Guinea - Ancient History
Only limited archaeological studies had been made of the area of West Africa constituting modern Guinea. Stone tools had been found in several localities in the country and were identified as belonging to Late Stone Age cultures, but few of the sites had been dated. Styles of workmanship indicated that at least some of the early toolmakers had probably come from the Sahara region to the north and northeast. The time of this movement was unknown, but it was speculated that changing living conditions brought on by the gradual desiccation of the Sahara, which had become quite noticeable by the third millennium BC, were an important factor in the migration.
Archaeological research in Guinea has confirmed the presence of fishing communities and farmers on the lands of Guinea for 3,000 years. Numerous foci of life have been highlighted. The green valleys of the Fouta Djallon and the fertile basins of the Upper Niger, which are suitable for gathering, hunting and fishing, attracted men early.
The arrival of the populations, according to the researchers, would be consecutive to the desiccation of the Sahara, followed by the drying up of the rivers, lakes and rivers. The populations moved to the wetter southern areas. The land between the rivers Senegal and Niger is becoming a privileged zone for the regrouping of the breeding and farming communities. While some groups headed for the Bafing and Falmee valleys, others settled in the Inner Niger Delta.
By AD 1000 peoples in the coastal region of present-day Lower Guinea, believed to have been mainly speakers of West Atlantic languages at that time, were generally cultivators. These groups experienced little pressure from outside. their own communities, and the development of political organization was minimal. Mostly they lived in small, independent or loosely associated villages and hamlets. The staple crop was rice, which had been introduced from the Niger River valley sometime during the first millennium AD. Fishing was also an important occupation for some, and cured fish and salt obtained by solar evaporation were probably trade items.
In the forested areas behind the coastal zone, in parts of the Fouta Djallon, and in the Forest Region of modern Guinea, other speakers of West Atlantic languages and presumably some Mandé languages roamed as hunters and gatherers. By AD 1000 many such groups had settled in isolated farming villages in forest clearings, where they also practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. Their adoption of a sedentary life had been encouraged by the new knowledge of iron smelting and forging that brought replacement of earlier stone farming implements by iron ones and made cultivation easier and more productive. As in coastal areas there was little stimulus for the development of central political controls, which was further discouraged by the difficulty of communications.
In contrast to the coastal and forest areas, the open land of the savanna was conducive to the early development of settled agricultural communities. During the first centuries of the Christian Era, technological advances in agriculture resulted in the growth of such communities in the broad savanna zone between the upper Niger River basin and the southern limits of the Sahara—a zone that includes the savanna region of modern Upper Guinea. This growth was accompanied by the gradual development of more complex societies in which social classes became differentiated and highly organized political institutions appeared that evolved into hereditary kingdoms.
In the first millennium AD, the first kingdoms were born in this region. Most of Guinean territory was an integral part of the successive empires of Ghana and Mali between the ninth and sixteenth centuries.
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