In most cases, African states retained an element of kinship-based social organization.

Most scholars now realize that centralized African states, like such states elsewhere in the world, arose from a variety of causes and most often resulted from internal forces present in various areas of the continent (Grif-fiths

s-torians both because of a lack of sources and because of prejudice. Initially, most historians accepted a view that only societies that are centralized were worth studying

This represents one of the most interesting aspects of the history of this continent’s peoples. There were many African societies that have been classified by political historians as stateless or decentralized.

Nevertheless, many writers of world history texts continue to treat human societies without writing as “prehistoric.”

Archaeological evidence indicates that African gatherers and hunters adapted their tools and ways of life to three basic African environments: the tropical rainforests with hardwoods and small game; the more open savannas with a diversity of large game living in grasslands, woods, and gallery forests along the rivers; and riverbank and lakeside ecologies found along major water-cou

Africa beginning with the first evidence of Homo sapiens sapiens,

The remainder of this chapter is divided into six sections. The first section outlines the evolution of human history in Africa from 100,000 BCE up to the early twentieth century.

In the past sixty years, specialists in African history have learned to use historical linguistics, oral traditions, and other sources to overcome the apparent lack of evidence and develop a far better under

All of these peoples spoke languages with the word-stem ntu, or something very similar to it, meaning “person.” The pre-fix ba denotes the plural in many of these languages so that ba-ntu means, literally, “people.” The source of these languages and the farming and herd-ing cultures associated with them and how they became so widespread in Africa were major questions by the mid-twentieth century.

The fishing cultures, which evolved near the many lakes and rivers in the African savannas between the Sahara and the forests and in eastern Africa in the wet period that followed the last ice age, allowed relatively large stationary settlements to grow.

Savanna-dwelling gatherers and hunters, few if any of whom exist today, led similarly mobile lives but often specialized in the collection of wild cereals that grew on the grassy plains and the occasional hunting of large grass-eating animals—giraffe, zebra, warthog, and many species of antelope.

Archaeological evidence indicates that African gatherers and hunters adapted their tools and ways of life to three basic African environments: the tropical rainforests with hardwoods and small game; the more open savannas with a diversity of large game living in grasslands, woods, and gallery forests along the rivers; and riverbank and lakeside ecologies found along major water-c