Southern Africa is described as a broad subcontinent extending from tropical latitudes to the temperate southern oceans. Its plateaux, river valleys, escarpments, coastal plains, forests, grasslands, scrublands, and arid regions created a varied ecological mosaic. The Namib, Kalahari, and Karroo contrasted with moist lowland environments in the Zambezi and Limpopo valleys and along parts of the eastern coast. This diversity offered early hominids multiple habitats and may have buffered populations against severe climatic fluctuations.

The archaeological record includes hundreds of sites distributed across much of the subcontinent. Particularly important evidence comes from caves and fissures in the dolomitic limestone of the Transvaal and northern Cape Province, where fossils and artifacts sometimes occur together. Taung, Makapansgat Limeworks, and Sterkfontein Type Site yielded remains attributed to the relatively gracile Australopithecus africanus, while Kromdraai Site B and Swartkrans Phase A produced robust australopithecine fossils identified as Australopithecus or Paranthropus crassidens and A. robustus. Swartkrans and Sterkfontein Extension also contain evidence assigned to Homo.

The relationship between fossils, tools, and behavior is not always secure. Sterkfontein Extension yielded rough bifaces and other artifacts classified differently by different researchers, together with broken antelope bones interpreted as food refuse. At Makapansgat, Raymond Dart proposed that selected bones, teeth, and horns had been used as tools in an 'Osteodontokeratic culture', but later studies of natural bone accumulations and predator activity undermined the assumption that the australopithecines had produced the entire bone assemblage. The extract therefore emphasizes both the importance of the evidence and the limits of behavioral reconstruction.

Chronological control is a persistent problem. Southern African sites cannot yet be securely dated by geophysical chronometric techniques in the same way as some East African localities. Many occurrences are assigned broadly to the Middle Pleistocene or to the early Upper Pleistocene, while radiocarbon determinations from several sites are regarded as unreliable for Acheulian contexts. At Rooidam, thorium–uranium results suggested an age between 110,000 and 170,000 years for calcium carbonate associated with the assemblage, although the result was to be treated cautiously.

The extract questions older schemes that divided hand-axe industries into Chellean, Acheulian, and Fauresmith stages. Fauresmith assemblages in their type area were found to be contemporary with non-Fauresmith Acheulian assemblages, and their distinctive character may be connected especially with the use of lydianite, or indurated shale, as raw material. The term remains useful for the type-area industries but is not accepted as a general label for late hand-axe industries or as a securely transitional tradition between the Acheulian and Middle Stone Age.

The Sangoan is likewise treated cautiously. It was once viewed as an intermediate industry between the Earlier and Middle Stone Ages, centered in the Congo Basin and extending into wooded parts of southern Africa. The extract notes that comparable assemblages do not provide a securely demonstrated transitional sequence. In the Congo Basin and Angola, heavy-duty tools and refined Lupemban forms led J. D. Clark to use the compound designation Sangoan–Lupemban for industries succeeding the Acheulian, stressing that the end of Acheulian manufacture need not represent a decline in technical skill.