ABSTRACT
Somewhere around human communities throughout the Old World entered upon the final phase of hunting and gathering existence, which was to end in the very gradual adoption of farming and stock-breeding. From the stone artefacts alone, it is clear that the Late Stone Age people of Africa, though still hunters and gatherers, were so in a very different sense from their predecessors. Every African villager knows the whereabouts of the local caves and rockshelters, and particularly of those with painted or engraved rock surfaces. For a human population of the Late Stone Age, which had achieved a technology adequate for a way of life based mainly on the rivers and lake shores, the practical significance of the Holocene Wet Phase was very great. In Africa south of the equator, where there had been no Holocene Wet Phase to stimulate change, the 'food-producing revolution' came later still.
