Africa is the Earth's second-largest (about 30,221,532 sq km / 11,668,545 sq mi) and second most populous (about 900 billion people as of 2008W) continent.
Africa straddles the equator and no part of the continent is more than about 4,000 kilometers from it, thus the continent's environments are largely tropical and subtropical, and with a great variation in rainfall and humidity, from tropical rain forests, through scrubland and savanna, to the Sahara and Kalahari deserts.
Both genus HomoW and our own species Homo sapiensW are thought to have originated in Africa, about 2.5 million years ago and 130,000 years ago respectively.
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