Julien Riel-Salvatore writes today on new research on the Moroccan site of Dar es-Soltan (near Rabat), which has yielded dates of c. 110,000 BP for one of the oldest cultures of our species: Aterian, defined by its characteristically tanged points and the clear evidence of symbolic behavior in form of perforated shells, extended through North Africa.
He mentions that the same Germano-Moroccan team has been working in other sites dated to as early as 175,000 BP, what is really bordering the very origins of our species as such (oldest skulls are dated to 190,000 BP in Ethiopia and 160,000 in both Ethiopia and Morocco).
He also points to a very promising site at Ifri n'Amar (at the Rif) with a depth of 6.3 meters which seems to include also recent layers of this culture. No final dates are given anywhere but the fact that the tanged peculiarity persisted through Upper Paleolithic (Oranian, Capsian) makes me think of some sort of continuity even through change.
Ref. Press release of the Moroccan Ministry of Culture (in French and Arabic).
Yesterday I let myself be carried away by the apparent antiquity of Aterian in North Africa. I was already persuaded that Aterian and the arrival of mitochondrial DNA U6 to North Africa was the same thing. True that I had arrived to such conclussions when I thought Aterian had much more recent dates... enfin.
Something I should have re-read before posting that is: N. Maca-Meyer's paper on the philogeny and possible spread scenarios of U6 in North Africa. True that they conclude that the arrival of U6 to North Africa originated in West Asia... but they also notice that the nucleotide diversity of the haplogroup is higher in Iberia than in Africa. The problem? That U6 is seldom seen elsewhere in Europe, so she thinks that the clade arrived to Spain via North Africa and not vice versa. Maca-Meyer thinks that U6 arrived from West Asia via East Africa, based only in the greatest diversity of one subclade U6a in East Africa.
The estimated age of U6 is of c. 66,000 BP (+/- 25,000 years), what certainly could make it coincident with the arrival of Aterian via East Africa (The Horn). Aterian seems indeed most closely related to African Middle Stone Age, like Indian Middle Paleolithic, with dates c. 60-73,000 BP but some reaching as early as 90,000 BP. So yes, in principle, Aterian and U6 correlate well.
Another possibility could be that U6 arrived to North Africa from Iberia with the Oranian (Iberomaurusian) culture, that is believed to be an offshot of Mediterranean Iberian Gravettian or later Gravettizing cultures. Nevertheless Oranian correlates more clearly with haplogroups H and V. If that was the case, it would not be the only case of a U clade that is as old as Aurignacian but is found only rarely in Europe, due to drift. The case of U8a can serve maybe as counter-example. If U6 was accidentally concentrated in Mediterranean Iberia due to founder effect, it could well have expanded to North Africa from there along H, V and possibly other smaller clades without ever migrating to continental Europe, at least in significative ammounts.
This can only be understood if one knows reasonably well the peculiarities of Mediterranean Iberian UP, always reciever and almost never exporter of culture (with the possible exception of some facies of Solutrean, restricted anyhow to the Iberian peninsula). In Aurignacian, Gravettian, Magdalenian and the epi-Paleolithic, Mediterranean Iberia is always at the recieving end, at least in what regards to Europe.
So personally I would not exclude the model of a European (Med. Iberian) origin of U6. If we are not going to push back the ages of the OOA event too much, then it looks the more plausible explanation. Occam's razor seems to favor it, really.
Still the late Paleolithic of North Africa is intriguing. The older ages of Aterian have been reviewed to as early as c. 90,000 BP (Cremaschi et al, 1998) and the end of this culture is uncertain, with dates wildly varying between 65,000 BP (Cremaschi, who contests older C14 dates) to 25,000 or even 15,000 BP (Thillet).
Then you have the Oranian (Iberomaurusian) with an older datation of c. 22,000 BP (source: J. Escola Pujol, on Uadi Kenta - in Catalan), making it coincident with the complex Gravettian-Solutrean transition in Mediterranean Iberia (that culminates with a Gravettizing Solutrean that could well be called a Solutreanized epi-Gravettian as well). The most recent dates could be of c. 7000 BP.
And then you have the more famous Capsian cuture that is clearly epi-Paleolithic, coexisting with Oranian c.10,000-6000 BP, that is of quite clear East African origin (Sudan, The Horn) and that is with all likehood related to the spread of Y-DNA E3b and Afroasiatic languages (Berber).
It seems that Aterian, the North African paleolithic culture (attributable to Homo sapiens), occupies the whole range of dates between c. 85,000 BP to the Epipaleolithic, when new waves (Iberomaurusian, Capsian) may have arrived from Spain and Sudan.Recently these findings have been confirmed by archaeological research at Taforalt, Morocco, that have yielded some of the oldest known ornaments, competing for that title with Skuhl cave (Palestine) and Oued Djebanna (Algeria).
Fine so far. But there is a problem: the deepest genetic layer in North Africa seems to be mtDNA haplogroup U6, that is related with other U clades of West, Central and South Eurasia. This clade is believed to have arrived to North Africa with the earliest human colonists, much like its "sisters" U5 and U8a seem to have arrived to Europe too. But, while European early sapiens colonization may date to 48-40,000 BP, not being in contradiction with the mainstream model of colonization of Eurasia from a single out of Africa migration c. 75-60,000 BP, the Aterian very old C14 dates do.
And there is nothing between Aterian and the Epipaleolithic that can explain that.
So I am starting to question the coastal migration model too, or at least the dates attributed to it.
No hardcore conclussions yet but what if... the OOA event happened much earlier, maybe c. 120,000 BP, and had a westward branch via the Levant that ended up in North Africa? There are certainly H. sapiens remains in the Levant that are date c. 100,000 BP (though they are believed to have been replaced by Neanderthals, that are dated to c. 60,000 BP).
In South Asia (key area for Eurasian prehistory) archaeology can hardly differentiate between pre-sapiens and sapiens technologies. The divide between Middle and Upper UP is placed, somewhat arbitrarily, at c. 30,000 BP (much later than in Central and West Eurasia) and human or hominin remains are very scarce anyhow. But, like in West Asia, disconinued blade tools (preluding UP somewhat) are occasionally found with much older dates. In West Asia this was (more or less consistently) attributed to Neanderthals but it is very unlikely that the findings of India can be attributed to them too.
Check for instance Petraglia et al., 2007: Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption:
We provide here firm chronological evidence that hominins were present in the Jurreru River valley, south India, immediately before and after the YTT eruption. Analyses of the archaeological industries recovered from the site indicate a strong element of technological continuity between the pre- and post-Toba assemblages. Together with the presence of faceted unidirectional and bidirectional bladelike core technology, these pre- and post-Toba industries suggest closer affinities to African Middle Stone Age traditions (such as Howieson's Poort) than to contemporaneous Eurasian Middle Paleolithic ones that are typically based on discoidal and Levallois techniques (Fig. 3). The coincidence of (i) evidence of hominins flexible enough to exhibit continuity through a major eruptive event, (ii) technology more similar to the Middle Stone Age than the Middle Paleolithic, and (iii) overlap of the Jwalapuram artifact ages with the earlier end of the most commonly cited genetic coalescence dates (21–23) may suggest the presence of modern humans in India at the time of the YTT event. This interpretation would be consistent with a southern route of dispersal of modern humans from the Horn of Africa (24); the latter, however, will remain speculative until other Middle Paleolithic sites in the Indian subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula (25) are excavated and dated.
Jwalapuram tools
And also:
- Modern Human Origins and the Evolution of Behavior in the Later Pleistocene Record of South Asia, by Hanna V.A. James and Michael D. Petraglia, 2005 (no link found).
- J.B. Harrod, Synopsis of the Paleolithic of India (PDF).
From this last paper (a list of Indian Paleolithic sites with brief descriptions), I specially noticed two sites from before the Toba event that show blade creation. One (Hokra 1-a and Gurha, Thar Desert, Rajasthan) is not dated but the other (Patpara, Middle Son Valley) has a C14 date of at least 100,000 BP. Blade based tools are also found after the Toba event in several sites that may be dated since c. 45,000 BP.
But even if the earlier blade industries are not really consolidated UP (like happens with Levantine Jabroudian, where stone blades were made long before UP apparently by Neanderthals without continuity), presence of anatomically modern humans does not need to be related to them anyhow (in fact that is the case in may other parts of the World). And the technoligical continuity in India an the very early dates of Sapiens-made Aterian in North Africa, strongly suggest an out-of-Africa event much earlier than Toba eruption. Maybe c. 100,000 BP. There was a warm peak (a more favorable climate probably) c. 105,000 BP that could account for such migration maybe.
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