ABSTRACT
The finely knapped microliths of the later community were used on the plains of Karamoja and Turkana. Some stone-flaking techniques in Karamoja resembled those used by the industries of the Saharan Neolithic and the Doian people of southern Somalia, also around granite inselbergs. Despite the lack of documentary evidence before the end of the nineteenth century, linguistic reconstruction and material culture allow many things to be said about previous human settlement in Karamoja and about Nilotic history. The Nilotes had begun to shift south over a millennium before any Christian influence, though at different rates, and changing in the process, but there is very little archaeological knowledge available of this time when the Nilotes began to split up into their Southern, Eastern and Western divisions. In 1400bc, there were two main groups involved: the Nilo-Saharan Eastern Sudanic, as evidenced by Egyptian loanwords in Nubian, and the Afroasiatic Northern Cushites.
