Could you list them? I didn’t see any.
This is a lie. Otherwise, show evidence. Besides, there were cities in NG as well, and advanced culture like Austronesians.
Irrelevant point. New Guineans of the upper mountains were also agricultural societies. Even more, they invented agriculture independently and earlier than other peoples.
Cheap retorical trick
Another retorical trick. Graphs and data means nothing. Come on. See the graph.
Show me the map of the spread of the Wheel, cities, monumental architecture, etc. And you are going to go back,as usual, to the limits and frontiers of Subsaharan Africa, where that region acquired those things from the external world.
New Guinea also had posts of foreign influences and foreign people in the Island since centuries ago. They also had animals, that brought from the Austronesians, in the same way SS Africans brought theirs from the external world.
So, your point it is irrelavant.
The masses of SS Africa weren’t literate, didn’t live in large cities and had monumental bridges. Theirs standard of living hardly was better than most tribal peoples worldwide.
I bet Tarzan movies are more realistic than yourself. :rolleyes:
I believe Blake is referring to what is widely assumed to be the likely precursor culture of the Ghana Empire, not the modern country of Ghana. The stone buildings at Tichitt-Oulata have been dated back to ~1,600 B.C or older.
Well, that was largely true of Europeans in 1500 as well 
( the bridges excepted ). There are other cities you are missing like M’banza-Kongo, the later Sao Salvador which pre-dated European contact. The Portuguese who encountered it in 1491 compared it favorably to Evora, which may not sound like much now, but at the time Evora was the second city of Portugal and something of a cultural center. Or Musumba, the capital of the Lunda in the modern Katanga region. Or a few others. As you noted there were a fair number of exceptions to a lack of urbanization, particularly in the West African Sahel.
Much like your discussion of population on the Chinese in the Americas thread, I can sympathize with your resistance to overblown notions of the level of sophistication throughout pre-colonial Africa. But much like in that thread I think you are really overselling and veering too far towards the other extreme. New Guinea was overwhelmingly neolithic, whereas Africa ( a much, much larger place ) was not and boasted a plethora of considerably more advanced societies scattered throughout the continent in areas that favored such development ( and many areas simply did not, for whatever geographic reasons ). I just can’t see much of a comparison.
Most scholars would note that the indigenous tribal peoples of the Americas had a standard of living that was roughly equal to, (superior in a couple of points), than the Europeans that invaded these lands.
Afghanistan is “tribal” to this day, yet supported a civilization for several thousand years. Your use of the word “tribal” in this discussion is neither pertinent nor accurate.
Incas and Aztecs weren’t tribal societies but large states, and they had superb agriculture. I doubt Indigenous from the Amazon, the Great plains or Patagonia enjoyed the same standard of living.
What term would you use then, to describe people that live in small villages?
So, your conclusion is that SS Africa was an highly urbanized place, plenty of high technology?
If so, more merit for Guineans 
Why you insist in talking about Africa when we the topic is SS Africa? In any case, I open this thread to compare SS Africa with a relatively backwards place and analize how backwards societies can develop.
If Africa was so advanced, then, we shouldn’t compare to New Guinea, but instead let compare it with China, India, Japan, Korea, Britain or Germany, all peoples that had the supposedly African level of development when European arrived.
Nope :). Just that some areas had some urbanization and more advanced technology than what was standard in New Guinea.
I am, actually. The Sahel is certainly sub-Saharan, definitionally. “Africa” is just shorthand, like certain other posters are prone to use…
Bolding added ;).
At any rate, no we shouldn’t be comparing “Africa” to various states, because it is a huge, highly heterogenous continent rather than a country.
Of course sub-Saharan African states for the most part weren’t particularly competitive with Eurasian counterparts for any of a variety of oft-argued reasons ( one of which, the innate intelligence argument, I remain quite unconvinced about ). There were a few exceptions with areas with more regular contact with the outside world ( i.e. probably the Sahelian empires at their height relative to other states of equivalent size/population, some of the Ethiopian highland kingdoms ditto ), but very generally the meme of sub-Saharan African technological/military inferiority is correct.
But again, that’s a far cry from comparing, say, the Kongo kingdom to highland New Guineans.
I don’t argue about that. I know there were advanced places in SS Africa, particularly in those that trade in gold, salt and ivory in Medioeval times, but also along the East Coast of Africa and Zimbabwe.
The more rational explanation for SS Africa lagging behind the rest in the Old World is so simple, nobody mentions it: isolation. Just by watching the map of Eurasia it is easy to see that the trading routes were mainle east-west rather than north-south.
SS Africa was a very difficult place to cross and to survive, up to modern times, when medicine has controlled the diseases somehow. Diseases also explain the problem in building large cities, where a plage could erradicate everybody easier than if people lived spread in a larger area.
New Guineans had agriculture. Not too bad for such a downplayed society.
I don’t know if this list is exhaustive but I think I covered most of the bases here. And as a word to the wise, this “I was not paying attention, where was I wrong?” tactic gets old instantly. I wouldn’t use it more than once.
Then there are all the exceptions to your statements:
Just to show an example that I am not wrong
I said:
Two regions where civilization (culture of large urban cities) came late in history
I was contradicted with this:
No, simply not true. There were sizable cities in Ganha, for example, 3, 500 year ago.
Quote:
What are the cities of Ghana that existed 3,500 years ago? There was any. The city discovered in the desert was located in Mauritania, not Ghana.
Besides, I never said there weren’t some cities in SS Africa, particularly in the frontiers with the external world. But that wasn’t the reality of the larger extensions of the interior.
Another example is the following were agriculture is mentioned, forgetting that New Guinea has agriculture thousand of years before Africa.
In short, they were playing rethorical games, knowing that most the interior of Africa was backwords. But why that should be so bad? After all most of the world was in a similar stage up to recent centuries.
The mention of Nubian charriots is specially pathetic, knowing the technology came from the north, and that never spread to the interior of the continent, where writing, the wheel and many other techniques were unknown.
If you have to keep changing your statement like this - “OK, there were some cities and some large organizations, and some writing, and they did have the wheel in some places” - then your generalization is probably wrong. If your thesis was that Sub-Saharan Africa lagged and you have to exclude a bunch of places and developments to show how it lagged, then you probably can’t say it lagged as a whole.
This is where I came in earlier. They were not playing games, they were scrutinizing what you said. You’ve tried to rebut some of the counterarguments, but a lot of what you are doing at this point is criticizing your opponents (by saying they’re nitpicking or playing games) or insisting they should just accept your conclusion (and saying they know you’re right and won’t admit it). If you want to make a real argument, you can’t just assume the conclusion is true and go from there.
My point was simply that most people in Subsaharan Africa (South of the Sahara, please) lived in small villages and had a tribal lifestyle. And that is true, regardless the trading posts and cities that connected Africa with the external world. Africa was never fully isolated, it is true, but the interior of Africa lived in a very basic lifestyle, with iron weapons, but basic anyways.
In the interior of Africa you didn’t find the wheel at all. Why? Because horses didn’t survive there! (I saw it in a Jared Diamond film). You didn’t find paved routes or bridges to cross rivers. You didn’t find large cities of hundred of thousands like in other continents. And even when Africans had iron they didn’t have steel or machinery at all. What was there is a large number of tribes that lives independent lives. So what is the problem with it?
I await Mr. Dibble’s response to this with great anticipation. An blatantly incorrect assertion about metalworking and African history. And this is a blanket statement,They did not have steel at all. Notjust did not have it, they did not have it at all.
Should be good.
So they have chariots and they have the capacity to cut and move huge stone blocks. Yet they have no machinery.
Intriguing. :dubious: