IN SETTING OUT TO MASTER THEIR OWN CONTINENT, AFRICANS MADE a first and crucial contribution to the general growth of mankind. Most physical anthropologists seem now to have accepted that vital evolutionary steps which led from near-men towards true men were taken in Africa: in some recent words of Leakey's that it was ‘the African continent which saw the emergence of the basic stock which eventually gave rise to the apes, as well as to man as we know him today’, and where ‘the main branch which was to end up as man broke away from those leading to the apes’.

Not all the experts would yet agree with Leakey's third claim for Africa's primacy in the production of man: that ‘it was also in Africa that true man separated from his manlike (and now extinct) cousins, the australopithecines or “near-men” of two million years ago’. But even if Africa was not in this direct sense the immediate birthplace of homo sapiens, there is now a wide consensus for the view, as Posnansky puts it, ‘that Africa was in some respects the centre of the Stone Age world’. Though only about 125,000 people may have inhabited the continent a hundred thousand years ago, according to a recent guess, they were probably more numerous than the population of any other continent. They had gone further, in other words, towards conquest of their environment. By the end of the Late Stone Age, they may have multiplied to as many as three or four millions.

They belonged to several indigenous types. Some of their surviving descendants include the Pygmies of the Congo forests and the Bushmen of the south-western deserts. These ‘small peoples’ were much more widely spread then than now. There may have been as many as a million Bushmen south of the Zambezi at the end of the Late Stone Age, whereas today there are fewer than 50,000. Other but related types included the ancestors of the Khoi (‘Hottentots’) of Southern Africa; the ancestors of the robust and dark-skinned ‘Negroes’ of western and central Africa; and those who had descended from a mingling of indigenous peoples with neighbouring Asians, in the north and north-east, that possibly occurred as early as the Middle Stone Age.