Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The cultural evolution and early survival of our species are major research subjects in paleoanthropology. For over two decades two regions of Africa have been at the forefront of this research: northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa. Both of them have rich stratified deposits spanning the Middle and the Later Stone Ages, with abundant faunal, paleoenvironmental, and marine shell records, remains of plants, advanced lithic and bone technologies, well preserved combustion features, and traces of symbolic behavior. Despite their robust absolute age models, and the excavations largely based on the same state-of-the-art excavation protocol, up to now these regions and their data have never really been compared and integrated into higher-resolution cross-regional studies. Building on the continuous work in the Cape and the renewed excavations of Rabat-Temara caves in Morocco, in this session we bring together researchers involved in these projects. The primary goals of this session is to advance our understanding of early human cultural evolution within the context of these coastal landscapes, establish future interregional collaborations, and to work on further standards of acquisition of data used to address the character and importance of coastal resources for human evolution.

Other Keywords
Human Behavioral Ecology • Africa • Material Culture and Technology • Coastal and Island Archaeology

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-16 of 16)

  • Documents (16)
Documents
  • The appearance of bifacial technology in the Middle Stone Age of Bizmoune Cave, Morocco (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Steven Kuhn.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The Middle Stone Age Aterian of North Africa shows a high level of continuity in artifact forms and modes of reduction. This continuity probably reflects stable environments in near-coastal parts of North Africa, combined with the notable adaptability of Homo sapiens. However,...

  • Assessing the intensity of coastal resource use by micromorphological analyses (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ximena Villagran.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Micromorphology has become a vital part of the toolkit for site formation process analyses in any archaeological context. The technique has been little applied in coastal settings, with most of the work focusing on shell-matrix sites in a few coastal areas of the world. In such...

  • Coastal Foraging at a Shifting Shore: Assessing Late MIS 3 Coastal Resource Use at Knysna Eastern Heads Cave 1 on the South Coast of South Africa (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Naomi Cleghorn.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early MSA coastal forager record of the African southern coast includes considerable variation in foraging strategies. The earliest sites show evidence of systematic use of coastal resources as part of a broader foraging strategy. True shell middens appear slightly later and...

  • Comparing Northern and Southern African Coastal Adaptations Through Faunal Remains (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Teresa Steele.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of zooarchaeological research on faunas from coastal sites along the Cape of South Africa have documented human subsistence patterns during the Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA) and the subsequent Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene Later Stone Age (LSA). MSA humans regularly...

  • The earliest phases of occupation at Klasies River Main Site, southern Cape coast, South Africa (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Wurz.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Klasies River main, a well-known site in South African Middle Stone Age research, contributed significantly to palaeoanthropological evidence on early humans, and to knowledge of early human behaviour and palaeoenvironments. The earliest layers in Cave 1 at Klasies River is known as...

  • Justification for the comparative analysis of occupations of the coast in South Africa and Morocco during the Middle Stone Age (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Curtis Marean.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Twenty years ago, discussions of coastal resource use in paleoanthropology were largely limited to a handful of papers. Today, the antiquity of coastal resource use and its significance is a vigorously debated research question in paleoanthropology. Coastal resources are important for...

  • Last Interglacial environments of the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain: plant wax biomarkers from Knysna Easterns Heads 1, Cape south coast of South Africa (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Irene Esteban.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> The South Cape region of South Africa, part of the Cape Floristic Region, is a crucial area for investigating Pleistocene ecosystems and human evolution dynamics. The transition from the Middle to the Later Stone Age in this region coincides with the exposure of the...

  • Middle and Late Pleistocene human occupation in Morocco and cultural evolution of early Homo sapiens (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Zeljko Rezek.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Even though the archaeological record left by groups of earlier Homo sapiens can be found across the African continent, more substantive knowledge of human biological and cultural evolution comes only from few regions, one of which is northwest Morocco. Stratified deposits, most...

  • North African Atlantic coast: A major refuge during the Late Pleistocene (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ismail Ziani.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North Africa holds a central position in the debate on the emergence and evolution of our species, thanks to numerous archaeological discoveries, especially the unearthing of the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens in Morocco, dated to 300 ka. Additionally, the discovery of various...

  • Paleoclimate Proxy Data and the Human Scale: Late Pleistocene Climate Variability and Forager Subsistence at La Grotte des Contrebandiers, Morocco (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kayla Worthey.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Understanding the climatic context of the human occupations of coastal landscapes in the Middle Stone Ages of North and South Africa is a necessary first step towards contextualizing early proliferations in these two regions of symbolic and functional technologies commonly...

  • Prey size in the MIS 5 and early MIS 4 levels at Pinnacle Point 5-6N, South Africa, and a comparison to regional prey size trends in South Africa and Morocco (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Fahey.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Debates about the origins of precocious cultural behaviors appearing in Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 5 and 4 in Africa often center on changes in subsistence strategies or demographic pressures. Patterns of prey size reconstructed from archaeofauna can be a useful proxy in detecting...

  • A proposed comparative research strategy to investigate the heat treatment of stone raw material in northern and southern Africa (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only John Murray.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The heat treatment of stone is thought to be an important proxy for human cognition and social learning due to the complex sequence of events that combines multiple unrelated processes and objects. As early as 162,000 years ago humans on the south coast of South Africa were heating a...

  • Reevaluating the dietary role of coastal resources in Later Stone Age Hunter-Gatherers of Northwest Morocco: Insights from isotopic analyses (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Zineb Moubtahij.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> Archaeological sites in Northwest Morocco have provided valuable insights into early modern human behavior, particularly regarding the role of coastal resources, such as shells, in symbolic practices. Although some sites contain mollusc and fish remains, determining the exact...

  • The use of cryptotephra to address big questions through improved age models and inter-regional comparisons (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jayde Hirniak.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using far-travelled volcanic ash in tephrochronological studies has transformed this technique. Traditionally, tephrochronology used visible tephra layers. However, methodological advances extended its capabilities to detect non-visible horizons (cryptotephra) which can be traced...

  • Zooarchaeological analyses of Howiesons Poort and post-Howiesons Poort fauna at Klasies River, southern Cape, South Africa: Environmental change and subsistence behaviour in MIS 4 and 3 (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jerome Reynard.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The transition from MIS 4 to 3 encompassed significant behavioural change in southern Africa. In this region, the Howiesons Poort (HP) techno-complex, generally dated to MIS 4, is associated with more evidence of innovative behaviours, technologies and tools. In the post-HP, during...

  • Zooarchaeology of the vertebrate faunal remains from the Middle and Later Stone Age deposits at Contrebandiers Cave, Temara, Morocco (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hallett.

    This is an abstract from the "Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrebandiers Cave is located on the Atlantic Coast of Morocco and is approximately 250 meters from the current shoreline. Harold Dibble and Mohamed El Hajraoui led excavations at Contrebandiers Cave from 2007 to 2011 and plotted finds with total stations. Middle Stone Age (MSA) and...