Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most-populous continent, being behind Asia in both categories. At about 30.3 million km (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area and 20% of its land area. With 1.2 billion people as of 2016, it accounts for about 16% of the world's human population. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The continent includes Madagascar and various archipelagos. It contains 54 fully recognised sovereign states (countries), nine territories and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition. The majority of the continent and its countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, with a substantial portion and number of countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
Africa's average population is the youngest amongst all the continents; the median age in 2012 was 19.7, when the worldwide median age was 30.4. Algeria is Africa's largest country by area, and Nigeria is its largest by population. Africa, particularly central Eastern Africa, is widely accepted as the place of origin of humans and the Hominidae clade (great apes), as evidenced by the discovery of the earliest hominids and their ancestors as well as later ones that have been dated to around 7 million years ago, including Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Australopithecus africanus, A. afarensis, Homo erectus, H. habilis and H. ergaster—the earliest Homo sapiens (modern human), found in Ethiopia, date to circa 200,000 years ago. Africa straddles the equator and encompasses numerous climate areas; it is the only continent to stretch from the northern temperate to southern temperate zones.
Africa hosts a large diversity of ethnicities, cultures and languages. In the late 19th century, European countries colonised almost all of Africa; most present states in Africa emerged from a process of decolonisation.

Afri was a Latin name used to refer to the inhabitants of then-known northern Africa to the west of the Nile river, and in its widest sense referred to all lands south of the Mediterranean (Ancient Libya). This name seems to have originally referred to a native Libyan tribe, an ancestor of modern Berbers; see Terence for discussion. The name had usually been connected with the Phoenician word ʿafar meaning "dust", but a 1981 hypothesis has asserted that it stems from the Berber word ifri (plural ifran) meaning "cave", in reference to cave dwellers. The same word may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe originally from Yafran (also known as Ifrane) in northwestern Libya.
Under Roman rule, Carthage became the capital of the province it then named Africa Proconsularis, following its defeat of the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War in 146 BC, which also included the coastal part of modern Libya. The Latin suffix -ica can sometimes be used to denote a land (e.g., in Celtica from Celtae, as used by Julius Caesar). The later Muslim region of Ifriqiya, following its conquest of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire's Exarchatus Africae, also preserved a form of the name.
According to the Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy (85–165 AD), indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea
 the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand
the real extent of the continent, the idea of "Africa" expanded with
their knowledge.
Other etymological hypotheses have been postulated for the ancient name "Africa":
• The 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Ant. 1.15) asserted that it was named for Epher, grandson of Abraham according to Gen. 25:4, whose descendants, he claimed, had invaded Libya.

Prehistory
Africa is considered by most paleoanthropologists to be the oldest inhabited territory on Earth, with the human species originating from the continent. During the mid-20th century, anthropologists discovered many fossils
 and evidence of human occupation perhaps as early as 7 million years
ago (BP=before present). Fossil remains of several species of early
apelike humans thought to have evolved into modern man, such as Australopithecus afarensis (radiometrically dated to approximately 3.9–3.0 million years BP, Paranthropus boisei (c. 2.3–1.4 million years BP) and Homo ergaster (c. 1.9 million–600,000 years BP) have been discovered.
After the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens approximately 150,000 to 100,000 years BP in Africa, the continent was mainly populated by groups of hunter-gatherers. These first modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the globe during the Out of Africa II migration dated to approximately 50,000 years BP, exiting the continent either across Bab-el-Mandeb over the Red Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco, or the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt.
Other
 migrations of modern humans within the African continent have been
dated to that time, with evidence of early human settlement found in Southern Africa, Southeast Africa, North Africa, and the Sahara.
The size of the Sahara
 has historically been extremely variable, with its area rapidly
fluctuating and at times disappearing depending on global climatic
conditions. At the end of the Ice ages,
 estimated to have been around 10,500 BC, the Sahara had again become a
green fertile valley, and its African populations returned from the
interior and coastal highlands in Sub-Saharan Africa, with rock art paintingsdepicting …

Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the
largest landmass of the Earth. Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez (transected by the Suez Canal), 163 km (101 mi) wide. (Geopolitically, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa, as well.)
The
 coastline is 26,000 km (16,000 mi) long, and the absence of deep
indentations of the shore is illustrated by the fact that Europe, which
covers only 10,400,000 km (4,000,000 sq mi) – about a third of the
surface of Africa – has a coastline of 32,000 km (20,000 mi). From the
most northerly point, Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia (37°21' N), to the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa (34°51'15" S), is a distance of approximately 8,000 km (5,000 mi). Cape Verde, 17°33'22" W, the westernmost point, is a distance of approximately 7,400 km (4,600 mi) to Ras Hafun, 51°27'52" E, the most easterly projection that neighbours Cape Guardafui, the tip of the Horn of Africa.
Africa's largest country is Algeria, and its smallest country is Seychelles, an archipelago off the east coast. The smallest nation on the continental mainland is The Gambia.
African plate
The African Plate is a major tectonic plate straddling the equator as well as the prime meridian. It includes much of the continent of Africa, as well as oceanic crust which lies between the continent and various surrounding ocean ridges. Between 60 million years ago and 10 million years ago, the Somali Plate began rifting from the African Plate along the East African Rift.
 Since the continent of Africa consists of crust from both the African
and the Somali plates, some literature refers to the African Plate as
the Nubian Plate to distinguish it from the continent as a whole.

There are clear signs of increased networking among African organizations and states. For example, in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (former Zaire), rather than rich, non-African countries intervening, neighbouring African countries became involved (see also Second Congo War). Since the conflict began in 1998, the estimated death toll has reached 5 million.
The African Union
The African Union (AU) is a 55-member federation consisting of all of Africa's states. The union was formed, with Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as its headquarters, on 26 June 2001. The union was officially established on 9 July 2002 as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). In July 2004, the African Union's Pan-African Parliament (PAP) was relocated to Midrand, in South Africa, but the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights
 remained in Addis Ababa. There is a policy in effect to decentralize
the African Federation's institutions so that they are shared by all the
 states.
The African Union, not to be confused with the AU Commission, is formed by the Constitutive Act of the African Union, which aims to transform the African Economic Community,
 a federated commonwealth, into a state under established international
conventions. The African Union has a parliamentary government, known as
the African Union Government,
 consisting of legislative, judicial and executive organs. It is led by
the African Union President and Head of State, who is also the President
 of the Pan-African Parliament.
 A person becomes AU President by being elected to the PAP, and
subsequently gaining majority support in the PAP. The powers and
authority of the President of the African Parliament derive from the
Constitutive Act and the Protocol of the Pan-African Parliament,
 as well as the inheritance of presidential authority stipulated by
African treaties and by international treaties, including those
subordinating.

Although it has abundant natural resources, Africa remains the world's poorest and least-developed continent, the result of a variety of causes that may include corrupt governments that have often committed serious human rights violations, failed central planning, high levels of illiteracy, lack of access to foreign capital, and frequent tribal and military conflict (ranging from guerrilla warfare to genocide).
 Its total nominal GDP remains behind that of the United States, China,
 Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India and France. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report in 2003, the bottom 24 ranked nations (151st to 175th) were all African.
Poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition
 and inadequate water supply and sanitation, as well as poor health,
affect a large proportion of the people who reside in the African
continent. In August 2008, the World Bank
 announced revised global poverty estimates based on a new
international poverty line of $1.25 per day (versus the previous measure
 of $1.00). 81% of the Sub-Saharan Africa population was living on less than $2.50 (PPP) per day in 2005, compared with 86% for India.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the least successful region of the world in reducing poverty ($1.25 per day); some 50% of the population living in poverty
 in 1981 (200 million people), a figure that rose to 58% in 1996 before
dropping to 50% in 2005 (380 million people). The average poor person in
 sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to live on only 70 cents per day, and
was poorer in 2003 than in 1973, indicating increasing poverty in some
areas. Some of it is attributed to unsuccessful economic liberalization
programmes spearheaded by foreign companies and governments, but other
studies have cited bad domestic government policies more than external
factors.
Africa is now at risk of being in debt once again, particularly in Sub-Saharan African countries. The last …

Africa's population has rapidly increased over the last 40 years, and
consequently, it is relatively young. In some African states, more than
half the population is under 25 years of age. The total number of
people in Africa increased from 229 million in 1950 to 630 million in
1990. As of 2016, the population of Africa is estimated at 1.2 billion
 . Africa's total population surpassing other continents is fairly
recent; African population surpassed Europe in the 1990s, while the Americas
 was overtaken sometime around the year 2000; Africa's rapid population
growth is expected to overtake the only two nations currently larger
than its population, at roughly the same time – India and China's 1.4
billion people each will swap ranking around the year 2022. This
increase in number of babies born in Africa compared to the rest of the
world is expected to reach approximately 37% in the year 2050, an
increase of 21% since 1990 alone.
Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger–Congo family) are the majority in southern, central and southeast Africa. The Bantu-speaking peoples from the Sahel progressively expanded over most of Sub-Saharan Africa. But there are also several Nilotic groups in South Sudan and East Africa, the mixed Swahili people on the Swahili Coast, and a few remaining indigenous Khoisan ("San" or "Bushmen") and Pygmy peoples
 in southern and central Africa, respectively. Bantu-speaking Africans
also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts
of southern Cameroon. In the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, the distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related to, but distinct from "Hottentots")
 have long been present. The San are physically distinct from other
Africans and are the indigenous people of southern Africa. Pygmies are
the pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of central Africa.
The peoples of West Africa primarily speak Niger–Congo languages, belonging mostly to its non-Bantu branches, though some Nilo-Saharan and Afro-Asiatic speaking groups are also found. The Niger–Congo…

By most estimates, well over a thousand languages (UNESCO
 has estimated around two thousand) are spoken in Africa. Most are of
African origin, though some are of European or Asian origin. Africa is
the most multilingual
 continent in the world, and it is not rare for individuals to fluently
speak not only multiple African languages, but one or more European ones
 as well. There are four major language families indigenous to Africa:
• The Afroasiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia.
• The Nilo-Saharan
 language family consists of more than a hundred languages spoken by 30
million people. Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by ethnic groups in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, and northern Tanzania.
• The Niger-Congo
 language family covers much of Sub-Saharan Africa. In terms of number
of languages, it is the largest language family in Africa and perhaps
one of the largest in the world.
• The Khoisan languages number about fifty and are spoken in Southern Africa by approximately 400,000 people. Many of the Khoisan languages are endangered. The Khoi and San peoples are considered the original inhabitants of this part of Africa.
Following the end of colonialism, nearly all African countries adopted official languages
 that originated outside the continent, although several countries also
granted legal recognition to indigenous languages (such as Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa). In numerous countries, English and French (see African French) are used for communication in the public sphere such as government, commerce, education and the media. Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaansand Spanish are examples of languages that trace their origin to.