Most of us still know less about Africa's past and peoples than we do about the continent's wild animals. And what we do know is colored by romance - safaris and treks and camel caravans, Solomon's mine and Tutankhamun's curse, the shores of Tripoli and the snows of Kilimanjaro.Yet the ancestor of all humankind may have lived in Africa. The world's longest-lived, literate civilization was African.Through the ages, great civilizations rose and fell...