East African MSA: regionalisation and variability

Summary

The Late Pleistocene is a central period in the story of human origin, being associated with the spread of modern humans within and Out of Africa. While fossils and genetics provide the evolutionary setting for the origin of our species, stone tools are often the only archaeological remain attesting of Early Modern Human behavior, and constitute the bulk of the evidence on hominin behavioural variability. East Africa encompasses ∼3.6 million km² including a large variety of biomes. Sites are irregularly distributed, largely concentrated within the East African Rift Valley system. The overall site density is low, with a complete lack of coverage for many areas; radiometric dates are few, and caves or other deeply stratified sequences that allow ready observation of change through time are rare. Here we present results of the lithic analysis of MSA sites from Ethiopia (Garba III, Melka Kunture) and West Turkana, Kenya (Kalakoel3; Lomanimania), showing analogies and differences at various scales of analysis, evidencing both the coherence in the East African MSA and specific adaptations to the paleoenvironments. The understanding of intra-regional variability is the mandatory step before attempting comparisons at a larger scale, allowing to test models about the different Out of Africa Routes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Parting the Red Sea: Late Pleistocene Lithic Variability and Human Dispersals in the Horn of Africa and Arabia

Keywords

Spatial Coverage