Early Human Occupations in Africa Essay -- African Inhabitation

Early Human Occupations in Africa Galana River, Tsavo National Park, Kenya Research on early human occupations in Africa is challenged with contextualizing artifacts with environmental landscape reconstructions. Understanding the landscape that humans inhabited is crucial for discerning how particular forms of technology (stone tools, grinding stones, ceramics) were used and how prehistoric people succeeded and failed in their modes of subsistence. This knowledge can teach us about how to develop sustainable alternatives that balance the needs of nature and humans alike. Research along the Galana River in Tsavo National Park , Kenya is providing a useful data set through which multiple, long-term habitations of several sites from the Middle to Late Holocene are currently being analyzed. Early foraging occupations of the site of Kahinju (5960 ±480 years bp, 5000  ±400 years bp ) correlate to pluvial periods as recorded in ÃŽ ´18 O ice core records from Mount Kilimanjaro (Thompson et al. 2002) . These occupations also correspond to periods of generally low periodicity in the El Nià ±o/...