Abstract
The appearance of personal ornaments in the Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age of North Africa has been widely recognised as indicating that archaic modern humans in this region had developed sophisticated ways of sharing, storing and transmitting coded information within and across groups. In this paper we discuss whether the first appearance of explicitly symbolic objects such as Nassarius shell beads in North Africa reflected a stage of rapid acceleration in cultural change across this region. A related issue concerns the question of what if any external factors may have given rise to innovations in technology and symbolic material culture and, finally, why these developments may have lacked longevity and ended in cultural loss as they probably also did in other parts of Africa.
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