The Middle Stone Age Record in Egypt and Sudan: Implications for Out of Africa 2

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Africa is the continent of origin for Homo sapiens and thus is the source for human colonization of the Old (and eventually New) World. Out of Africa 2 (anatomically, then behaviorally, modern humans) is supported archaeologically by African stone artifact industries found outside of Africa. Two routes widely acknowledged are along the Nile Valley corridor into the Levant and the Southern Route across the Bab al-Mandeb Strait from Eritrea/Djibouti to Yemen. What, however, is the on-the-ground data within Africa along these probable routes out of Africa? This talk discusses the Middle Stone Age stone artifact record from two northeastern African regions—high desert middle Egypt near Abydos and low desert northern Sudan in the upper 4th Cataract region. The Abydos Survey for Paleolithic Sites (Egypt) and the Bioarchaeology of Nubia Expedition (Sudan) survey datasets are used to examine the diversity of the record along the Nile Valley corridor route, including Middle Stone Age technologies, stone raw materials, and spatial distributions of materials. Assessed are the potential implications of this "trace evidence" for moving out of Africa during the MSA, and whether such "trace evidence" is sufficient to address the questions we ask about prehistoric out of Africa migrations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23378