Stone Age Africa

The Stone Age is now beginning to be recognised as vital in establishing who we are and where we have come from. This period has long been neglected.

A fully up-to-date account of the evidence relating to the Middle Stone Age in Nigeria and the other countries of West Africa, based upon the author’s own fieldwork and extensive personal knowledge of the region and its archaeology.

This fascinating volume, assessing Lower and Middle Pleistocene African prehistory, argues that the onset of the Middle Stone Age marks the origins of landscape use patterns resembling those of modern human foragers. Inaugurating a paradigm shift in our understanding of modern human behavior, Grant McCall argues that this transition—related to the origins of “home base” residential site use—occurred in mosaic fashion over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. He concludes by proposing a model of brain evolution driven by increasing subsistence diversity and intensity against the backdrop of larger populations and Pleistocene environmental unpredictability. McCall argues that human brain size did not arise to support the complex patterns of social behavior that pervade our lives today, but instead large human brains were co-opted for these purposes relatively late in prehistory, accounting for the striking archaeological record of the Upper Pleistocene.

A textbook providing the only comprehensive and up-to-date account of African history between 500 B.C. and 1400 A.D. Also useful to students of archaeology.

This 1954 text analyses the relationship between physical geography and stone age culture within the Horn of Africa.