Copper artifacts recovered from Nubia provide the earliest known evidence of metal smelting in sub-Saharan Africa, dating back sometime after 4000 B.C.E. – they were most likely imports from Egypt.
People started to cultivate yams, rather than digging up wild ones, as long as 10,000 years ago in both Africa and Asia, and some time later in the New World.
Ounjougou has yielded the earliest pottery found in Africa, and is believed to be one of the earliest regions (along with East Asia) in which the independent development of pottery occurred.
Archaeological studies have found that early human settlers arrived in West Africa around 12,000 B.C.E.
The San peoples, also known as the Bushmen, are members of various indigenous hunter-gatherer groups that are the first nations of Southern Africa, and whose territories span Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and South Africa.
The oldest tally sticks date to between 35,000 and 25,000 years ago, in the form of notched bones found in the context of the European Aurignacian to Gravettian and in Africa’s Late Stone Age.
Early humans inhabited the vicinity of Lake Malawi 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
The Semliki harpoon, also known as the Katanda harpoon, refers to a group of complex barbed harpoon heads carved from bone, which were found at an archaeologic site on the Semliki River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
All mitochondrial genomes today should be traceable to a single woman, a ‘mitochondrial Eve’. This woman, the researchers concluded, probably lived in Africa around 200,000 years ago.
Southern Africa was first reached by Homo sapiens before 130,000 years ago, possibly before 260,000 years ago.
