The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior.

Widespread water balance shifts in closed basin lakes reveal major glacial–interglacial variations in rainfall and streamflow. Markedly arid conditions characterising intertropical Africa during the last glacial maximum were followed by an early Holocene lacustral phase in which annual precipitation between 24 °N and 8 °S exceeded 150% of the 1931–60 mean.

Environmental and climatic implications of late Quaternary lake-level fluctuations in Africa

Introduction: The Project of Historiography Section 1: Beginnings - East and West Introduction 1.1 Asian Historiography: Two Traditions 1.2 Historiography and Greek Self-Definition .3 Re-Reading the Roman Historians 1.4 The Historiography of Rural Labour 1.5 Towards Late-Antiquity Section 2: The Medieval World Introduction 2.1 The Historiography of the Medieval State 2.2 Saladin and the Third Crusade 2.3 Family and Household 2.4 The Medieval Nobility 2.5 Armies and Warfare 2.6 Popular Religion Section 3: Early-Modern Historiography Introduction 3.1 The Idea of Early Modern History 3.2 The Scientific Revolution 3.3 Intellectual History 3.4 The English Reformation 3.5 Popular Culture in the Early-Modern West 3.6 Revisionism in Britain Section 4: Reflecting on the Modern Age Introduction I: Revolution and Ideology 4.1 The French Revolution 4.2 The Soviet Revolution 4.3 National Socialism in Germany 4.4 Fascism and Beyond in Italy 4.5 Orientalism London: II Area Studies 4.6 China 4.7 Japan 4.8 India 4.9 Africa 4.10 North America 4.11 Latin America Section 5: Contexts for the Writing of History I: Hinterlands 5.1 History and Philosophy 5.2 History and Anthropology 5.3 History and Archaeology 5.4 History of Art II: Approaches 5.5 The Historical Narrative 5.6 The Annales School 5.7 Marxist Historiography 5.8 Women in Historiography 5.9 Comparative World History 5.10 Archives and Technology

Companion to Historiography

The Predynastic of Egypt, spanning an interval from ca. 4000 to 3050 B.C., was an eventful period. After the inception of food production in the Nile Valley at least a millennium before, it was the time when the identity of Egyptian society was forged. Egypt was settled by refugees from the deserts of the eastern Sahara and the southern Levant, fleeing from mid-Holocene droughts, and became a melting pot of indigenous Nilotes and desert herders, part-time cultivators, and hunters. Within a millennium, an increasing dependence on agriculture led to sedentary life and, in some cases, to the development of sizable communities. By 4000 B.C., the settled communities had also developed a distinct division of labor between men and women and ritual and religious beliefs in which women, grain, fertility, and death were salient and interrelated elements. The Predynastic communities were also faced by the most destabilizing factor of agricultural economy, namely, fluctuations of yield. Attempts to dampen the fluctuations through interregional integration led to the emergence of community representatives and eventually chiefs. Legitimation of the status of chiefs through affiliation with the traditional and supernatural power associated with women, fertility, and death and the acquisition of exotic goods stimulated trade and an industry in funerary goods. Enlargement of economic units through alliances, with occasional incidences of fighting, especially after 3600 B.C., led to the rise of a state society governed by supreme rulers. The wedding of the funerary cult of Late Predynastic Egypt with political power and military might was the basis for the most fascinating aspects of Ancient Egypt—religion and kingship.

The Predynastic of Egypt

Over the past 40 years, traditional perspectives on the constitution of human groups have been subjected to stringent critique within anthropology. This began with the dismantling of accepted “race” divisions after World War II and continued with analyses of the meaning and reality of African “tribal” distinctions from the 1960s until the present. Archaeologists, ethnographers, linguists, and historians of Africa now work within a research milieu where social interactions, cultural exchange, and the dynamic nature of group identifications are accepted as a normal part of the human experience. At the same time, new techniques have been developed for the examination of human history, techniques based upon an expanding repertoire of tools for the analysis of genetic variability in human populations. Perhaps the most striking result of this research has been Cavalli‐Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes. Rather less attention has been paid, however, to the conceptual relations...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/300144

Genes, Tribes, and African History.

Between the ninth and third millennia B.C. wetter conditions prevailed over most of Africa. Lakes and rivers were fuller and some of the internal basins were temporarily linked, especially in the ‘Middle African’ belt. This comprises the southern Sahara and Sahel, stretching from the Upper Niger to the Middle Nile, with a south-easterly extension into the Upper Nile basin and the East African rift valleys. This situation was exploited by people who developed a decidedly aquatic economy and culture. From their waterside camps and settlements archaeologists have recovered bones of fish and aquatic animals which these people ate, as well as the distinctive harpoon-heads carved from bone with which they obtained them, and also pottery, bearing peculiar decoration executed with fish-bones and water-shells, made in imitation of (fishing-) baskets. Boating and other cultural developments are deducible. The harpoons date back to 7,000 b.c. at least; the pottery dates back to more than 6,000 b.c. and was clearly an African invention. It reflects important developments in gastronomy and home life. In the Kenya rift valley the main stage of Leakey's ‘Kenya Capsian’ culture is essentially the local manifestation of this far-flung ‘aquatic civilization’. Its greatest extent was achieved during the wettest times of the seventh millennium b.c. , and probably involved the expansion of Negroid peoples across this continent-wide savanna belt. Also explained perhaps is the extensive, though now fragmented, distribution of languages which Greenberg combines in his ‘Nilo-Saharan’ super-family. It is suspected that aspects of this ancient aquatic way of life may be maintained or reflected by latter-day isolated or ‘unclean’ lake or swamp communities. This subject has been largely neglected by African culture-historians. Drier conditions in the late sixth and fifth millennia b.c. signalled a decline of this aquatic civilization and, in particular, broke its geographical continuity. Nevertheless, there was a qualified revival in many parts in the fourth and third millennia. In the Kenya rift this later phase seems to equate with the first stage of the ‘stone bowl cultures’. Around Lake Victoria a devolved relic survived until the eve of Bantu expansion about two thousand years ago. Other late or modified examples are known on the Nile and in the western Sudan. Generally, however, the viability and prestige of an aquatic way of life were undermined by the second millennium b.c. In the Sahara and Sahel as well as in the northerly parts of eastern Africa this decline was paralleled by the spread of pastoralism as a new basis of subsistence and prestige. Those who introduced cattle to Kenya from Ethiopia were Cushitic-speakers maintaining, significantly, a fish-taboo. This subject should prove of considerable historiographical interest. The aquatic way of life flourished through Middle Africa at the very time when grain-agriculture and stock-raising were being pioneered in the Near East; and the slow spread of agriculture in Africa, sometimes considered an indication of ‘backwardness’, may be partly explicable by the very success of the aquatic life and of its distinct cultural tradition which was ascendant for a while across the widest part of the continent.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700013864

The Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa

Malindi was founded—or, strictly speaking, refounded—in 1861 by Sultan Majid of Zanzibar. For historians this revelation, hitherto unemphasized rather than unknown, is probably the most exciting fact in Dr Martin's book. The obvious parallel, though he fails to notice it, is with Dar es Salaam, founded by the same sultan four of five years later. The reign of Seyyid Majid (1856-70) has been unfairly treated by historians (who have allowed the limelight to be stolen by his father Said and his half-brother and successor Barghash). Here, in the 1860s, was the court of Zanzibar, now a separate sultanate from Oman, projecting itself purposefully onto the mainland littoral with new towns and plantations exploited by slave labour. Malindi and Dar es Salaam should not be considered simply as further extensions of Arab activity: rather the Zanzibar! sultanate, appointing its own governors and stationing loyal Baluchi troups, was trying to compete on the mainland with the older harbours and settlements— Lamu and Mombasa, Bagamoyo and Kilwa Kivinje among others—where its subjects, Arab and Swahili, enjoyed a measure of independent wealth and power. There is no indication that Malindi was conceived by Majid as an alternative capital to Zanzibar town, as Dar es Salaam with its grandiose palace and name ('The House of Peace' or 'Paradise') specifically was. Nevertheless, in its first two or three decades Malindi proved, from the point of view of Zanzibar and foreign observers, the more successful of the two new harbour-settlements. Dar es Salaam's permanent success was not assured until the German annexation of the southern Swahili coast.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0021853700014614

Malindi in Retrospect - The History of Malindi: a geographical analysis of an East African coastal town from the Portuguese period to the present . By Esmond Bradley Martin. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1973. Pp. xvi + 301, maps, tables and photos. Soft cover: no price given.

southern Africa is almost constantly neglected. This is particularly glaring in the case of South Africa itself, and is curious in view of the fact that Marianne Cornevin reminds us of the phenomenal economic strength of the Republic, which towers over the rest of black Africa. Too much time is wasted in long passages on the political evolution of Asia and the colonial metropoles. This is particularly important in connexion with Egypt and the Mahgreb, intimately linked with the Arab Near East during the post-war period, and raises the problem of what place North Africa should assume in a general history of contemporary Africa. The most fundamental weakness of this book, largely responsible for the distortions noted above, lies in its almost exclusively political orientation. A few pages on general social and economic trends are included here and there, but always in the perspective of the emergence of nationalist elites or of problems of neo-colonialism. Independence is the constant point of reference, both during the colonial and the post-colonial eras. An attempt has been made to stress African initiative, but only in a political sense, or to explain political events. Detailed histories of political parties and charismatic leaders occupy much of the book, but seem curiously irrelevant to the Africa of the 1970s. The breakdown country by country makes it almost impossible to even guess at the continental or regional patterns of socio-economic change. The concentration on the state masks the fundamental and often growing weakness of the state in Africa, and gives too much importance to the declarations and legislation of unstable and often impotent governments. One thus has the frustrating feeling that one is watching a puppet show, without understanding who or what is pulling the strings. It is, of course, essential to stress that this reflects the bulk of the historiography on contemporary Africa, and that Marianne Cornevin was limited by the sources at her disposal. But this book should perhaps serve to remind us that a shift away from the purely political history of contemporary Africa is urgently needed.

J. E. G. Sutton

Papers

The Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa

Malindi in Retrospect - The History of Malindi: a geographical analysis of an East African coastal town from the Portuguese period to the present . By Esmond Bradley Martin. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1973. Pp. xvi + 301, maps, tables and photos. Soft cover: no price given.

East Africa . By W. T. W. Morgan. London, Longman (Geographies for Advanced Study), 1973. Pp. xx + 410, numerous figures and photos. £5.