This paper is an empirical investigation of the determinants of city growth in Australia from 1981 to 1991. Our basic goal is to explain the population and labour force growth of a cross‐section of cities in the time period using variables representing the initial characteristics of cities. While we find that city growth is negatively correlated with initial size, government sector employment and a city's level of specialization, we also find it to be positively correlated with various measures for the degree of human capital investment in the city. Our results, while simple and non‐structural, mirror the conclusions of studies in the US indicating the importance of studying city level growth in order to understand economy‐wide growth.

Between 1000 BC and AD 1000, or so the story goes, sub-Saharan Africa was the setting for one of the all-time great population movements of antiquity—the Bantu migrations. Sweeping to and fro across the continent in a kind of grand migrationary gavotte, absorbing or brushing aside the autochthonous hunter-gatherers, the ancestral Bantu speakers carried with them on their march the seeds of a settled life fueled by food production and iron technology. Their movements are represented by large arrows scything across big blank maps of the African interior. How good is the evidence that any of it ever happened?In this paper we shall examine some of the serious methodological and practical problems that bedevil the migrationary model. We shall also present an alternative model for the prehistory of sub-Saharan Africa: in brief, that the development of the Early Iron Age in Africa was a process rather than an event; that autochthonous populations gradually adopted the suite of traits that define the Early Iron Age, without any large-scale movement of peoples; and that increasing sedentarization actually led to a population decline which was only overcome after AD 500.The model constitutes a new paradigm that emphasizes continuity and takes into account a few observations that are awkward for the migrationary paradigm: that sub-Saharan Africa has a difficult topography that may put certain constraints on population movements, and that the continent was slowly filling up on its own when events starting in the sixteenth century turned the autochthonous peoples' lives upside down.

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