In eastern Africa the valley divides into two, the Eastern Rift and the Western
Rift. The Gulf of Aden is an eastward continuation of the rift - before the
rift opened, the Arabian Peninsula was attached to the Horn of Africa - and
from this point the rift continues as part of the Mid-oceanic ridge of the
Indian Ocean. In a southwest direction the fault continues as the Great
Rift Valley, which split the
older Ethiopian highlands into two halves. The great rift system (GRV)
extends from Lebanon in the north to Mozambique in the south, to the south
through the Jordan Valley into the Dead Sea on the Israeli-Jordanian border.
The southern end of the Red Sea marks a fork in the rift. The Afar Triangle
or Danakil Depression of Ethiopia and Eritrea is the probable location of
a triple junction which is possibly underlain by a mantle plume.
The Capsians' diet included a wide variety of animals - many no longer present
in the area - ranging from aurochs and hartebeests to hares and snails; there
is little evidence on what plants they ate. As the lakes in the Eastern Rift
have no outlet to the sea, these lakes tend to be shallow and have a high
mineral content as the evaporation of water leaves the salts behind.
The Neolithic Capsian culture appeared in North Africa around 9,500 B.C.
and lasted until possibly 2700
BC. Between about 9000 and 5000 B.C., the Capsian culture began influencing
the Ibero-Maurusian, and after about 3000 B.C. the remains of just one human
type can be found throughout the region. In Central North Africa, the cave
paintings found at Tassili-n-Ajjer, north of Tamanrasset, Algeria, and at
other locations depict vibrant and vivid scenes of everyday life in the central
Maghrib between about 8000 B.C. and 4000 B.C. The time of the Pharaohs stretches
from before 3000 B.C. to about 30 BC.
Proto-Afroasiatic was the language spoken by the Epi-Paleolithic (i.e. mesolithic)
Natufian culture of Palestine and Syria. The Natufians themselves had already
begun deliberate cultivation of cereals, hunted gazelles as well as harvesting
wild grasses, with a high rate of child mortality. The earliest sites, in
Palestine, have been dated to 10,900 BCE and the culture continued to 7,800
BCE, during which it metamorphosed, between 8,500 and 8,000 BCE into the first
fully blown agricultural neolithic Pre-Pottery A culture, for the use of wheat,
barley and legumes from carbonized seeds found throughout the Levant. Proto-Afro-Asiatic
is supposed to be the parental language from which modern Afro-Asiatic languages
(Northeastern Sahara) are culturally descended. The difference between Chadic,
Omotic, Cushitic and Semitic, were wider than that seen between any members
of the Indo-European family and as wide as some of the differences seen within
and between separate language families, for example, Indo-European and Altaic.
Groupings of the Eurasiatic macrofamily are Eskimo-Aleut is moreover spoken
across the subArctic region from northeast Asia
to Greenland, and the Uralic languages are also spoken westward as far
as into Scandinavia
and Hungary. Personal pronouns are thought by many to be seldom borrowed
between languages.
The Capsian period of the Neolithic age who lived in a savanna region teeming
with giant buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, animals that no
longer exist in the now-desert area. Neolithic civilization (marked by animal
domestication and subsistence agriculture) developed in the Saharan and Mediterranean
Maghrib between 6000 and 2000 B.C. This type of economy, so richly depicted
in the Tassili-n-Ajjer cave paintings, predominated in the Maghrib until the
classical period.
2100 B.C. and 2000 B.C. is sometimes called the 3rd dynasty of Ur or Sumerian
Renaissance, founded by Ur-Nammu.
The Eburran culture of the 13th-8th millennia B.C. in Kenya is also termed
the Kenya Capsian, due to
similarities in the stone blade shapes; whether this culture is to be linked
with the North African Capsian culture. During this period, the area's climate
was open savannah, much like modern East Africa, with Mediterranean forests
at higher altitudes. Geographically, Egypt
and Sudan are sometimes included in this region of the elephant, water
buffalo, lion, leopard and rhinoceros with the Indian Ocean running along
the southeast border.
1,
2, 3, 4,
5, 6,
7, 8,
9,