Introduction

By its very nature archaeological evidence is almost always deficient and rarely tells us what we would really like to know. Our inquisitiveness, however, drives us to seek new evidence, ask more questions and keep looking. After more than a century of looking, the fossil evidence continues to point to Africa as the development centre for humanity. While little evidence has been found to show how large early human populations were and how they subsequently grew, it is always taken for granted that they were small, actually, very small. Besides the equivocal definition of what is ‘small’, the premise that our formative populations were ‘small’ could be wrong. There may have been several population centres that arose from an earlier single centre, where the human line broke away from a common ape ancestor. As evidence emerges that hominins may have divided from anthropoids as far back as the Upper Miocene, it is increasingly difficult to believe that they lived in extremely small populations (Brunet et al., 2002). Research during the last decade suggests that early hominins were distributed over a wide area of Africa and were not necessarily confined to eastern parts as previously suspected. Perhaps more importantly, it shows that they could survive in savannah and close to semi-arid environments. They were not necessarily confined to rainforests or dense forest eco-niches (Vignaud et al., 2002).