Leaving the controversies aside, iron and copper metallurgy were clearly well established in West Africa by 500 BC with gold, bronze, and brass following in the mid-first millennium AD. The earliest appearance of metallurgy in East Africa dates to the closing centuries of the last millennium BC. In southern Africa, the southward migration of Bantu-speaking farmers introduced iron and copper around AD200, with gold, tin, bronze, and brass appearing towards the beginning of the second millennium.

catso: I can see this action as the beginning of the end.

nnamdibig: violated school policy by reading the Bible in school.

In West Africa, there is very little evidence for people south of the Sahara prior to the mid-Holocene, and such evidence as does exist is primarily of small scattered groups of mobile hunter-gatherers, some of whom returned frequently, possibly even seasonally, to the same places.

Davies(1967) and Shaw (1978) both argued that before the desiccation of the Sahara, not only were Saharan inhabitants not compelled to move southward, but it was virtually impossible for them to do so. Postulated barriers to human occupation in southern West Africa include the difficulty of making a living in the dense rainforest prior to the advent of iron tools, and potentially lethal diseases such as malaria, onchocerciasis, and trypanosomiasis, the latter an added problem to herders because it can be devastating to cattle (Smith 1992). Only when climate zones contracted could people, and especially herders, move south.

The artefacts found at many early sites support a northern origin for SMA people in southern West Africa. Projectile points are often in a 'Saharan Style' with concave or convex bases, and pottery often bears comb and roulette impressions very similar to types known from the Sahara and the Nile Valley as early as the tenth millennium B.P.

Ayomivic: Don't ever believe in men or trust men, believe in God,trust God, believe in scripture and trust yourself.

ChinenyeN:
As for firearms, there is plenty of historical evidence that shows West Africans to have actively engaged in the production of firearms after it was introduced by Europeans. There are a number of local communities even today that are still known to manufacture and not import firearms.

PAGAN 9JA:
[size=18pt]BAN FOREIGN RELIGION.

PROBLEM SOLVED!


THE CHANGE CAN ONLY START IF THE MORE LIBERAL SOUTH SETS AN EXAMPLE FIRST.

THERE IS ALREADY A MOVEMENT ERUPTING IN PARTS OF SOUTH-WEST, BUT THIS IS NOT ENOUGH..[/size]

macof: that's nice, The whole world would be pagan again

European Congress of Ethnic Religions!
Των Εθνικών Ευρωπαϊκή Εκκλησία!

The purpose of the ECER is to serve as an international body that will assist Ethnic Religious groups in various countries and will oppose discrimination against such groups.

By Ethnic Religion, we mean religion, spirituality, and cosmology that is firmly grounded in a particular people’s traditions. In our view, this does not include modern occult or ariosophic theories/ideologies, nor syncretic neo-religions.

alnaijiri: God-willing, Nairaland will rise again, and will be used to spread Islam throughout Nigeria and all of Africa, and bring justice to the oppressed Muslims everywhere.

SAY NO TO THE EVIL THAT IS PAGANISM!

Both the lexical and morphological correspondences have left no doubt that the Meroitic language shares an origin with Nilo-Saharan Group of North Eastern Sudanic.

These lexical elements direct the Urheimat toward the Sahel region rather than the Nile. The geographic distribution of the NES languages follows the same idea. Out of the three branches of North Eastern Sudanic, Taman and Nyima are the last to split off and are found in the Darfur-Kordofan region. If the principle of least movement is followed, this would also be the area of origin for the Nubians. It is likely that here proto-NES first appeared.

The movements of the Proto-Nubians, the third group of the Eastern branch, are more difficult to reconstruct. As argued elsewhere (Rilly 2008), it is not plausible that they ever reached the Nile prior to the end of the Meroitic Kingdom in the third century AD. On the other hand, the chronology of phonetics changes in the Nubian languages indicates that the split in the Nubian groups did not occur much prior to this date. The proximity of proto-Nubian and Meroitic , despite two millennia of separation, and Meroitic's conservative character in relation to proto-NES are such that they presuppose a relatively isolated position during a long period. The phonology of proto-Nubian, for instance, was not affected by influences that changed Meroitic or Nyimang phonology. It is likely that the Proto-Nubians were nomads wandering between still hospitable zones until the first millennium BC. Some portion of the middle part of Wadi Howar or the valley of Gebel Tageru may have served that purpose.

"Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study. Thus, by modern American standards it is reasonable to characterize the Egyptians as "blacks", while acknowledging the scientific evidence for the physical diversity of Africans.” - Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (2001)

The first expansion of Niger-Congo peoples appears to have stretched from as far east as the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, where proto-Kordofanian would have been spoken, to as far west as Mali, anciently the territory of the Mande and Atlantic-Congo branches. Just how long ago this period of expansion took place remains unknown.

The ceramic technology of these peoples directs the attention of historians to a very important story for world history—namely, the global primacy of sub-Saharan Africans in the invention of ceramic technology. Pottery making was already a fully established and not at all incipient technology in the archaeology of the southern half of the eastern Sahara by 8500 BCE, as early as the claimed dates for pottery in Japan. But Saharan pottery making was not even the first ceramic technology in Africa. The earliest known pottery in all of human history comes from West Africa, from the modern-day country of Mali, and dates to the centuries 10,000–9500 BCE. The archaeology of the makers of this pottery belongs to the West African Micro-lithic Complex,39 a set of archaeological traditions everywhere associated with peoples speaking languages of a third African family, Niger-Congo. For historians the question still to be answered is, did ceramic technology among nilo-saharan speakers in the eastern and other parts of the sahara diffuse to them a thousand or more years later from far-away West Africa, or were these two separate and independent African developments of this key early technology?

A second, but still early and important stage in Niger-Congo history was the proto-Mande-Congo era. At this period, or so it appears from the evidence of word histories, the cultivation of Guinea Yam and possibly other crops, such as the oil palm, began among at least the peoples of the Atlantic and Ijo-Congo branches of the family (Williamson 1993 proposes the early words for these crops; Greenberg 1964 identifies an Atlantic and Ijo-Congo verb for cultivation,*-lim-). Between possibly about 8000 and 6000 BC, these peoples spread across the woodland savannas of West Africa, the natural environment of the Guinea yams. At that time, woodland savanna environments extended several hundred kilometers farther north into the Sudan belt than they do today. (Edit:Green Sahara period)

For whatever reason, West Africa was only populated extremely sparsely until the end of the Pleistocene, some 12,000 years ago (Muzzolini 1993).

One feature of the Niger-Congo region is the virtual absence of residual languages. What languages the MSA hunter-gatherers spoke must remain unknown. Only in Southern Africa, where the expanding Bantu-speakers encountered the Khoesan, does a real mosaic of farmers and hunter-gatherers still exist. But within much of the core Niger-Congo area, only Jalaa in Nigeria and Laal in Chad (see Table 8.1 and Map 8.1) seem to be true remnants of an earlier diversity that must have characterised the continent. These fragments both hint at a more ancient stratum of hunting-gathering populations in West Africa, present at the time of the Niger-Congo expansion but almost completely absorbed by them. Niger-Congo must have expanded and assimilated all the resident groups and must therefore have had highly convincing technological or societal tools to bring this about.

Agricultural Invention: West African Planting Agriculture, 9000-5500 BCE

To the south of the Sahara, African peoples found other innovative ways to respond to climatic shifts that emerged by 11,000 BCE. None of these at first entailed the adoption of agriculture but were instead approaches that enhanced the productivity of the wild environment.

In West Africa a variety of consequences was set in motion by the increased rainfall between 11,500 and 8000 BCE. All across a 300- to 400-kilometer-side zone extending inland from the Atlantic coast, from Senegambia in the west to Cameroon in the east, woodland savanna was replaced by expanding rainforests. In Cameroon the spread of the West African forest zone connected up with the newly expanding equatorial rainforest of central Africa. The woodland savanna belt shifted nortward into the previously open savanna areas of the southern Djouf Basin. In addition, stream flow increased, and more rivers than before ran year round.

The shift to still wetter climate in West Africa during and after the ninth millennium BCE had different effects in different areas. Increased river flow enhanced the possibilities for fishing, and the nortward advance of woodland savanna opened up new areas favorable to yams. At the same time, however, many areas nearer the coast that were previously covered by moist woodland savanna began to be swallowed up by the expanding rainforest, in which there was too little direct sunlight to support the particular yam species favored by the Niger-Congo peoples.

But it was also the period in West African history in which a new African agriculture was invented. We do not know yet when some of the Niger-Congo communities commenced the shift to deliberate cultivation of yams, not exactly where. The most probably answer is that the changeover began sometime around 8000 BCE and that the locales of the first yam agriculture lay in the intermediate parts of the West African woodland savana zone -in areas where the abundance of wild yams had declined with the spread of woodland conditions, but where a farmer's efforts in preparing the ground and planting and protecting the growing plants could effectivly reverse that decline.

We can this new and independent invention "West African planting agriculture," from the fact that the farmers reproduced their staple (most important) crops, the different types of West African yam, not by sowing seed, but by planting a part of the yam itself back in the ground. These early West African farmers by no means restricted their agricultural experimentation, however, to just yams. They domesticated one animal, the guineafowl, at probably an early stage in their development of food production. From an early period they also tended to two tree crops, the oil palm and the raffia palm. The oil palm provided cooking oil for its nuts as well as palm wine from its sap; the raffia palm was another source of palm wine, and by the fourth or third millennium BCE its fibers and become highly valued by West Africans for the weaving of raffia cloth. In the woodland savannas of modern-day Nigeria and Cameroon. Niger-Congo communities brought under cultivation two major food plants grown from seed, black-eyes peas and voandzeia (and African groundnut), probably as early as the sixth and fifth millennia. Okra was still another quite early crop of Niger-Congo farmers, while the kola nut, a tree crop of the West African rainforest, became important later, in the last 3000 years BCE. The inventors of this agriculture, by the way, were women, who in pre-agricultural eras and borne the chief responsibility for collecting of wild yams and other wild plant foods.

Gradually an important new development in technology took hold along with the new economy. Niger-Congo peoples began to make polished stone axes, in this way becoming able to effectively clear patches of woodlands and grow their sunlight-requiring yams and oil palms in more and more areas.

Uyi Iredia: ^^^That's one way of looking at it. But the same applies to paganism eg Akhenaten's worship of Ra. And there is another side you don't consider: that pagan elements_Roman paganism_were infused in Christianity to make the Catholic church. The same happened to the Catholic church in Brazil but this time various elements of African traditional worship were in infused especially Ifa religions. Islam acknowledges certain aspects of Christianity especially its monotheistic nature and the acknowledgment of prophets in the Bible. Need I elaborate how Judaism became Christianity. Even further back I strongly suspect based on hints from different sources that Judaism and Christianity sttongly draw from pagan religion especially ancient Egyptian worship eg the word Amen is said to be derived from the Egyptian word Amun which denotes the hidden creative force responsible for the origin of the Egyptian gods and reality by extension.