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The area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was populated as early as 90,000 years ago, as shown by the 1988 discovery of the Semliki harpoon at Katanda, one of the oldest barbed harpoons ever found, and which is believed to have been used to catch giant river catfish.
The earliest known human settlements in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been dated back to the Middle Stone Age, approximately 90,000 years ago.The first real states, such as the Kongo, the Lunda, the Luba and Kuba, appeared south of the equatorial forest on the savannah from the 14th century onwards.
The earliest inhabitants of the region comprising present-day Congo were the Forest peoples whose Stone Age culture was slowly replaced by Bantu tribes. The main Bantu tribe living in the region were the Kongo, also known as Bakongo, who established mostly unstable kingdoms along the mouth, north and south, of the Congo River.
The Congo River was named by early European sailors after the Kingdom of Kongo and its Bantu inhabitants, the Kongo people, when they encountered them in the 16th century. [19] [20] The word Kongo comes from the Kongo language (also called Kikongo).
Before the 1997 war, about 9,000 Europeans and other non-Africans lived in Congo, most of whom were French; a fraction of this number remains. [21] Around 300 American immigrants reside in the Congo.
Zaire, [c] officially the Republic of Zaire, [d] was the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1971 to 18 May 1997. Located in Central Africa, it was, by area, the third-largest country in Africa after Sudan and Algeria, and the 11th-largest country in the world from 1965 to 1997.
The Belgian Congo (French: Congo belge, pronounced [kɔ̃ɡo bɛlʒ]; Dutch: Belgisch-Congo) [a] was a Belgian colony in Central Africa from 1908 until independence in 1960 and became the Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville). The former colony adopted its present name, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in 1964.
Map of the Belgian Congo, 1914. This is a list of place names of towns and cities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which were subsequently changed after the end of Belgian colonial rule. Place names of the colonial era tended to have two versions, one in French and one in Dutch, reflecting the two main languages of Belgium. Many of these ...