The Middle Stone Age of the Central Sahara: Biogeographical opportunities and technological strategies in later human evolution

Abstract

The Central Sahara is an area of great interest in human evolution partly because it currently exhibits some of the most extreme desert conditions in the world, and partly because of its geographical location – in a nexus of relationships with sub-Saharan Africa, Mediterranean Africa, and Western Asia. Fieldwork in the Ubari sand sea and the Messak (Fazzan, Libya) through the Desert Migrations Project has identified numerous Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites both along the shores of interdunal palaeolakes and on the mountainous plateaus of the area, such as the Messak Settafet. In this paper, we describe some of the evidence for the MSA in Fazzan, and discuss it in the context of the African MSA more generally. We show that this MSA record exhibits considerable typological and technological variation, and discuss the implications for hypotheses relating to the colonization of desert environment and the expansion of hominins out of sub-Saharan Africa.