Aperçu critique du Middle Stone Age en Afrique du Nord

Abstract

The North African MSA stretches, at least in some areas, from about 300,000years BP to almost all of MIS 3. During this long period, the large geographic region extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Southern Sahara and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea was occupied by anatomically modern human populations who had diverse cultural characteristics, but shared a common technological substrate (Mode 3). North Africa is a key region for understanding the history of early Homo sapiens, their adaptation strategies to not always favorable environments and their technological and symbolic behavior, which finds comparisons in the rest of Africa, in the Levant and in the Arabian Peninsula. This critical overview presents and discusses currently available archaeological data based on the most recent literature. After a description of the paleoenvironment and human exploitation of animal resources, the main sites and cultural complexes are treated separately for the different geographical areas.