Patterns of stone tool use among the earliest herders at Lake Turkana, northern Kenya.
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Past societies around the world repeatedly reconfigured their technologies to accommodate the challenges and opportunities of novel food-production strategies. In Africa, mobile lifestyles that focused on herding livestock emerged before plant agriculture. Mobile herding facilitated the expansion of Human, animal and plant populations, contributing to the development of social and economic diversity in sub-Saharan Africa. Broad geographic patterns were shaped by the specific solutions adopted by herders as they confronted new climatic and social situations. Stone-tool technologies were a primary component of early herder strategies, reflecting the ways in which these groups interacted with their environments. The lithic record provides a means of connecting regional archaeological patterns to broader trajectories of African food production. African pastoralism emerged in the Early Holocene Sahara, during a period of high rainfall and associated expansion of rivers, lakes and grasslands. Initially, people integrated herding into extant fisher-forager lifeways, while maintaining the widespread use of wavy-line pottery, barbed bone points and microlithic and bifacial toolkits. As herding became more important, groups gradually increased their investment in systematic lithic raw-material acquisition, and reorganised their lithic methodologies. Aridity in the early Middle Holocene pushed herders southward. In eastern Africa, domesticated Cattle, Bos taurus,Sheep, Ovis aries, and Goats, Capra hircus, first appear at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya by 5000 years ago. Northern Kenya proved an important staging ground for the southward expansion of pastoralism. As herders ventured farther from resource-predictable river valleys such as the Nile in search of grazing, they encountered unpredictable and drought-prone environments already occupied by hunter-gatherers. Herders responded to these conditions by developing new social institutions, including the unprecedented tradition of constructing monumental ‘pillar-site’ cemeteries. Despite evidence for climatic and social change on this moving frontier, many aspects of herder economic strategies remain unclear. This is due predominantly to the challenge of differentiating herder and hunter-gatherer toolkits, and identifying meaningful variation within or between assemblages.