ligious awareness. Primarily, though, the Chinese were in-
terested in exploring trade routes. Th ey explored southward
and westward, eventually reaching central Asia. Th e earliest
of these explorers returned with such things as seeds for new
plants, and in time trade for Chinese silk developed between
the two regions. Considerable exploration was done by the
adventurous souls who set out in boats to migrate from island
to island in the Pacifi c.
Perhaps the earliest true explorers were the ancient
Greeks and Romans, probably because of their location in a
sea that allowed travel by ship. Th e Greeks, in particular, ex-
hibited a curiosity about lands beyond their boundaries, and
numerous accounts exist of travels to such far-fl ung locations
as the west coast of Africa, Britain, and the eastern Atlantic.
In the other direction the Greeks explored such regions as
India and Turkey. One prominent name in the history of ge-
ography and exploration was that of Ptolemy, a second-cen-
tury Greek who compiled the fi rst maps that located places by
latitude and longitude. Ptolemy’s maps, however, showed that
the Greeks had not yet circumnavigated Africa, for he showed
southern Africa as connected with China.
In and around the Mediterranean Sea most of the early
exploration was done by the Greeks. Aft er the Roman Em-
pire absorbed the Greeks, little remained to be done, at least
in that part of the world. What exploration the Romans did
as they relentlessly expanded their empire west, north, and
east was motivated by a desire for military conquest and to
establish trade routes. Exploration more for its own sake took
place primarily in Africa. Aft er the Romans conquered the
Carthaginians in the second century b.c.e., a number of Ro-
mans undertook exploration of the west coast of Africa and
of sub-Saharan Africa.
AFRICA
BY MICHAEL J. O’NEAL
Archaeological evidence, which always remains open to new
fi ndings and new explanations for old fi ndings, shows that
the fi rst humanlike species developed in Africa perhaps 5
million years ago. In 1974 in the Hadar region of Ethiopia,
archaeologists unearthed “Lucy,” the earliest-known ances-
tor of humans, whose fossilized skeleton is about 3.18 mil-
lion years old. Th rough a process of continual evolution the
species Homo sapiens sapiens—modern humans—developed
in Africa some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, though quite
similar ancestor species had existed for some 400,000 years
before that.
Modern geneticists—that is, scientists who study genet-
ics, the branch of biology that explores the origins, varia-
tions, and heredity of organisms—are keenly interested
in the emergence and spread of humans. Using DNA evi-
dence, they have tentatively identifi ed the genetic group of
the fi rst humans who emerged in southeastern Africa at the
very dawn of the species. From there humans evolved into
two further major groups. One was the San, or Khoisan, of
southern Africa, commonly called the Bushmen. Th e other
group was that made up of the small-statured people some-
times referred to as the pygmies of central Africa. Roughly
60,000 years ago some of these humans migrated into the
Arabian Peninsula and then into Asia. Meanwhile, the re-
lated species known today as Neanderthals (Homo neander-
thalensis) had occupied parts of Europe, but in time Homo
sapiens spread there as well and outcompeted the Neander-
thals, who disappeared.
Th e earliest humans in African formed nomadic tribes.
As these hunter-gatherers searched for food and other re-
sources, they became the fi rst explorers of the African conti-
nent. In the process they located resources they could use not
only to ensure their own survival but also for trade. Th ey built
cities and transportation networks and thus created some of
the world’s oldest civilizations. But while historians know
much about the end results of their explorations, they know
little of the process of exploring. Th e absence of any kind of
written records is the chief obstacle. Much of the history of
the movements of African peoples is preserved orally by gri-
ots, or storytellers, who retain and pass along their knowl-
edge of the ancestry of African peoples, including those who
left their tribes in search of new horizons.
Th us, the world’s fi rst explorers were Africans, though
none of their names survive in history textbooks. Modern
people have to use their imaginations to envision the earli-
est explorations of their world by humans in Africa. Some of
this exploration was no doubt motivated by simple human
curiosity, the need to know what lay over the horizon, on
the other side of a mountain range or river. Other explora-
tion was doubtless driven by necessity as homelands became
depleted of resources, natural disasters forced people to fi nd
new homes, or one group drove out another, so that explorers
had to be sent out to discover a new place to live. Whatever
the motivations, Homo sapiens in time spread out from its
origins in southwest Africa to settle every inhabitable conti-
nent of the world.
Although history does not record the names of these
early explorers, it does record those of some later ones, par-
ticularly from the Carthaginian Empire. Th e Carthaginians
were named for their capital city, Carthage, on the Medi-
terranean north coast of Africa in what is today Libya. Th e
Carthaginians were actually Phoenicians, a people originally
from the region around modern-day Lebanon who became
one of the most active seafaring and trading nations of the
ancient world. Eventually the Romans conquered Carthage
in the Punic Wars, so called because Puni was the Roman
name for Carthaginians. Th e fi nal defeat came in 146 b.c.e.,
but long before then the Carthaginians had explored a great
deal of Africa and Europe.
Th e most important of Carthage’s explorers was Hanno,
oft en called Hanno the Navigator to distinguish him from a
later political fi gure, Hanno the Great. Th e dates of Hanno’s
life are uncertain, but he is believed to have lived sometime
between 633 and 530 b.c.e. At some point in this time frame436 exploration: Africa