EAST AFRICA: AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY

Chapter 2 THE PEOPLING OF EAST AFRICA TO C. 1000 A.D.

Chapter 2 The earliest history of East Africa can only be broadly outlined here. The period of time covered by this chapter is vast; knowledge of the millennia that make up the period is sketchy and presents a challenge for the historian. Most of the information known about human history in the region during this period, which encompasses the Stone Age and the Early Iron Age, comes from archaeology; for the Early Iron Age, linguistics also provides the historian with important insights. During the Early Iron Age, which began slightly before the Christian era in portions of East Africa, the ancestors of many of the present-day inhabitants entered the region, bringing with them a knowledge of food production and/or iron working (for some peoples the latter was adopted somewhat later than the former). The newcomers, who included Bantuspeaking and Nilotic-speaking peoples, interacted and mixed with the groups populating the regions in the final period of the Stone Age and with each other over the span of the next several centuries. This interaction went some way toward producing the social formations that would characterize East Africa in this millennium. Archaeological research has demonstrated that East Africa was the site of widespread Stone Age hunting and gathering populations and that it was an especially important region for human evolution. During the past half century, an increasingly complete picture of early hominid fossil The Peopling of East Africa to c.1000 A.D. THE PEOPLING OF EAST AFRICA TO c.1000 | 11 remains, unearthed by archaeologists in the region, has provided significant insights into the process by which hominids developed greater brain size, a bipedal mode of locomotion, and hands adapted to tool making. One of the most important sources of information about early man is the Olduvai Gorge site in northern Tanzania. Here, thanks to the pioneering and painstaking efforts of the late Dr. L. S. B. Leakey and his family, a series of five beds have been identified on the walls of a canyon that portray a geological sequence extending back more than two million years. This was a well-watered area with a lake nearby and a plain that was full of animals, among them a number of early hominids. Important hominid fossil remains have been recovered as well as some of the oldest evidence of stone tools; the pebble tools were found in the lowest—and therefore oldest—level, Bed 1. Since the Olduvai region has experienced volcanic eruptions, dates for archaeological finds can be obtained using the potassium argon dating technique. The pebble tools found at Olduvai have been dated to about two million years ago. The pebbles found in Bed 1 at Olduvai, usually referred to by the type name Oldowan, represent what most scholars feel was the initial type of tool used by early hominids. Three factors support the identification of these small stones as tools. The stones exhibit a regular pattern of flaking, which indicates they have been intentionally altered. They were found associated with large numbers of small animals’ bones that had been fractured , evidently by the pebble tools, to extract the marrow. And finally, the lake deposits of Olduvai are comparatively stoneless, so that any significant number of stones found in the area must have been brought in to serve as tools. More recent discoveries at the Koobi Fora site, east of Lake Turkana in Kenya, indicate a pebble tool complex known as Karari dating to more than two and a half million years ago, even older then Olduvai. Olduvai and Koobi Fora are the major sites in East Africa where evidence of Oldowan type tools have been discovered, but the larger, more complex tools known as hand axes (Acheulean tools), which first came into use in East Africa about 1.5 million years ago, are found at archaeological sites throughout the region. Starting with these hand-sized implements , we can for convenience’s sake, look at the Stone Age as a sequence of three periods, Early, Middle, and Late, with divisions based on changes that occurred in the tools used by early humans and in their mode of 12 | chapter two living. As might be expected, the progression is from the simple to the more complex. early stone age Numerous hand axe sites in East Africa have been investigated by archaeologists , and they permit an understanding of how the hominids that made and used them lived. The...