African Palaeoclimate and Human Response: A Special Issue of the African Archaeological Review

Abstract

Acknowledging the patchiness of palaeoclimatic data, as well as a new appreciation of how complex the forcing mechanisms of Africa’s climates are, it would be premature to propose a grand synthesis of the continent’s climatic backdrop to human history and prehistory. That said, this “state-of-the-art” sampler from several regions of Africa serves several purposes. Although chronological resolution—palaeoclimatic and archaeological—continues to improve, the warning “Causation, Correlation or Co-incidence” still very much applies to all exercises in explanation. Even in those cases of high-resolution climatic sequences, dating of the corresponding prehistoric sequence often proves disappointing. And lastly (ending on an optimistic note), each contribution to this special issue features one or more new techniques of climate data extraction that might usefully be applied continent-wide.