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78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest

MPS-Authors
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Roberts,  Patrick
Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

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Blinkhorn,  James
Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

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Douka,  Katerina
Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

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Groucutt,  Huw S.
Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

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Petraglia,  Michael D.
Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons188575

Boivin,  Nicole
Archaeology, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Shipton, C., Roberts, P., Archer, W., Armitage, S. J., Bita, C., Blinkhorn, J., et al. (2018). 78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest. Nature Communications, 9: 1832. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-04057-3.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0001-50D4-5
Abstract
The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Africa has been debated as a significant shift in human technological, cultural, and cognitive evolution. However, the majority of research on this transition is currently focused on southern Africa due to a lack of long-term, stratified sites across much of the African continent. Here, we report a 78,000-year-long archeological record from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya. Following a shift in toolkits ~67,000 years ago, novel symbolic and technological behaviors assemble in a non-unilinear manner. Against a backdrop of a persistent tropical forest-grassland ecotone, localized innovations better characterize the Late Pleistocene of this part of East Africa than alternative emphases on dramatic revolutions or migrations.