Objectives and goals
The objective of the Lake Victoria Prehistory Project (LVPP) is to understand the natural and cultural history of equatorial Africa’s Lake Victoria basin. Lake Victoria is the largest lake in Africa and today supports some of the densest human populations on the continent. From the perspective of deep time, the lake has served as an enormous rain gauge over its approximately 400,000-year history, expanding and contracting with cyclical changes in global climate. The research of the LVPP aims to understand the relationships among global climate change on the surrounding plants, animals, and particularly human populations. To date, our efforts have focused on the last 100,000 years or so, during intervals of extreme aridity when the lake was completely desiccated, the area covered by grassland, savanna and desert fauna, and early humans that probably included Homo sapiens using Middle Stone Age technology.