The Glacial Maximum in Tropical Africa: 22 000-12 000 BP

Late Pleistocene human adaptations in the tropics and subtropics of sub-Saharan Africa, from the southern edges of the Saharan south to the Limpopo River, are perhaps the least well known of any major area in the Old World. For some parts of this area, for instance, Kenya and Ethiopia, research has focused primarily on earlier periods, to the extent that more excavated archaeological sites are known from the early Pleistocene than from the Late Pleistocene hypothermal, around 18 000 BP. In the more forested areas in or adjacent to the Zaire Basin, exploration has been very limited, and only a few archaeological sequences are known from any time period. West Africa south of the Sahel is almost completely unknown during this interval, and the few regional surveys conducted suggest that human settlement was sparse or absent in this area during the hypothermal. For the southern part of tropical Africa, preliminary regional sequences of Later Pleistocene industries have resulted from more intensive work in limited areas of Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, although one cannot assume the applicability of these sequences to the relatively unexplored adjacent regions of Botswana, Angola, or Mozambique.