Clark assembled this volume as the first reasonably complete account of African prehistory, running from the earliest hominids of the Plio-Pleistocene to the point after about 500 BC when iron technology spread. Chapters are built to stand on their own, so material occasionally recurs; the editor treats that as intended rather than careless, and is scrupulous about how radiocarbon results are reported and where they have been calibrated against tree-ring sequences.

An opening chapter lays the physical groundwork: a continent of extremes, equatorial forest and the world's greatest hot desert, rift trenches and snow-capped volcanoes, basins lying well below sea level, and the climatic swings recorded in cave fills, lake margins, spring tufas and coastal gravels that decided where Acheulian populations could live.

Later chapters carry the story into the Saharan and Mediterranean Neolithic, the domestication of sorghum, millet and rice, Egypt and Nubia, and the first Iron Age.