Middle Stone Age
The Middle Stone Age (or MSA) was a period of African prehistory between the Early Stone Age and the Later Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50–25,000 years ago. The beginnings of particular MSA stone tools have their origins as far back as 550–500,000 years ago and as such some researchers consider this to be the beginnings of the MSA. The MSA is often mistakenly understood to be synonymous with the Middle Paleolithic of Europe, especially due to their roughly contemporaneous time span, however, the Middle Paleolithic of Europe represents an entirely different hominin population, "Homo neanderthalensis", than the MSA of Africa, which did not have Neanderthal populations. Additionally, current archaeological research in Africa has yielded much evidence to suggest that modern human behavior and cognition was beginning to develop much earlier in Africa during the MSA than it was in Europe during the Middle Paleolithic. The MSA is associated with both anatomically modern humans ("Homo sapiens") as well as archaic "Homo sapiens", sometimes referred to as "Homo helmei". Early physical evidence comes from the Gademotta Formation in Ethiopia, the Kapthurin Formation in Kenya and Kathu Pan in South Africa.
Early history of South Africa
The Late Stone Age in South Africa corresponds to the later phase of the Sangoan, beginning about 50,000 years ago, followed by Lupemban culture, from about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago (also known as "Second Intermediate", between Middle and Late Stone Age.
The term Late Stone Age was introduced for South Africa in 1929 by John Hilary Goodwin and C. van Riet Lowe
The Lupemban is followed by the so-called Albany industry (12,000 to 9,000 years ago). Finally, the time from 9,000 to 2,000 years ago (7th to 1st millennia BC) is accounted for by the so-called "Wilton inventory" microliths.
Beginning around 2,000 years ago, there are trances of pastoralism. This reflects the arrival of the Khoikhoi herders; from this time, hunting and gathering gradually gave way to herding as the dominant economic activity. The arrival of livestock is thought to have introduced concepts of personal wealth and property-ownership as well as the establishemt of a political structure of chiefdoms.