Justification for the comparative analysis of occupations of the coast in South Africa and Morocco during the Middle Stone Age

Summary

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 several reasons. The ethnographic record shows that coastal hunter-gatherers generally differ from terrestrial hunter-gatherers and are, for example, more sedentary and less egalitarian. Coastal resources excel over terrestrial resources in some important nutritional characteristics. Coastal resources are less affected by changes in climate than terrestrial ecosystems and thus could be stable when climate change impacts terrestrial resources. It has been theorized that movement into the coastal niche may have been significant to the evolution of modern humans. The earliest evidence for coastal resource use comes from Morocco and South Africa during the Middle Stone Age. These regions also consistently have shown patterns of behavioral and cultural complexity that surpass other regions. Detailed comparative studies between these two regions are essential and need to examine the following: 1) evidence for site occupation intensity, 2) evidence for the significance of coastal resources in the diet, and 3) the timing and persistence of human occupation of the regions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Early human adaptation on the African coasts: Comparing northwest Morocco and the Cape of South Africa

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51107