Southern Rhodesia may perhaps best be described as a high plateau between the Zambesi and the Limpopo Rivers. It has an area of approximately 152,000 square miles of which about a quarter is over 4000 ft. above sea level. The highest ground, which stretches south-west to north-east, forms a watershed which feeds the two great rivers, and if to-day the tributary streams are dry or reduced to a trickle of water in winter, there is abundant evidence to prove that, since the human race arrived, they have carried great quantities. The country has, however, been subject to varying climatic conditions during this period, as we shall see later, but it has proved itself capable of supporting human life under very favourable conditions for a long time. It is, in short, a country where we might reasonably expect to find some evidence of the presence of the earliest men who came to South Africa.

It will be readily understood that man, as soon as he had become what we understand by the use of the word, had everything to find out for himself. His dawning intelligence could not long rest content with things as he found them. He early felt the urge to adapt nature to meet his needs. Naked and defenceless, he needed to provide himself with food, to protect himself from the wild animals, and to shield himself from the cold. His inventive faculty thus came early into operation. While his first tools must surely have been pointed sticks, natural stones, or splinters of rock naturally fractured, these did not long satisfy him, and the first stage in his development was of necessity the adaptation of natural objects to his particular needs. In order to meet these, he doubtless experimented with all the suitable materials nature provided. Of his achievements we know nothing except in so far as his working in stone is concerned. In the absence in this country of the actual remains of these early people, we are thus limited in our knowledge of their cultural achievements, and the stone implement provides the only means by which we can measure them. Then it is only when we can satisfy ourselves that man has shaped it for his use that we can recognise it.