain created anti-nazi color film Calling mr. Smith about current nazi crimes in occupied Europe and about lies of nazi propaganda; the West and the Soviet Union both used propaganda extensively during the Cold War. Both sides used film, and
Civilizing mission
The mission civilisatrice was a rationale for intervention or colonization, purporting to contribute to the spread of civilization, used in relation to the Westernization of indigenous peoples in the 15th – 20th centuries. It was notably the underlying principle of French and Portuguese colonial rule in the late 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and early and mid 20th centuries, it was influential in the French colonies of Algeria, French West Africa, Indochina, in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea and Timor. The European colonial powers felt it was their duty to bring Western civilization to what they perceived as backward peoples. Rather than govern colonial peoples, the Europeans would attempt to Westernize them in accordance with a colonial ideology known as "assimilation"; the intellectual origins of the mission civilisatrice can be traced back the Christian tradition dating from the Middle Ages. European thinkers had naturalized social change by using the development metaphor. In the eighteenth century, history came to be seen as a unilinear, inevitable process of social evolutionism with the European nations running ahead.
Colonialists saw the "backward" nations as intrinsically incapable. "Progressive" thinkers like the Marquis de Condorcet postulated a holy duty to help those peoples "which, to civilize themselves, wait only to receive the means from us, to find brothers among Europeans and to become their friends and disciples". Evolutionist views survived colonialism. Modernization theorists declared that traditional customs had to be destroyed, traditional societies had to adapt or to disappear. Development criticism sees development therefore as continuation of the colonial civilizing mission. To become civilized has always meant to become "like us", therefore "Civilizing" now meant that in the long run all societies had to become consumer societies and renounce their native traditions and habits. An early champion of this idea was French Republican political leader Jules Ferry. Equal rights and citizenship were extended to those peoples who adopted French culture, including primary use of the French language in their lives, wearing Western clothes, conversion to Christianity.
Despite granting French citizenship to the residents of the "Four Communes", most West Africans did not adopt French culture or Christianity. After World War I, "association" replaced assimilation as the fundamental tenet of the colonial relationships, it was thought that French culture might exist in association with indigenous societies and that these autonomous colonies might associate with France in the French Union. After consolidating its territory in the 13th century through a Reconquista of the Muslim states of Western Iberia, the Kingdom of Portugal started to expand overseas. In 1415, Islamic Ceuta was occupied by the Portuguese during the reign of John I of Portugal. Portuguese expansion in North Africa was the beginning of a larger process known as the Portuguese Overseas Expansion, under which the Kingdom's goals included the expansion of Christianity into Muslim lands and the desire of nobility for epic acts of war and conquest with the support of the Pope; as the Portuguese extended their influence around the coast to Mauritania and Guinea, they created trading posts.
Rather than become direct competitors to the Muslim merchants, they used expanding market opportunities in Europe and the Mediterranean to increase trade across the Sahara. In addition, Portuguese merchants gained access to the African interior via the Senegal and Gambia rivers, which crossed long-standing trans-Saharan routes; the Portuguese brought in copper ware, tools and horses. Trade goods soon included arms and ammunition. In exchange, the Portuguese received gold and ivory, it was not until they reached the Kongo coast in the 1480s that they moved beyond Muslim trading territory in Africa. Forts and trading posts were established along the coast. Portuguese sailors, cartographers and soldiers had the task of taking over the coastal areas and building churches and factories, as well as exploring unknown land and sea. A Company of Guinea was founded as a Portuguese governmental institution to control the trade, called Casa da Guiné or Casa da Guiné e Mina from 1482 to 1483, Casa da Índia e da Guiné in 1499.
The first of the major European trading forts, was founded on the Gold Coast in 1482 by the Portuguese. Elmina Castle was modelled on the Castelo de São Jorge, one of the earliest royal residences in Lisbon. Elmina, which means "the port", became a major trading centre. By the beginning of the colonial era there were forty such forts operating along the coast. Rather than being icons of colonial domination, the forts acted as trading posts—they saw military action—the fortifications were important, when arms and ammunition were being stored prior to trade; the 15th-century Portuguese exploration of the African coast, is regarded as the harbinger of European colonialism, marked the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade, Christian missionary evangelization and the first globalization processes which were to become a major element of the European colonialism until the end of the 18th century. Although the Portuguese Empire's policy regarding native peoples in the less technologically advanced places around the world had always been devoted to enculturation, including teaching and evangelization of the indigenous populations, as well as the creation
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most-populous continent, being behind Asia in both categories. At about 30.3 million km2 including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area. With 1.2 billion people as of 2016, it accounts for about 16% of the world's human population. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west; the continent includes various archipelagos. It contains 54 recognised sovereign states, nine territories and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition; the majority of the continent and its countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, with a substantial portion and number of countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Africa's average population is the youngest amongst all the continents. Algeria is Africa's largest country by area, Nigeria is its largest by population. Africa central Eastern Africa, is accepted as the place of origin of humans and the Hominidae clade, as evidenced by the discovery of the earliest hominids and their ancestors as well as ones that have been dated to around 7 million years ago, including Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Australopithecus africanus, A. afarensis, Homo erectus, H. habilis and H. ergaster—the earliest Homo sapiens, found in Ethiopia, date to circa 200,000 years ago.
Africa encompasses numerous climate areas. Africa hosts a large diversity of ethnicities and languages. In the late 19th century, European countries colonised all of Africa. African nations cooperate through the establishment of the African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa. Afri was a Latin name used to refer to the inhabitants of then-known northern Africa to the west of the Nile river, in its widest sense referred to all lands south of the Mediterranean; this name seems to have referred to a native Libyan tribe, an ancestor of modern Berbers. The name had been connected with the Phoenician word ʿafar meaning "dust", but a 1981 hypothesis has asserted that it stems from the Berber word ifri meaning "cave", in reference to cave dwellers; the same word may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe from Yafran in northwestern Libya. Under Roman rule, Carthage became the capital of the province it named Africa Proconsularis, following its defeat of the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War in 146 BC, which included the coastal part of modern Libya.
The Latin suffix -ica can sometimes be used to denote a land. The Muslim region of Ifriqiya, following its conquest of the Byzantine Empire's Exarchatus Africae preserved a form of the name. According to the Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy, indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa; as Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of "Africa" expanded with their knowledge. Other etymological hypotheses have been postulated for the ancient name "Africa": The 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus asserted that it was named for Epher, grandson of Abraham according to Gen. 25:4, whose descendants, he claimed, had invaded Libya. Isidore of Seville in his 7th-century Etymologiae XIV.5.2. Suggests "Africa comes from the Latin aprica, meaning "sunny".
Massey, in 1881, stated that Africa is derived from the Egyptian af-rui-ka, meaning "to turn toward the opening of the Ka." The Ka is the energetic double of every person and the "opening of the Ka" refers to a womb or birthplace. Africa would be, for the Egyptians, "the birthplace." Michèle Fruyt in 1976 proposed linking the Latin word with africus "south wind", which would be of Umbrian origin and mean "rainy wind". Robert R. Stieglitz of Rutgers University in 1984 proposed: "The name Africa, derived from the Latin *Aphir-ic-a, is cognate to Hebrew Ophir." Ibn Khallikan and some other historians claim that the name of Africa came from a Himyarite king called Afrikin ibn Kais ibn Saifi called "Afrikus son of Abrahah" who subdued Ifriqiya. Africa is considered by most paleoanthropologists to be the oldest inhabited territory on Earth, with the human species originating from the continent. During the mid-20th century, anthropologists discovered many fossils and evidence of human occupation as early as 7 million years ago.
Fossil remains of several species of early apelike humans thought to have evolved into modern man, such as Australopithecus afarensis (radiometrically dated to 3.9–3.0 million years BP, Paranthropus boisei and Homo ergaster have been discovered. After the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens 150,000 to 100,000 years BP in Africa, the continent was populated by groups of hunter-gatherers; these first modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the globe during the Out of Africa II migration dated to 50,000 years BP, exiting the continent eith
