From 100th century BCE
Africa, especially the Sahara, Sahel, Nile Valley, and southern Africa
African prehistory as presented here emphasizes deep local human and cultural development rather than population of the continent through successive Asian migrations. Archaeological discoveries, rock art, fossil sequences, pottery, and early grain gathering are used to support Africa’s central role in human evolution and the development and dissemination of techniques during the Early Stone Age and later periods.
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The Story
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European scholarship frequently portrayed African peoples as lacking an autonomous history. The cultural achievements of the continent were instead attributed to successive immigrants from Asia, a framework systematized by German ethnographers and linguists and later expressed through the Hamitic theory. This interpretation treated migration as the principal mechanism through which agriculture, pastoralism, technologies, languages, and civilization reached Africa.
The extract describes a model in which successive populations were credited with introducing agriculture, banana and root-crop cultivation, cattle breeding, cereals, metalworking, ploughing, and other cultural practices. In this scheme, the ancestors of the Bantu were explained through intermixture between supposedly incoming Hamitic groups and African populations. The model also assigned hierarchical value to languages and peoples, presenting some as culturally or linguistically superior to others.
This interpretation was undermined by discoveries made between the two world wars and afterward. Australopithecine remains discovered in South Africa in 1924, together with finds in North Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, were presented as evidence for a continuous African sequence in human development. The sequence included Australopithecines, pithecanthropoid humans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, each associated with tools and extending toward the Neolithic.
Rock paintings and petroglyphs in the Atlas Mountains, southern Africa, and the Sahara provide evidence of endogenous cultural development. Relative chronology based on artefact form and stratigraphy was supplemented by carbon-14 and potassium-argon dating, transforming interpretations of African cultural history. The Neolithic in Saharan and Sahelian latitudes was shown to be older than earlier scholarship had assumed.
At Tassili N’Ajjer and Tadrart-Acacus, in the borderland between Algeria and Libya, hearths and ceramics indicate pottery use from about 8000 BCE onward. A skeleton of negroid type bearing traces of skin clothing was found at Acacus and dated to about 9000 BCE. Findings from the Ahaggar mountains received similar dates, while the extract places the Neolithic of Tassili N’Ajjer and Ennedi in a period contemporary with that of southern Europe and Cyrenaica.
Evidence from Neolithic camps in Lower Nubia indicates the gathering and preparation of grain from wild cereals during the thirteenth millennium BCE. Radiocarbon results from the Ballana district gave 12050 ± 280, while remains from the Tushka region gave 12550 ± 490. These findings are presented as evidence that grain gathering in the Nile Valley preceded the corresponding practice in the Near East by approximately four thousand years.
From 100th century BCE
Africa, especially the Sahara, Sahel, Nile Valley, and southern Africa
African prehistory as presented here emphasizes deep local human and cultural development rather than population of the continent through successive Asian migrations. Archaeological discoveries, rock art, fossil sequences, pottery, and early grain gathering are used to support Africa’s central role in human evolution and the development and dissemination of techniques during the Early Stone Age and later periods.
Continue exploring
The Story
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European scholarship frequently portrayed African peoples as lacking an autonomous history. The cultural achievements of the continent were instead attributed to successive immigrants from Asia, a framework systematized by German ethnographers and linguists and later expressed through the Hamitic theory. This interpretation treated migration as the principal mechanism through which agriculture, pastoralism, technologies, languages, and civilization reached Africa.
The extract describes a model in which successive populations were credited with introducing agriculture, banana and root-crop cultivation, cattle breeding, cereals, metalworking, ploughing, and other cultural practices. In this scheme, the ancestors of the Bantu were explained through intermixture between supposedly incoming Hamitic groups and African populations. The model also assigned hierarchical value to languages and peoples, presenting some as culturally or linguistically superior to others.
This interpretation was undermined by discoveries made between the two world wars and afterward. Australopithecine remains discovered in South Africa in 1924, together with finds in North Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, were presented as evidence for a continuous African sequence in human development. The sequence included Australopithecines, pithecanthropoid humans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, each associated with tools and extending toward the Neolithic.
Rock paintings and petroglyphs in the Atlas Mountains, southern Africa, and the Sahara provide evidence of endogenous cultural development. Relative chronology based on artefact form and stratigraphy was supplemented by carbon-14 and potassium-argon dating, transforming interpretations of African cultural history. The Neolithic in Saharan and Sahelian latitudes was shown to be older than earlier scholarship had assumed.
At Tassili N’Ajjer and Tadrart-Acacus, in the borderland between Algeria and Libya, hearths and ceramics indicate pottery use from about 8000 BCE onward. A skeleton of negroid type bearing traces of skin clothing was found at Acacus and dated to about 9000 BCE. Findings from the Ahaggar mountains received similar dates, while the extract places the Neolithic of Tassili N’Ajjer and Ennedi in a period contemporary with that of southern Europe and Cyrenaica.
Evidence from Neolithic camps in Lower Nubia indicates the gathering and preparation of grain from wild cereals during the thirteenth millennium BCE. Radiocarbon results from the Ballana district gave 12050 ± 280, while remains from the Tushka region gave 12550 ± 490. These findings are presented as evidence that grain gathering in the Nile Valley preceded the corresponding practice in the Near East by approximately four thousand years.