Late Prehistory

The earliest inhabitants of the Sudan
       The earliest traces of man on the Middle Nile region back 500,000 years - this is the dating of flint Acheulean handaxes. In the Late Paleolithic period (c. 40,000 BP) the emergence of the first representatives of homo sapiens on the Blue Nile and the Atbara was accompanied by small flint implements called microliths.

The beginnings of pottery
       About 9,000 BC (at the turn of the Pleistocene and the Holocene periods) far-reaching climate changes took place, and as a result the central part of the Sudan became part of the Sub-Saharan savannah zone. The sustenance of small communities inhabiting partly permanent settlements and seasonal camps consisted of an intensive adaptive economy: hunting, fishing, and gathering fruit and wild grains. The sites of the Mesolithic Early Khartoum culture (Saqqai, Khartoum Hospital ) yielded fragments of the oldest clay vessels in all of Africa.
       At the same time, in the region of the Second Cataract there appeared hunters of the Arkin culture, who hunted the large mammals of the savannah, and groups of people of the Qadan culture, who were based on fishing and mollusk gathering and thus dependent on the ecosystem of river valleys and the seasonally dry marshes.


First animal breeders
       The second stage of late prehistory on the Middle Nile began at the turn of the 6 th and 5 th millennia BC. Communities migrating from the Western Desert spread the keeping of domesticated animals - oxen, sheep and goats. These groups are jointly called the Khartoum Neolithic. There is no convincing evidence for planned soil cultivation at this time, or whether only wild species of millet and sorghum were consumed. From the territory of the Central Sudan the rudiments of animal breeding economy would spread both into the region of the Third Cataract and into the heart of the African continent.

Neolithic society
       The site of Kadero, ca 20 km north of Khartoum, has been investigated by Poznań archaeologists for over 30 years. The Khartoum Neolithic culture settlement and the nearby big cemetery offer a unique opportunity to reconstruct various aspects of life of its shepherd community. During excavations over 200 graves were unearthed, most of which contained only humble equipment or none at all; a small percentage, however, were burials of the elite concentrated at an isolated part of the cemetery. The wealthier dead were provided with high-quality pottery (including ritual vessels) and ornaments made of ivory, carnelian, rhyolite, malachite, shells from the shores of the Red Sea and amazonite from the Sahara. Clubs with stone heads were probably symbols o power.
       Similar social differentiation is characteristic of the Late Neolithic as well and can be observed, for example, at the cemetery from the first half of the 4 th millennium BC in Kadada.