Africa – a place of innovation

The African continent holds stories of innovation by our firsthuman ancestors. Tanzania has evidence of major innovationincluding: the first upright walking, experiments with some of the first stone tools, first musical instrument -Malimba and the world’s oldest...

Species without boundaries: a new way to map our origins

The evolutionary tree may not be this simple. shutterstock Francis Thackeray, University of the Witwatersrand More than 145 years ago, Charles Darwin argued that Africa was the continent from which humans evolved in prehistory. We now know he was right. We have the...

How I reconstructed an unwritten ancient African language

Hausa is the most widely known Chadic language, spoken by some 80 million people or more. It’s harder to grasp the history of other, unwritten Chadic languages. Irene Becker/Contributor/Getty Images H. Ekkehard Wolff, University of Leipzig Africa is humankind’s home...