The First People

It is said that all people in this world originated from Africa. So how did all these different races and nationalities come about? The skeletal remains of Homo erectus, the first up-right walking humans, were found in Africa; while the skull of Homo sapiens, the earliest form of our species, were found in France. Throughout the years the human species has evolved from walking on all four limbs to up-right tool making men and have migrated up and down this earth adapting to the ways of their new environments. The only other way for humans to have gotten to different areas of the world would be if they were taken. The migration of the human population began with the movement of Homo erectus. Homo sapiens occupied all of Africa from 400,000 to 200,000 years BCE and later evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens which is where we remain today. According to historians humans first started to migrate from Africa out through modern day Europe and Asia a million years ago. More groups started to spread out to places like Australia and later North, Central, and South America. Because of migration people had to adjust to new environments and climates. Groups living in Africa had to deal with the sun and intense heat so their bodies provided them with more melanin to protect their skin making them darker. While people who migrated to Europe or Australia had less melanin making them appear lighter. Adjustments were also made in people as small as eye shape, hair color, or body hair. This is why all humans don't appear to look alike.

Other humans were taken from Africa forcefully. The people of Africa were subjected to two major slave trades. The Arab Muslim slave trade headed by the Arabs and Islamic community, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade ran by the Europeans'. Although the people traded weren't restricted to just people of Africa, between 11 and 18 million Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken across the seas and the Sahara desert between 650 and 1900 into the Middle East. Many were brought to the Middle East for military service and sexual concubines. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was the trade of Africans from their home to North and Central America and different Caribbean islands. For four centuries Africans were brought to these places for slave labor to bring Europe the produce from plantations; cotton, sugar, and tobacco.

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