Continuity of the Middle Stone Age into the Holocene

Abstract

The African Middle Stone Age (MSA, typically considered to span ca. 300–30 thousand years ago [ka]), represents our species’ first and longest lasting cultural phase. Although the MSA to Later Stone Age (LSA) transition is known to have had a degree of spatial and temporal variability, recent studies have implied that in some regions, the MSA persisted well beyond 30 ka. Here we report two new sites in Senegal that date the end of the MSA to around 11 ka, the youngest yet documented MSA in Africa. This shows that this cultural phase persisted into the Holocene. These results highlight significant spatial and temporal cultural variability in the African Late Pleistocene, consistent with genomic and palaeoanthropological hypotheses that significant, long-standing inter-group cultural differences shaped the later stages of human evolution in Africa.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Scerri, E.M.L. Niang, K. Candy, I. Blinkhorn, J. Mills, W. Cerasoni, J.N. Bateman, M.D. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1756-6046 Crowther, A. Groucutt, H.S.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 8 December 2020 Published (online): 11 January 2021 Published: 11 January 2021
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Geography (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	11 Feb 2021 17:02
Last Modified:	12 Feb 2021 01:08
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41598-020-79418-4
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:170139

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Continuity of the Middle Stone Age into the Holocene

Abstract

Metadata

Download

Published Version

Export

Statistics