Africa: A Biography of the Continent
John Reader
The continent where humanity began, told from the bedrock up.
Reader fuses geology, ecology, paleoanthropology and recorded history into one continental narrative, opening with Africa as the cradle of humanity and tracing how thin soils, drought and disease shaped its societies. Instead of treating Africa as a stage for outside actors, it centers the land itself and the people who adapted to it, bringing a science-grounded deep history to general readers and placing Africa at the origin of the human story.
Its legacy. It became one of the most widely read single-volume introductions to the continent's past.
- Author
- John Reader
- First published
- 1997
- Genre
- History
- Theme
- The Continent's Own History
More from The Continent's Own History
- Africans: The History of a Continent — John Iliffe
A history built on a startling claim: Africa's central problem was too few people, not too many.
- The Lost Cities of Africa — Basil Davidson
The book that put Kush, Aksum and Great Zimbabwe back into world history.
- The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 — Christopher Ehret
Deep African history reconstructed from the evidence of language itself.
- Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 — John K. Thornton
Africans as agents, not merely victims, in the making of the Atlantic world.