Prehistoric Nigeria (Stone Age)

Prehistoric Nigeria is the long span of human settlement before farming, ironworking and the first identifiable cultures. The Library of Congress country study notes that the region was settled for millennia before agriculture spread about 3,000 years ago, but that comparatively little archaeological work has been done, so this early history can only be outlined.

The best-known early human find is from Iho Eleru ("Cave of Ashes"), formerly written Iwo Eleru, a rock shelter at Isarun near Akure in Ondo State. It was found in 1961 during a survey of the hills around Akure. According to Wikipedia, the Iho Eleru skull is about 13,000 years old, and the shelter contains Later Stone Age tools from the transition between the Pleistocene and the Holocene. The country study, written in 1990, gives a lower estimate of about 10,000 years for the skeleton and adds that stone tools at the site are some 2,000 years older still.

Wikipedia's history of Nigeria describes, in cautious terms, the wider Stone Age of West Africa: earlier stone-tool users who may have lived in the region hundreds of thousands of years ago, and Middle and Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers whose way of life eventually gave way to farming communities. It also records the Dufuna canoe, a dugout found in Yobe State and dated to around 6300 BC, as the oldest known boat in Africa.

Farming developed gradually. The country study says that pastoralists in the savanna had microlithic and ceramic industries from at least the fourth millennium BC, continued by the grain farmers of settled communities, while further south hunting and gathering gave way to farming on the edge of the forest in the first millennium BC, and yams were later grown in forest clearings. Stone axe heads used to open up the forest were later venerated by the Yoruba as "thunderbolts" thrown down by the gods.

The end of this period is not a single date: it overlaps with the beginnings of ironworking and of the Nok culture, which Wikipedia dates from about 1500 BCE (see the next period).