African prehistory encompasses the vast span of time before the practice of making written records began in Africa. The greater part of the continent's history lies within the realm of prehistory and can only be ascertained through \Tarchaeology\t, \Thistorical linguistics\t and related disciplines, and oral traditions (as far as they will reach back in time and only to the point where they are reliable). The field of African prehistory is of special importance because more than 90 percent of the evidence concerning human origins has thus far come from Africa. Consequently, in the past several decades archaeological research in Africa has been part of a massive, fast-moving investigative campaign that has involved many disciplines and research tools and a large, dedicated body of scientists. PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN AFRICA The acquisition of an abnormally large number of finds from a particular area may merely reflect an extremely thorough investigation. On the other hand, it may reflect a genuine pattern from the past. Grounds now exist for believing that it was in eastern Africa from Ethiopia to the Transvaal, where more early hominid fossils have been found than anywhere else in the world, that early \Tman\t evolved out of the common ancestry he shares with the apes. Apparently, Old World apes and monkeys evolved in Africa during a time when the continent was an island. Then, about 20-15 million years ago, \Tcontinental drift\t joined it to Asia in its northeastern part, and apes and monkeys appeared in southern Asia for the first time. The extinct genus \TDryopithecus\t ranged over the tropical regions of Africa and Asia, which were then more widely forested than today. With the final shrinking of the Tethys Sea that lay between the two continents at that time, many of these forested areas became savanna or grassland. About 14 million years ago, a new type of ape appeared, \TRamapithecus\t, better adapted to such conditions although still associated with forest. The Fossil Record A number of archaeologists consider Ramapithecus the earliest known ancestor of man. Specimens have been found in Europe and East Africa, but the greatest number are from southern Asia. It now appears that this area was the locus of man's most important evolutionary developments. The fossil record between 8 and 5 million years ago is incomplete, but apparently bipedalism, the ability to walk upright, was developed during this period. By about 3 million years ago the changed environmental conditions sparked a burst of evolutionary activity, and in eastern Africa remains have been found of a number of bipedal hominids adapted to open country. Important finds have been made in the Afar and the \TOmo\t Valley in Ethiopia, on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, in \TOlduvai Gorge\t and \TLaetolil\t in Tanzania, and in South Africa at \TMakapansgat\t, \TSterkfontein\t, \TTaung\t, Kromdraai, and Swartkrans. These upright-moving hominids included two species of \TAustralopithecus\t--Australopithecus robustus and Australopithecus africanus--and the creature called \THomo habilis\t. Australopithecus robustus, as well as being larger and more massive than the slender, gracile A. africanus, had enormous molar teeth adapted to a hard, coarse vegetable diet; the dentition of both A. africanus and H. habilis seems to have been better adapted to an omnivorous diet. The separate taxonomic status of Homo habilis and the question whether A. africanus could have been in the direct line of human ancestry have been subjects of unresolved debate. It is also not clear which of these creatures were toolmakers and tool users. More than one type of hominid has been found in the deposits yielding the earliest recognizable stone artifacts, dating from around 2 million years ago. The sites of the deposits are at East Turkana, in the Shungura Formation of the Lower Omo Valley, and in Bed I at Olduvai Gorge. Homo habilis is considered by a number of archaeologists as probably the earliest toolmaker. The earliest stone tools, rough choppers, are called \TOldowan\t after Olduvai Gorge. Although there is some overlap, they were succeeded, about 1 million years ago, by tools of a more developed type, characterized by their bifacial manufacture--oval or pointed-oval stones carefully chipped over both faces to a regular pattern. Some bifaces, also called handaxes, have a straight chisellike cutting edge at one end and are known as cleavers. Such collections of stone tools are called \TAcheulean\t (after St. Acheul in France, where they were first recognized). Acheulean tools are commonly associated with a more advanced type of hominid, \THomo erectus\t. This hominid species succeeded in "breaking out" of East Africa and spreading Acheulean tools over southern Eurasia, as well as other parts of Africa. In some areas, however, Homo erectus seems to have maintained the chopping-tool tradition. Homo erectus had a brain about twice the size of the australopithecines but only two-thirds that of modern man. Sites in Africa associated with H. erectus remains or early Acheulean tools include Sidi Abderrahman in Morocco; Ternifine in Algeria; Melka Kontoure in Ethiopia; Peninj in Kenya; and Swartkrans, Vereeniging, Sterkfontein, and Stellenbosch in South Africa. Later Acheulean sites are widespread in Africa, including parts of what is now the Sahara but was then not a desert. Important sites have been investigated at \TAin Hanech\t in Algeria, \TOlorgesailie\t and Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, KALAMBO \LFall\ls in Zambia, Kamoa in Zaire, and the Cave of Hearths in South Africa. Middle Stone Age in Africa The Acheulean tool industry persisted for a long time, until 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, but thereafter an increasing regionalized specialization occurred, first into the industries called Fauresmith in southern Africa and Sangoan in central and western Africa, and later into those of the African Middle Stone Age. The human type in Africa was then comparable to that of the \TNeanderthalers\t of Europe and western Asia and includes the fossils of \TBroken Hill man\t in Zambia and Saldanha man in South Africa. Much greater regional diversity began to occur in the Middle Stone Age. More and more specialized tool industries developed as different groups of the growing population adapted their way of life to a greater variety of ecological niches. Hunting, fishing, and gathering remained the basic way of life, but a greater variety of strategies was employed in exploiting the resources of different environments. The Acheuleans had a wooden thrusting spear, which later was made more lethal with a stone point, and many of the Middle Stone Age peoples had a light stone-tipped throwing spear. Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) was now the human type throughout Africa, and by the beginning of the late Stone Age used the bow and arrow and made composite tools of wood, stone, and bone. Late Stone Age in Africa In northwest Africa, the Aterian (c.40,000-25,000 BC), an advanced tool industry of the Middle Stone Age, was succeeded by the Oranian (c.14,000-8,000 BC) and Capsian (c.7,000-4,000 BC) tool cultures. South of the Sahara the Late Stone Age seems to have begun at dates ranging from 40,000 to 10,000 BC in different areas. Small shaped-stone artifacts, known as microliths--some of which were slotted into arrow shafts to make the points and barbs--indicate that in these communities hunting was an important economic activity. Gathering the products of the wild was also important, although it usually leaves less obvious traces in the archaeological record. As population increased, different communities exploited an even greater range of environments and devised more specialized techniques for dealing with them. Seasonal movement was often involved, and in Nubia and in areas near the Nile Valley in Egypt, evidence indicates that wild grain was extensively collected. Nubian cemeteries dating from 10,000 BC contain bodies pierced by stone arrow-points, which suggests intercommunity warfare. From the 6th to the 4th millennium BC, the southern Sahara and the Sahel were considerably wetter than at present and supported communities that depended on fish from lakes and rivers for a considerable part of their diet. This way of life extended into the north part of the Great Lakes area of East Africa. Dependence on such aquatic resources would seem to imply at least a semisedentary type of existence. Animal and Plant Domestication The central Sahara was also wetter than at present, and the highlands in particular supported large numbers of cattle pastoralists. The cattle, widely portrayed in prehistoric rock art, may have been derived from an indigenous domestication of the wild North African ox or from cattle introduced via Tunisia or Egypt. The culture of these pastoralists and fishing peoples is sometimes referred to as the Saharan Neolithic. By the 5th millennium BC, people in the lower Nile Valley adopted cereal agriculture, using the Nile floodwaters to irrigate their crops of wheat and barley. In sub-Saharan Africa, which lies in the summer rainfall area, it is impossible to grow wheat and barley by dry-farming methods. Therefore, local wild grasses had to be domesticated to form the African tropical cereals known today: the millets (Guinea corn, or sorghum; pearl, or bulrush; millet; finger millet); African rice; fonio; chindumba; and the tiny Ethiopian grain called teff. These were domesticated in different areas of a broad zone stretching south of the Sahara from Senegal to Ethiopia and down into the northern Great Lakes area of East Africa. From the beginning of the 3d millennium BC the Sahara began to dry up. The fishing populations must have found that the stands of wild grasses that they also depended on became thinner and harder to find, which probably stimulated the process of cereal domestication. Whatever the reason, domestication first occurred in the zone across Africa where they lived. Goats, sheep, and pigs must have been introduced into the rest of Africa from its northeast corner. BRONZE AGE AND IRON AGE AFRICA Most of sub-Saharan Africa missed out on a \TBronze Age\t and passed directly, at different times in different areas, from the Stone Age into the \TIron Age\t. Apparently only in Nubia and in the extreme west, in Mauritania, was there a period during which copper was exploited for tools and weapons before the advent of an iron technology. At Akjoujt, Mauritania, copper ores were exploited in the 5th century BC, and numerous copper arrowheads and other weapons and tools have been found in the surrounding area. It is not known whether the metallurgy practiced at Akjoujt gave rise to an iron technology or whether this knowledge was introduced to sub-Saharan West Africa from the area of North Africa influenced by \TCarthage\t on the northeast coast or from the Nubian kingdom of \TMeroe\t on the Nile. The city of Carthage was founded at the end of the 9th century BC by settlers from the Levant. Iron was commonly used for tools and weapons in this area before it was so used (after 600 BC) in Egypt. In Meroe, an African kingdom independent from but much influenced by Egypt, iron smelting was practiced on a large scale by the 4th century BC. Iron-smelting furnaces of about the same date in central Nigeria are associated with the Nok people, who produced the remarkable terra-cotta heads for which the Nok culture is famous. By the early 2d century AD, Meroe had been surpassed in importance by the newly emergent power of \TAksum\t. This kingdom was founded farther to the east in the highlands of present-day Ethiopia by Semitic-speakers who had earlier come from southern Arabia. By this time there were long-established farming communities throughout the savanna lands. In the forests of the eastern part of West Africa food production had also been established, presumably based on yams, tuberous crops, and oil-palm products. In the central parts of eastern Nigeria and in Cameroon, people speaking a language ancestral to the \TBantu\t group of languages apparently began to move eastward through the savanna lands and northern forest margins of what is today the Central African Republic. In their migration they reached the northeast angle of the equatorial rain forest, where they turned southward. What generated this movement is not yet known; data are insufficient to demonstrate a population explosion as the stimulus, although this is the most commonly offered explanation. Another group from the same homeland area in southern Cameroon apparently reached the savanna lands south of the equatorial forest, either by traveling along the coast or along Zaire River tributaries, at a somewhat later date. These eastern and western streams of Bantu interacted and dispersed in complex ways over the rest of southern Africa as far as a line from Windhoek to Port Alfred. Much of this area had been inhabited by hunter-gatherer Khoisan-speaking peoples, among them the \TSan\t (Bushmen). In some places the Khoisan-speakers survived and were able to maintain their way of life alongside the Bantu-speaking farmers; in others they were driven out or absorbed. In West Africa, a similar stone technology appears to have remained in use for more than a thousand years after iron was first used in other places. Where a population of settled peasants remains over a long period, towns and other kinds of centralized institutions tend to become established. The stimulus for this development is not the same in all areas. A number of potentially conducive circumstances sometimes work together and sometimes work in isolation, and historical or geographical accident may determine the pace. Two situations in sub-Saharan Africa combined to delay centralization. First, Africa's indigenous cereal grains had to be domesticated. Unlike Egypt and Europe, Africa could not, for climatic reasons, accommodate the grain grasses that were domesticated in southwest Asia. Second, just when the urban arts were being developed in Egypt, the desiccation of the 3d millennium BC changed the Sahara from a broad grassland corridor into a desert barrier. Nevertheless, towns did emerge in a number of widely separated places. With the Arab conquest of North Africa in the 7th century, long-distance trading was injected into localized exchange networks south of the Sahara. This development further stimulated both the growth of urbanized communities and the centralization of political power. The ancient kingdom of \TGhana\t prospered as middleman in the gold trade between the West African forests and the Islamic world and was succeeded by the kingdoms of \TMali\t and \TSonghai\t. The state Bono Manso was based on the same trade with Begho as the collecting point for gold on the way to the great market center of Djenne. The center of political power later moved into the forest itself when the \TAshanti\t established power. \TBenin\t, \TIfe\t, and Igbo-Ukwu were other important West African centers of wealth and remarkable artistic achievement. Another route by which the Islamic and Indian world obtained the tropical African products they desired, above all ivory, was by sea from the East African coast. Beginning about the 9th century, voyagers from the Persian Gulf, and later from northwest India, were able to take advantage of the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean and establish a string of entrepots from the Somali coast as far south as Sofala, of which the most important and the best investigated is KILWA. The great fortified center of \TZimbabwe\t prospered in the 14th century as a result of its middleman position in this trade. Thurstan Shaw Bibliography: Clark, J. Desmond, ed., Atlas of African Prehistory (1967) and Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 1 (1982); Davidson, Basil, Africa, rev. ed. (1972); Fage, J. D., ed., Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 2 (1979); Leakey, Louis S., Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa (1961) and Stone Age Africa (1936); Oliver, Roland A., and Fagan, Brian M., Africa in the Iron Age (1975); Phillipson, D. W., African Archaeology (1985) and The Later Prehistory of Eastern and Southern Africa (1977); Shaw, Thurstan, "The Prehistory of West Africa," in History of West Africa, ed. by J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (1976). See also: \TAfrica, history of\t.