Mesolithic–Neolithic

The Paleolithic was everywhere followed by the Mesolithic, a period when humans continued to use stone tools, mostly microlithic, and, while still in the hunting-and-gathering stage, depended less for their food supply on large mammals than on fish and mollusks. In Africa the evidence for the Mesolithic is still scanty. In the Lower Nile Valley, sites have been examined only at Ḥulwān (Helwan) and Kawm Umbū (Kom Ombo). At the latitude of Khartoum, for a considerable distance to each side of the Nile, have been found sites of a Mesolithic culture in which large, well-fired, unburnished pots decorated with designs impressed with a fish spine to make them resemble baskets were made and barbed bone harpoons were used for fishing. Arrows were mostly armed with stone lunates, and in general the microlithic industry shows relations with the Capsian (of northwestern Africa) and the Wilton (of east central Africa). The fauna indicates a climate much wetter than the present. The upper Kenya Capsian, with traces of similar pottery found at Gamble’s Cave, probably represents the Mesolithic of Kenya. Its pottery also copies basketwork. And while it is impossible to say where pottery was invented, the discovery of a prepottery Neolithic in Asia, with the existence of modern mud-lined baskets among the Nilotes, the accidental burning of which could have led to the invention of pottery, suggests that pottery was possibly an African discovery.

The Neolithic inventions that led to the rise of humans above the conditions of the Old Stone Age were made gradually in different places and probably over a long period. Some, such as the domestication of animals, took place more than once. In a famine, a wild animal will sell itself into slavery to humans for the food that will preserve its life. Thus, cattle and goats, while certainly domesticated in Asia, may have been independently domesticated in Africa, too. African jackals may have provided one breed of domestic dog, while the donkey and the cat are African. The polishing of stone implements was probably a by-product of the grinding of red ochre, in wide demand for its magic properties since the Paleolithic and extensively used in Africa in the Mesolithic and later. One result of the grinding of ochre was to polish the grindstone, and another, when the upper grindstone was used at an angle, was to develop a sharp edge that, produced accidentally, may have led to the idea of grinding the cutting edge of celts or other tools. Repeated pecking of the flat surfaces of the grindstones that became too smooth to grind ochre efficiently led to perforation of the stone and thus to the development of the disk macehead of the Nile Valley. Archaeology must establish where and when celts were first ground; but the partly polished celts of the Fayum and Khartoum are probably the earliest forms of that tool known. The cultivation of wheat, barley, and flax probably were Asiatic developments that first entered Africa through the Nile Delta. The cultivation of one form of wheat may have originated in Ethiopia, however.

In Egypt, civilization first reached its full development c. 3000 bce, but though it passed through Copper and Bronze ages and introduced copper tools to the Sudan, there is no evidence of either of these ages in the rest of Africa, where a transition from the Stone Age, generally still Mesolithic in type, directly to the Iron Age took place gradually during the last two millennia and in a few places did not take place until the middle of the 20th century. In some localities, an intermediate state, when Neolithic forms were used, occurred (e.g., Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ghana), but elsewhere (e.g., Kenya) polished-stone celts, or axes, seem so rare that they may have been comparatively late imports from the north.