ABSTRACT
This book is about change in Africa, the changes that have occurred over the last twenty millennia, but principally over the last ten. (We do not deal with the older ‘Early Humankind’ story revealed in the eastern half of Africa; we are entirely concerned with modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.) There have been many changes in the environment, there have been changes in the way people have lived, there have been changes in the interactions between these two. In the vast continent of Africa these changes were not uniform: there are today, and always have been, many differing environments in Africa, and the ways different people have exploited these environments have also varied. Change does not necessarily mean a complete break with what went before; change often came to an underlying continuity.
