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Cultural differentiation in Africa can be reconstructed from the archaeological evidence available. Early Acheulian hand-axe culture might have spread all over Africa, including West Africa.

Thus, about 50, 000 years ago the heavy browed Sangonans spread across most of Africa, south of the Sahara. They had learnt to make fire, lived in caves or rock shelters and were equipped with better tools consisting of choppers and scrappers.

The Sangonans were forest dwellers, occupying the great lakes of Central Africa, the present day Congo and Angola and around the Zambezi River. They probably spread into different areas of the forest zone of West Africa to give more impetus to Acheulian culture. This results in the development of variants of stone cultures found in West Africa of different ages as shown in the archaeological findings in Ugwuele 55, 000 B.C (Anozie 1980), Nsukka 2555 B.C. (Hartle 1967), Ukpa Rock Shelter 2935 B.C. (Hartle 1967 and 1972) Iwo Eleru 9250 (Shaw 1965, and sites in Ghana and Sierra Leone (Wai Ogodsu Anday BW 1973 and 1979)

The other folks that developed another stone culture in East Africa which was contemporaneous with the Sangonans are called Fouresmith culture. They were developed in a more open grassland and lightly wooded terrain of the Plateau regions to the south. The hand-axes were almond in shape and mostly made of gray shell found in the region. They made more use of wood, resin and bone and conducted ingenuous varieties of traps for capturing animals.

The West African Stone Age, particularly that of the Ugwuele, had relationship chronologically and typologically with those of the Sangonan and the Fouresmith. The northward migration of earlier folks into the blooming Sahara region via the Cameroons and southeastern Nigeria might have opened another new era of African culture in the Saharan and Western Africa. Regional variations in physical appearance began to appear 35, 000 years ago. Homo sapiens had appeared alongside the Neanderthals who became extinct by 10, 000 B.C. Small statured men occupied southern Africa. The Sangonans have been displaced by the Negroes. The Neanderthals occupying North Africa were displaced by new settlers from South Africa and probably by Asia Minor. These new types lived in larger groups and had regulated community life.