11 - The Future of the First Africans' Past

Summary

Who are, or were, the first Africans? The question may seem strange given all that has gone before, but it is pertinent to ask it now because it leads directly into several other important issues, such as the responsibilities of contemporary archaeologists to the presentday inhabitants of the African continent, what it means to be indigenous in an African context, and how academic researchers can best establish connections between the ethnographic and archaeological records. In this, our final chapter, we address these questions first, while briefly touching, too, on some of the infrastructural challenges facing archaeology in Africa. This done, we identify and summarise the key points that we feel emerge from our survey and look forward to new patterns of research in the future.

THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Who Is Indigenous and What Does the Term Mean?

Our own usage of the phrase the first Africans has been, to a degree, deliberately ambiguous. One of the reasons for selecting it was to emphasise the importance of Africa in the human evolutionary story and of the archaeological evidence for this. In this sense, the phrase carries a clear chronological connotation. More specifically, it also draws attention to the fact that for all but a fraction of their existence, behaviourally modern humans have practised hunting and gathering as a way of life. In that sense, hunter-gatherers, and not just earlier, now extinct hominin taxa, were indeed the first Africans.