Africa Africa.
Africa is the world's second largest continent and second most populous after Asia At about km mi including its adjacent islands it covers percent of the total land area on Earth With over million human inhabitants in countries it accounts for about one seventh of the world human population A satellite composite image of Africa
Etymology
World map showing Africa geographically The name Africa came into Western use through the Romans who used the name Africa terra land of the Afri plural or Afer singular for the northern part of the continent as the province of Africa with its capital Carthage corresponding to modern day Tunisia.
The origin of Afer may either come from. the Phoenician afar dust. the Afri a tribe possibly Berber who dwelt in North Africa in the Carthage area. the Greek word aphrike meaning without cold see also List of traditional Greek place names. or the Latin word aprica meaning sunny.
The historian Leo Africanus attributed the origin to the Greek word phrike meaning cold and horror combined with the negating prefix a so meaning a land free of cold and horror However the change of sound from ph to f in Greek is datable to about the first century so this cannot really be the origin of the name.
Egypt was considered part of Asia by the ancients and first assigned to Africa by the geographer Ptolemy AD who accepted Alexandria as Prime Meridian and made 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.
Geography
Main article Geography of Africa
Africa in the Blue marble picture with Antarctica to the south and the Sahara and Arabian peninsula at the top of the globe
Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the main mass of the Earth's surface It includes within its remarkably regular outline an area of c km mi including the islands.
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 km miles wide Geopolitically Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa as well From the most northerly point Cape Spartel in Morocco a little west of Cape Blanc in N to the most southerly point Cape Agulhas in South Africa S is a distance approximately of km miles from Cape Verde W the westernmost point to Ras Hafun in Somalia E the most easterly projection is a distance also approximately of km miles The length of coast line is km miles and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is shown by the fact that Europe which covers only km square miles has a coast line of km miles.
The main structural lines of the continent show both the east to west direction characteristic at least in the eastern hemisphere of the more northern parts of the world and the north to south direction seen in the southern peninsulas Africa is thus composed of two segments at right angles the northern running from east to west the southern from north to south the subordinate lines corresponding in the main to these two directions.
History
Main article History of Africa
Map of Africa 
Africa is home to the oldest inhabited territory on earth with the human race originating from this continent The Ishango Bone carbon dated to c years ago shows tallies in mathematical notation.
Throughout humanity's prehistory Africa like all other continents had no nation states and was instead inhabited by groups of hunter gatherers.Around B C the nation state of Egypt developed which existed with various levels of influence until B C Other civilizations include Ethiopia the Nubian kingdom the kingdoms of the Sahel Ghana Mali and Songhai and Great Zimbabwe.
In the Portuguese established the first of many trading stations along the Guinea coast at Elmina.