Central Africa and the Emergence of Regional Identity

The record of east Africa is rich in the fossils of Middle Pleistocene hominids and the detritus that represents the material record of their behaviour. For archaeology and human palaeontology, as for any historical discipline, the order in which discoveries are made has a profound impact on the growth of knowledge and on the interpretation of new finds. This chapter therefore begins with a brief review of the history of research into the Middle Pleistocene of east Africa and a discussion of its hominid fossil record. It seeks to correct two misapprehensions about the Middle Pleistocene of east Africa: first, that the Middle Pleistocene may be equated with the handaxe and with the Acheulian industry, and second, that handaxes and the Acheulian are uniform both across space and through time. In fact, the Middle Pleistocene record of east Africa is highly variable. Aspects of heterogeneity in Acheulian lithic technology discussed here include variability in biface shape, differences in approaches to biface production, and specialised and unspecialised flake production techniques. A further aspect of variety is the presence of many occurrences that lack bifaces altogether. The disappearance of the Acheulian and its replacement by MSA technology is an important Middle Pleistocene phenomenon. It seems to be related to the origin of the Homo sapiens lineage and is accompanied by a number of novel behavioural markers. This review emphasises evidence from the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya, which provides a wellcalibrated sequence spanning much of the Middle Pleistocene (see figure 7.1).