The first tools that men made in the Stone Age, 300,000 years ago, were used 20,000 years longer than previously thought by hunter-gatherers in some regions of Africa, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The tools of the Middle Stone Age of the African record date back 300,000 to 30,000 years, then disappear almost completely.
For a long time it was thought that these tools were replaced 30,000 years ago by a type of miniaturized and radically different artifacts, much more suitable for diversified subsistence strategies and mobility patterns across Africa.
However, the study led by Eleanor Scerri, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Germany) and Khady Niang, of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal, shows that hunter-gatherers Readers in the Senegal area continue to use technologies from the earliest prehistory of our species until 11,000 years ago.
The study published on Monday thus suggests that the prehistoric cultural phases of humanity did not take place in a clear and universal sequence but were able to advance in a fractional way and at different times.
“West Africa is a veritable frontier for the study of human evolution. We know almost nothing of what happened here in deep prehistory. Almost everything we know about human origins is extrapolated from discoveries in small parts of ‘Eastern and Southern Africa,’ explains Scerri, lead author of the study.
To fill these gaps, Scerri and Niang explored different regions of Senegal, from desert edges to forests and the banks of the Senegal and Gambia rivers, where they found multiple sites of the Middle Stone Age with surprisingly recent dates. .
“These findings demonstrate the importance of researching the entire African continent, if we are to truly understand the deep human past,” says Khady Niang.
The study attempts to explain why in this region of West Africa the culture of the Middle Stone Age (until 11,000 years ago) persisted for so long.
One possible explanation is the physical barriers: “In the north, the region is the Sahara Desert but in the east, there are the tropical forests of Central Africa, which were often isolated from the rest of the tropical forests of Africa. Western in periods of drought and fragmentation. Even the river systems of West Africa form an autonomous and isolated group, “says Jimbob Blinkhorn, co-author of the work.
“It is also possible that this region of Africa has been less affected by the extremes of repeated cycles of climate change,” Scerri adds.
“The only thing we can be sure of is that this persistence is not simply due to a lack of ability to invest in the development of new technologies. These people were smart, they knew how to select good stone for the manufacture of their tools and exploit the landscape in which they lived, ”Niang argues.
The study fits with the emerging view that during most of the deep prehistory of mankind, populations were relatively isolated from each other, living in groups subdivided into different regions.
And it also “agrees with genetic studies that suggest that Africans who lived in the last 10,000 years were grouped into highly subdivided populations,” Niang points out.
“We’re not sure why, but apart from the physical distance, there may also be some cultural boundaries. Perhaps the populations that used these different material cultures also lived in slightly different ecological niches.”