The Evolution of Culture in Africa

Abstract

At the best of times the prehistorian is at a considerable disadvantage when compared with his colleagues in the social or biological sciences in that his researches are of necessity based on incomplete evidence. So much of the culture in its full sense and of the physical population studied by the prehistorian has failed to survive the vicissitudes of preservation that his interpretations and reconstructions must often be based upon little more than the imperishable implements of stone and, if he is lucky, a few incomplete fossil fragments of the makers themselves. The position is not invariably as bad as that of course, and from the increasingly complex evidence surviving from late Upper Pleistocene time onwards, much can be deduced by the archaeologist working in close cooperation with his colleagues in the natural sciences on whom he is dependent for interpreting the environment. Until little more than a decade ago, however, the prehistorian's evidence for the earliest periods consisted of scarcely more than the most imperishable remains that favorable geological circumstances had preserved. In Europe, where prehistoric studies first began, the cultural evidence for man in pre-Upper Pleistocene times is almost invariably found in geological contexts-in gravels, sands or solifluction deposits of inter-glacial age-so that no deduction could be made as to his living habits, nor was it possible even to determine the full extent and nature of his tool assemblages since the artifacts themselves occurred redeposited and divorced from the place of their original manufacture and use. Many of the misconceptions concerning human cultural development arose from this lack of knowledge of the living places of the early Pleistocene hominids. It seems obvious, therefore, that we must concentrate on man's living sites if we are to learn much about his way of life, culture, physical appearance and capabilities in the earlier stages of his evolution. Recent work in Africa has shown that such living sites exist in many different parts of the continent sealed in datable geological contexts. The excavation of these by techniques not previously applied to such early sites is extending our knowledge of the human populations of those times in a way that would hardly have been believed possible twenty years ago. Because it was not affected by the glaciations that destroyed so much of the evidence in Europe and northern Asia, Africa, previously the Cinderella of the continents where prehistoric investigations are concerned, is now providing more factual evidence on human biological and cultural development in Lower and Middle Pleistocene times than any other part of the world. This is not to say that