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Palæolithic Types of Implements in Relation to the Pleistocene Deposits of Uganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2013

E. J. Wayland
E. J. Wayland
Affiliation:
Director Geological Survey of Uganda
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Extract

The history of early man in Uganda is bound up with that of the inland sea now familiar to Europeans as Lake Victoria or the Victoria Nyanza. The area of this great lake is given as 26,828 square miles (Handbook of Uganda, Ed. II., 1920, p. 26), or about the size of Scotland, but its maximum depth is probably some-what less than the height above ground of the cross of St. Paul's Cathedral. Lake Victoria, then, is just a gigantic puddle.

The history of the Lake is a long one. Beginning as a natural sump, as it probably did in Miocene times, it reached its maximum, in all probability, in the Pliocene, when its area was doubtless quite double that ot its present surface, while its depth was at least four times as great as that now registered.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , 1924 , pp. 96 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1924

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References

page 96 note * The area of Scotland and the Scotch islands is given as 29,819 square miles.

page 96 note † The top of the cross is 365 feet above the ground.

page 101 note * Since this paper was read an account of “Some Primitive Stone Implements from Uganda,” by Smith, R. A. and Wayland, E. J. (17 pp. illus.)Google Scholar has been published by the Uganda Protectorate Geological Survey Dept., Jan. 1923.

page 101 note † Other and nearer areas might have been selected for comparison, but I choose north-west Europe partly on account of its distance, and partly on account of the fact that there the culture stages of the Stone-age have been worked out in considerable detail.

page 103 note * This tool was picked up by Mr. P. Perryman, of the Uganda Civil Service, at the foot of Mt. Debasian, in Karamoja, towards the end of the war. It was despatched by him to Oxford, but appears, in common with much ocean freight, to have been “sent to the bottom.” Judging by a sketch supplied to me by Mr. Perryman, the tool may have been an axe, or it may have been an unfinished digging stone.

page 103 note † Mr. E. B. Haddon, of the Uganda Civil Service, a keen anthropologist, and son of the well known Dr. Haddon, of Cambridge, has found a few digging-stones in the north-west of the Protectorate; H. E. Sir Robert Coryndon, the present Governor of Uganda, found one, probably of local origin, in a military store at Bombo, and I have been informed by a native chief that Mr. Baines, late of the Uganda Service, but now political officer in the Bukoba district cf Targanyita, opened up a cairn in North Buddu (Uganda) and found in it some bits of pottery, an iron hoe and a digging-stone (I have not been able to verify this statement). For a description of the digging-stone and stick as used by the Bushmen of South Africa see Sollas', “Ancient Hunters,” 1911, p. 227Google Scholar. It is to be noted that Professor Sollas regards the Bushmen as modern representatives of the Solutrians (loc. cit., pp. 271–306, and p. 382). The position of the digging-stone in the cultural series is, therefore, to be regarded as problematical.

page 104 note * In reference to a sketch supplied by the writer, Professor Seligman says: “The sketch you send is perfectly clear, there can be no doubt as to the Uganda tortoise-point of Mousterian type, so it looks as if Mousterian man ranged Africa from N. to South.”

page 111 note * Note in this connection, however, the occurrence of polished neoliths in quantity in “West Africa” (Nigeria, etc.), which is separated from Uganda by forest belts, etc.