Cultural transitions in the Middle Stone Age records of North Africa: an overview from Morocco

 Bouzouggar, A.¹ and Barton, R.N.E ²

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

2 Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK

An intensely debated issue in human evolutionary research is the African origins and dispersal of Homo sapiens into North Africa.  Significant uncertainty remains on the nature, timing and associated paleoenvironments with cultural differentiation of the North African Middle Stone Age (NAMSA) and recent excavations and associated various dating techniques have spawned a new hypothesis that the NAMSA groups appeared as early as 300,000 yrs ago in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco (Hublin et al., 2017). Knowledge is highly limited on this MSA population expansion, particularly when these early hominids appeared initially, the duration of occupation and the palaeoenvironmental context during occupation.  There is an especially rich archaeological record near Casablanca (Rhodes et al., 2006).However it is unclear when these dispersals took place in North Africa or how successful they were initially. Research in some sites in Morocco provides relevant results demonstrating exceptional potential covering the critical periods of the possible emergence of the blade technology, bifacial foliates, the persistence of some late Acheulean “archaic tools” and the precocious appearance of symbolic artefacts and other behavioural indicators of the cognitive complexity (Bouzouggar et al., 2007). It should also be possible to demonstrate whether Northwest Africa served as a refugium even during the most arid periods of the last interglacial-glacial cycle.

References:

• Bouzouggar, A., Barton, R.N.E., Vanhaeren, M., D'Errico, F., Collcutt, S., Higham, T.F.G., Hodge, R., Parfitt, S., Rhodes, E., Schwenninger, J-L., Stringer, C., Turner, E., Ward, S., Moutmir, A. & Stambouli, A., (2007), 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 104 (24),9964-9 
• Hublin, J.-J., Ben-Ncer, A., Bailey, S. E., Freidline, S. E., Neubauer, S., Skinner, M. M., Bergmann, I., Le Cabec, A., Benazzi, S., Harvati, K., & Gunz, P. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco) and the Pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature, 546, 289-292. 
• Rhodes EJ, Singarayer JS, Raynal J-P, Westaway KE & Sbihi-Alaoui FZ (2006) New age estimates for the Palaeolithic assemblages and Pleistocene succession of Casablanca, Morocco. Quaternary Science Reviews, 25(19-20), 2569-2585