Africa and Iberia in the Pleistocene

Abstract

The Strait of Gibraltar would logically seem to be a major point of contact between Africa and Europe. Yet, controversy about possible trans-Gibraltar human movements in the Lower, Middle and even Upper Pleistocene has reigned for over a century and continues to do so. Imbricated with biogeographical arguments about faunal transfers and the creation of hominid niches in Iberia, the problem of the relationships between Africa and Iberia is one of the knottiest in Stone Age prehistory . Did early Homo ( H. ergaster , erectus , or “ antecessor ”) cross into Iberia from the Maghreb , as has long been argued on the basis of general archeological similarities? This old hypothesis, still unproven, is made somewhat more plausible by the re-dating of the site of Ain Hanech in Algeria and, in particular, by the spectacular Lower Pleistocene fossil and artifactual discoveries at Atapuerca in north-central Spain and, less securely, in the Guadix-Baza Basin of Granada. Middle Pleistocene contacts remain problematic, with direct peopling of Iberia from northwest Africa during the mid-Upper Pleistocene seeming (ironically) to be out of the question, as southern Spain and Portugal were one of the last refugia of Neanderthals using Mousterian technology, despite proximity to the putative source of anatomical modernity and cultural superiority. Similarly, despite years of speculation on a migrationist cause for the similarity between tanged points in the Aterian of North Africa and in the Solutrean of Mediterranean Spain and Portugal, the chronological and archeological data solidly disprove this seductive hypothesis. For the Upper Pleistocene, it is only in the terminal Paleolithic that, with clear evidence of marine fishing and probable navigation, a credible case can be made for trans-Gibraltar human contacts.