Relevance of chronological tools to discuss human occupation continuity/discontinuity in Northwestern Africa before the LGM 

Eslem Ben Arous ¹, Christophe Falguères ¹, Roland Nespoulet¹, Mohamed Abdeljalil El Hajraoui2

¹ UMR CNRS 7194 HNHP, département Homme et Environnement, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle –

Université de Perpignan Via Domitia - Sorbonne Universités, Paris, France

² Institut National des Sciences de l'Archéologie et du Patrimoine (INSAP), Rabat, Morocco

Recent archeological discoveries in North Africa brought this area back to the heart of the debate on the origins and dispersal of Homo sapienswithin and out of Africa. 

During the Late Pleistocene a major technical, cultural and anthropological shift corresponding to Middle Stone Age/Later Stone Age transition occurred in North Africa. But this major period remains not well understood and still debated about her significance and duration. The environmental contexts of these key behavioral transitions are not clear. Due to the lack of reliable dating evidence and well stratified records, particularly across the period 70–20 ka, late Pleistocene models of modern human migrations have proven difficult to describe it spatially and temporally. The human occupation continuity/discontinuity question from the Middle Stone Age to the Later Stone Age through North Africa is still debated. 

This work focuses these questions of the human occupation continuity/discontinuity during the Late Pleistocene by the example of the Temara caves, characterized by an important coastal caves concentration. Recently, a multi-chronological approach applied to many caves of this region show how it is possible to precise the chronological resolution of this transition and to compare it with environmental and climate data available.