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From the Middle to the Later Stone Age in Eastern Africa

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Sourcebook of Paleolithic Transitions

Abstract

The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in sub-Saharan Africa occurred sometime between 50,000 and 20,000 years ago. It is supposed to be the period in which (already) anatomically modern Homo sapiens became behaviorally modern “Upper Palaeolithic” people. It is said to occur prior to the dispersal(s) out of Africa which brought modern humans into Eurasia and elsewhere. Various evolutionary models have been applied to this period, most notably Richard Klein’s idea that some Africans went through a sudden neurological transformation that resulted in the development of symbolically-based language and culture. This made the dispersal possible, and almost inevitable. What is less well known is that there are few archaeological records in the African continent which can be used to test these models. This paper reviews the evidence for the Middle to Later Stone Age transition in East Africa. While genetics and geochronology point to an African origin of our own species, it is still difficult to conclude what happened during the Upper Pleistocene that led to the spread of anatomically modern humans out of the continent.

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Acknowledgements

First of all, I must thank Parth R. Chauhan and Marta Camps for inviting me to participate in this volume and for their assistance in the preparation of this chapter. For permission to conduct field research in Tanzania, I would like to thank the Department of Antiquities, Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, as well as COSTECH, the Tanzania Commission on Science and Technology. This research has been funded by SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation, the Boise Fund, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (through a Gordon and Jean Southam Fellowship), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and by the University of Alberta through grants from the Faculty of Arts Support for the Advancement of Scholarship (SAS) Fund, the Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences Research Fund (HFASSR) and the Killam Cornerstone Fund.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

    Pamela R. Willoughby

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  1. Pamela R. Willoughby
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Correspondence to Pamela R. Willoughby .

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  1. Dept. Anthropology, George Washington University, G Street NW., 2110, Washington, 20052, U.S.A.

    Marta Camps

  2. CRAFT Stone Age Institute, Indiana University, W. Dittemore Road 1392, Gosport, 47433-9531, U.S.A.

    Parth Chauhan

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Willoughby, P.R. (2009). From the Middle to the Later Stone Age in Eastern Africa. In: Camps, M., Chauhan, P. (eds) Sourcebook of Paleolithic Transitions. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76487-0_20

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