The Prehistory of East Africa

This book is the first book to synthesize every aspect of the prehistory of East Africa. When it was first published in England in 1954, it was at once recognized as the authoritative work on the subject.

The author tells of the important fossils found recently in East Africa by various expeditions led by the noted British archaeologist, Dr. L.S.B. Leakey, formerly Curator of the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. One of the fossils may be a 14 million year old ape in the direct line of human ancestry; two are the remains of ape-men; and one appears to be intermediate between Java and Peking Man, and Rhodesian Man (the African equivalent of Neanderthal Man). Considerable controversy exists among scientists regarding the evaluation of these finds. For example, there is the “Zinjanthropus” boise (or ” Nutcracker Man”) skull found in Tanganyika in 1959 by Dr. Leakey’s wife Meave, also an archaeologist. Some experts believe it to be a completely new genus, while others hold that it belongs to a previously know type of African ape-man. The dating of the skull also poses a question. Since the age assigned to it by the potassium-argon method is 1.7 million years and the fossil was found in one to the earliest deposits of the Pleistocene, before the true “Ice Age,” it would appear, then, that the Pleistocene lasted for almost 2 million years- double some of the current estimates.