Why didn't Africa conquer Europe
Ross, I take it that you meant why sub-sahara Africa did not conquer Europe . . . since folks in North Africa came pretty close to conquering Europe, at least twice: Hannibal (now, try to make an argument that he was not intelligent :-) in 200+BC nearly crushing the Roman Republic, Moorish Caliphate in 800AD occupying Spain and southern France. Both were very close-run things that could have turned history as we know it quite differently.
Now, assuming you ment sub-sahara Africa . . . well, the most obvious answer was that the Sahara Desert got in the way. The Europeans did not conquer subsahara Africa until the 19th century. Even at the end of 19th century . . . that's merely 100 years ago, out of a human history of at least 5000 years, the Italian army was still defeated by the Ethiopian army.
Sub-sahara Africans were exploited by slavers long before the Europeans came along. North African Arabs were big on the slave abduction trade . . . in a process not unlike the (southern) Romans used to do to Northern Europeans north of the Danube-Rhine line . . . yes, blond-hair blue-eyed "Germans" used to be targetted for slavery by the relatively dark-skinned Romans. I doubt either of us would suggest that the Germans were less intelligent. The Romans were simply better organized, thanks to mediterrenean free trade, and a superior transportation technology called boats, that transported grain from Egypt and the Black Sea to feed armies on the German frontier. It was easier for Romans to get grain from modern day Ukraine than it was for the German tribes to do the same; that's how import mediterrenean boat-based trade was.
In terms of pre-industrial civlization development, Sub-sahara Africa suffered from a major handicap compared to Europe, middleast and Asia: the latter had steppe horses that were relatively easily tamed (not to mention much smaller in the wild before domestication about 3-5000 years ago), whereas the zebra, wildebeast and African bison are much more ferocious and dangerous animals. Draft animals made farming and communication a lot more efficient than having to pull the plough and carry everything on the men and women's backs/heads. That, in pre-industrial economy, meant higher population density in urban area: higher land productivity and food import from trade allow cities to emerge. Cities and the market place further accelearated economic development. Europe was quite a miserable place in the dark ages, after Rome fell and before the re-emergence of cities in the 10th centry. Now think of a place where there was no horse, very little inland trade, hence hardly any cities at all except for the coastal settlements where boats could move things around. BTW, Africa also had much much less coast line than Europe, despite the continent itself being several times bigger.
Before trade and city building was a factor in human history, it seems that if the dominant theory of human origin being from East Africa is correct, the ancestors of Blacks were much more successful hunters than ancestors of Whites and Asians . . . hunters of fellow human beings using nothing more than sticks and stones: since it was the ancestors of Blacks who threw out the ancestors of Whites and Asians from Africa. It must have been a tremendously dangerous undertaking to trek out of Africa to escape the pursuit of the "dominant race," the Black chiefs who held onto the home range.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
