[1] 'Toolkits' are also referred to as 'technologies' or 'industries' by archaeologists.
[2] BCE stands for 'Before the Common Era.' This is the same dating as 'BC' or 'Before Christ.'
[3] Prehistoric cultures or industries are often named for the site at which they were first discovered. It is called a 'type site.'
[4] The 'Old World' is the opposite of the 'New World,' and thus includes Africa, Europe and Asia.
[5] Microlithic, of course, means small stone tools. By this time people in some regions had developed the means to make fish hooks and needles from stone.
[6] Nilo-Saharan is one of the five language families thought to have originated on the Continent. The others are Afro-Asiatic, Congo-Kordofanian, and Khoisan.
[7] The term 'Food Production Revolution' refers to the same phenomena and era as the term 'Agricultural Revolution.'
[8] Adrienne Zihlman, "Women as Shapers of the Human Adaptation," in Woman the Gatherer, (New Haven, 1981) p. 75 and passim. The 'reproductive success model' is the name given to the theory developed by Zihlman in this chapter.
[9] Zihlman, p. 93.
[10] Children almost certainly nursed for the first 3-4 years of their lives, thus placing an increasingly large burden on their mothers.
[11] The term 'food production' includes both animal and plant food sources. It involves, at its most basic, the practice of selecting certain wild plants or animals for breeding and cultivation under control of humansfor the purpose of eating them. This process is also know as 'domestication.' After several generations of deliberate selection and breeding domestic plants and animals were no longer like their wild ancestors, but came to form new 'domestic' species. Domestic species of plants and animals are, by definition, dependent on their human owners. The term 'cradles of agriculture' refers to those areas where certain plants and/or animals were first domesticated.
[12] The term 'Neolithic' (New Stone Age) refers to the time when a particular region moves from primary dependence on foraging (gathering and hunting) to primary dependence on food production. The terms agriculture, horticulture, as well as nomadic herding or cattle raising are all associated with food production, and thus, with the Neolithic.
[13] The '4th millennium' BCE refers to the thousand years between 3999 and 3000 BCE. Note that in the time 'before the common era,' that is BCE, we are counting down to 1, thus the numbers get smaller as events get closer in time to today. The last millennium before the Common Era (i.e. Christ's traditional birth date) runs from 1999 to 1 BCE. For convenience, numbers designating years BCE are usually written with a minus sign before them.
[14] The word 'colonize' is here used to mean to open up new lands for human habitation by clearing land for farms, or scouting out good pastures, or both.
[15] In fact the concept of radical distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the material and immaterial, the living and the dead, and between the secular and spiritual, does not become common until the advent of the modern, scientific, industrial age in which we live, that is, no more than about 300 years ago.
[16] The term 'state' is a very important one for the study of history. It does NOT generally mean a subdivision of a country, like it does in the United States of America. The term 'state' in historical writing refers instead to countries (like the USA) that consist of a specific territory whose inhabitants acknowledge a sovereign central government, i.e., one not under the control of any outside country or ruler. The key concepts here are territory, central government, and sovereign. 'States' take on a kind of personality, like modern corporations, in that they are recognized and 'do business' with other states, and they make and enforce policies for the inhabitants of their territory. There are peoples, usually called 'nations' or 'tribes,' that share a territory, speak the same language, and have a common socio-economic system, but are not organized as states, since they have no central government with formal over the territory. Many peoples, in Africa as elsewhere, maintain law and order among themselves without recourse to centralized institutions of government. However, historically most densely populated territories have developed (or had imposed on them) state forms of government, the most common of which is form of monarchy.
[17] For further reading on ancient Egypt Volume II of the UNESCO General History of Africa is recommended. This volume is edited by G. Mokhtar and is entitled, Ancient Civilizations of Africa.
[18] Barbara S.Lesko, Becoming Visible, 2nd edition, (Boston, 1987) p. 48.
[19] Both the terms 'Western' and 'African' are meta-historical, denoting very general historical spheres or traditions that have been constructed entirely by hindsight. In other words, when 'African' was being formed, the people involved did not necessarily understand themselves to be 'African; when 'Western' was being formed, the people involved did not call themselves 'Western,' or even 'Europeans.'
[20] This is particularly important since classical Greek civilization is considered to be foundational for much later 'Western' (Western European) civilization ( of which modern American civilizations are offshoots).
