For: Demographics of Africa

The term African people can refer to people who live in Africa, or people who trace their ancestry to indigenous inhabitants of Africa. This includes members of the "African diaspora" resulting from the Atlantic Slave Trade such as Black British, Afro-Latin Americans, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Black Canadians. The term Black people is often used as a synonym for people of African ancestry (in particular Sub-Saharan Africa), particularly in the Americas and Europe, although the two terms are not always considered synonymous.

The peoples of Africa

The African continent is home to people of wide-ranging phenotypical traits, both indigenous and foreign to the continent, of diverse origins, and with several different cultural, communal, and artistic traits. Distinctions within Africa's geography, such as the varying climates across the continent, have nurtured diverse lifestyles among its population. The continent's inhabitants live amidst deserts and jungles, as well as in modern cities across the continent.

Prehistoric populations

As early as 1964, A. W. F. Edwards and others had discovered that three populations in Africa were related but distinguishable on the basis of a relatively small set of genetic information (20 alleles). Those populations were called Tigre (Ethiopians), Bantu (in southern Africa), and Ghanaian (West Africa).

When general anthropometrics were taken as the criteria for grouping, the African population was split into a different three groups: the more closely related Pygmy (such as the Mbuti) and Bushmen (such as the Khoisan) and the Bantu.

By 1988 more genetic details were known, more groups could be distinguished on the basis of genetic information, but the relationships among these groups were accounted as different depending on which was the data was construed. The groups analyzed at this time were Bantu, Berber and North African, Ethiopian, Mbuti Pygmy, Nilotic, San (Bushman), West African.

Studies of mitochondrial DNA conducted within the continent of Africa have shown that the indigenous population has diverged into three divergent main lines of descent.

A number of scholars such as Alan Templeton hold that support is found for traditional racial categories because many studies use the pre-defined categories to begin with, and subsequently insert data into those categories rather than let data speak for itself. Tempeton uses modern DNA analysis to argue that human "races" were never "pure", and that human evolution is based on "many locally differentiated populations coexisting at any given time" - a single lineage with many locally gradated variants, all sharing a common fate.