The archaeology of the core area of Buganda is very little known, but enough work has been done in neighbouring lands for faint outlines of the regional prehistory to be discernible. We know that hominids, members of the human family, lived in the Lakeland almost if not quite as early as in the lands of the East African Rift, and that it was in the mainstream of cultural evolution throughout the Pleistocene epoch. With the coming of the Holocene, however, some ten thousand years ago, the record becomes very sparse. The reason seems to be that, as rain returned to Africa after the great late Pleistocene drought, dense equatorial forest spread eastwards to the shores of Nalubaale, and was shunned by the hunter-gatherers of the Late Stone Age, who were mostly adapted to a savanna way of life. To the north, things were moving fast during the early Holocene. From the expanded lakes of northern Kenya right across to Lake Chad and the middle Niger fishing communities became settled enough to make earthenware vessels to hold their stews, developing the art of pottery in apparent independence. By the end of the fifth millennium BC, as noted earlier, some settlements on the middle Nile, just downstream from Khartoum, had acquired domestic animals from further north and were probably experimenting with the northern practice of sowing selected cereal grains. The southward spread of this new, ‘neolithic’ economy seems to have been slow but, by the end of the second millennium BC at the latest, pastoral and perhaps marginally agricultural communities were established in the highlands of Kenya and north-central Tanzania.