Journal of veterinary parasitology

North Africa is quickly emerging as one of the more important regions yielding information on the origins of modern Homo sapiens. Associated with significant fossil hominin remains are two stone tool industries, the Aterian and Mousterian, which have been differentiated, respectively, primarily on the basis of the presence and absence of tanged, or stemmed, stone tools. Largely because of historical reasons, these two industries have been attributed to the western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic rather than the African Middle Stone Age. In this paper, drawing on our recent excavation of Contrebandiers Cave and other published data, we show that, aside from the presence or absence of tanged pieces, there are no other distinctions between these two industries in terms of either lithic attributes or chronology. Together, these results demonstrate that these two \u27industries\u27 are instead variants of the same entity. Moreover, several additional characteristics of these assemblages, such as distinctive stone implements and the manufacture and use of bone tools and possible shell ornaments, suggest a closer affinity to other Late Pleistocene African Middle Stone Age industries rather than to the Middle Paleolithic of western Eurasia

New Excavations at the Site of Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco

New excavations at Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, began in 2007 and continued through 2010. This site, origi- nally excavated by Roche in the 1950s, contained deposits with Aterian, Iberomaurusian, and Neolithic materials, although the latter were completely removed during Roche\u27s excavations. This report presents an overview of the recent excavations, the stratigraphic sequence of the site, absolute dates based on OSL, TL, and ESR, and detailed data on the lithic (Iberomaurusian, Aterian, and Mousterian) and faunal assemblages, the latter of which includes large mammals, microvertebrates, and marine shells

Integrating Human-Animal Relationships into New Data on Aterian Complexity: a Paradigm Shift for the North African Middle Stone Age

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