The classic account of the riparian lifestyle of this period comes from investigations in Sudan during World War II by British archeologist
Anthony Arkell.
[5] Arkell's report described a Late Stone Age settlement on a sandbank of the
Blue Nile which was then about 12 feet (3.7 m) higher than its present flood stage. The countryside was clearly savanna, not the present-day desert, as evidenced by the bones of the most common species found in the middens — antelope, which require large expanses of seed-bearing grasses. These people probably lived mainly on fish, however, and Arkell concluded, based on the totality of the evidence, that rainfall at the time was at least three times that of today.
The physical characteristics derived from skeletal remains suggested that these people were related to modern Nilotic peoples, such as the Nuer and Dinka. Subsequent radiocarbon dating firmly established Arkell's site to between 7000 and 5000 BCE. Based on common patterns at his site and at French-excavated sites already reported from Chad, Mali and Niger (e.g., bone harpoons and a characteristic "wavy line" pottery), Arkell inferred "a common fishing and hunting culture spread by negroid people right across Africa at about the latitude of Khartoum at a time when the climate was so different that it was not desert. The originators of the wavy line pottery are as yet unidentified.
In the 1960s, the archeologist Gabriel Camps investigated the remains of a hunting and fishing community dating from about 6700 BCE in southern Algeria. These pottery-making people (the "wavy line" motif again) were black African rather than Mediterranean in origin and (according to Camps) evidenced definite signs of deliberate cultivation of grain crops as opposed to simply the gathering of wild grains.[6] Later studies at the site have shown the culture to be hunter gatherers and not agriculturalists, as all the grains were morphologically wild, and the society was not sedentary.
Human remains were found by archaeologists in 2000 at a site known as
Gobero in the
Ténéré Desert of northeastern
Niger.
[7][8] The Gobero finds represent a uniquely preserved record of human habitation and burials from what is now called the
Kiffian (7,700 to 6,200 B.C.) and the
Tenerian (5,200 to 2,500 B.C.) cultures.
