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

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.