The term African people refers 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 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.
Perhaps it is a function of the number of excavations actually performed in given areas, but it is at least suggestive that the five very earliest out of the twelve of earliest archaeological discoveries of Homo sapiens sapiens have been in Africa and the adjacent Arabian peninsula.
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.
In his recent book, Spencer Wells traces the migration of the early Africans beyond their own continent by noting the appearance of new genetic markers on the Y-chromosome as the migrations progressed.
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.
Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger-Congo language family) are the majority in southern, central and east Africa proper. However, there are several Nilotic groups in East Africa, 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 and southern Somalia. 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.
Some Ethiopian and Eritrean groups (like the Amhara and Tigrayans, collectively known as "Habesha") speak Semitic languages. The Oromo and Somali peoples speak Cushitic languages, but some Somali clans trace their founding to legendary Arab founders. Sudan and Mauritania are divided between a mostly Arabized north and a native African south (although the "Arabs" of Sudan clearly have a predominantly native African ancestry themselves). Some areas of East Africa, particularly the island of Zanzibar and the Kenyan island of Lamu, received Arab Muslim and Southwest Asian settlers and merchants throughout the Middle Ages and in antiquity.
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