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African Kingdoms
Early Cultures
Khormusan Industry (Late Palaeolithic)
(Egypt) c.40,000 - 16,000 BC
Tool-making from Africa's
fading Aterian culture
reached ancient Egypt
around 40,000 BC, generating the Khormusan industry. A start
date for this industry is still somewhat negotiable though, being
anywhere between 40,000 BC and 30,000 BC, a span of ten thousand
years.
The people of this culture developed advanced tools not only from
stone but also from animal bones and hematite. With these they were
able to hunt and fish along the banks of the Nile. They also
developed small arrowheads which resembled those of
Native Americans, even though no bows have been found in
Khormusan deposits.
Excavations along the Nile have produced a series of discoveries
which hint at temporary occupation over time by a number of groups
from a number of different directions, and not just within Africa.
One of these was Abbevillian - formerly known as Chellean - a
culture of Homo Neanderthalis in
Europe.
Another
was Acheulean, both primitive and developed, with this being an even
older culture of Homo ergaster and Homo Heidelbergensis,
while there also exist signs of an
Egyptian form of
the Clactonian, another Homo Heidelbergensis culture. All of
these cultures show constant habitation of the region even by early
humans (see feature link for more on H Heidelbergensis and
early human chronology). All of these show constant habitation of
the region even by early humans.
All of these primitive cultures, of course, predate the Aterian. The
Khormusan itself stretched down the Nile and into what is now
Sudan (formerly
regions of Nubia). It
was originally though to be an Upper Palaeolithic culture, but
later revisions brought it down into the Middle Palaeolithic and
then into the later period.
The end of the Khormusan industry came around 16,000 BC with the
appearance of other cultures in the region, including the Gemaian.
The Sebilian culture more directly replaced it though, via the
Halfan in-between,
although it added little to the extant tool technology which,
during its course, had become more refined and specialised by
practitioners along the Nile Valley.
Archaeological finds are constantly being made, and archaeological
cultures are frequently being updated with new information. Get in
touch
here
if this page also requires updating.
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Just as the Aterian is
fading, the Late Palaeolithic begins in
Egypt around this
time. The Nazlet Khater skeleton is unearthed in 1980 from the banks
of the Nile. Two years later it is dated from nine samples which range
between 35,100-30,360 years. This specimen is the only complete modern
human skeleton from the earliest Late Stone Age period in Africa.
The Sahara has undergone a gradual transition from
sweeping grassland to dessicated sand on more than
one occasion, notably around 30,000 BC (and again
around 2000 BC)
Some of the oldest-known buildings are discovered in Egypt by the
archaeologist, Waldemar Chmielewski. They are located along the
southern border near Wadi Halfa. These are mobile structures which
are easily disassembled, moved, and reassembled by hunter-gatherers.
The
background to this period is one of the rolling grasslands of the
Sahara which contain abundant vegetation and food, but which is
fading. The climate is beginning to dry up, the rolling grasslands
have started receding, and the food supplies have begun to vanish
(see feature link for more on a later repetition of the same
grassland-to-sand process).
c.16,000 BC
Thanks to the Sahara's cycle of grass-to-sand, humans in this region
have been forced to make their way to the Nile Valley with its readily
available water, game, and arable land. Over the course of about two
thousand years Africa's
Khormusan fades into the intermediate
Halfan culture.
