Aterian artifacts at 175,000 BP at Ifri n’Ammar, Morocco

The Moroccan Ministry of Culture has a press release (in French) about the cave site of Ifri n’Ammar, about 50km south (i.e., away from the coast) of Nador, indicating that the Moroccan-German team that has been working there for the past seven years has identified Aterian levels dating to about 175,000 BP. If these dates are correct, they push back the age for the earliest Aterian assemblages by some 65,000 year, since to date, the oldest Aterian levels had been identified at the Moroccan site of Dar es-Soltan, where they date to as old as 110,000 BP (Barton et al. 2009) . This is significant in and of itself by showing that the Aterian industry may be much longer than had previously been believed. And based on the press release, the Ifri n’Ammar does look very credibly Aterian, whose stone tool technology is generally defined by the presence of distinctive 'tanged' artifacts, especially points:

© Moroccan Ministry of Culture.

This is also significant because of what the Aterian is usually taken to mean in terms of prehistoric human adaptations. For some, it is associated with some of the earliest evidence for projectile technology, which confers the advantage of allowing prey to be brought down at a distance, hence minimizing the risks of hunting to whoever uses it (e.g., Shea 2006). Other researchers have also argued that some of the bifacial points associated with the Aterian "may be adaptive systems focused on hunting in grassland ecosystems" (Banks et al. 2006: 76, 78). Specifically, these authors have argued that such grassland ecosystems are established in North Africa (where the Aterian is found) beginning with Oxygen Isotope 5e, some 130,000 years ago, while before that bifacial lanceolate points are mostly found clustered much further to the SW. if the ages from Ifri n’Ammar are correct, then, this provides some evidence against a simple link between ecology and the emergence of the Aterian industry.

Also of interest is that the Aterian sequence at Ifri n’Ammar is reported to be some 6.3m thick, with much more recent Aterian levels as well. Here, it bears emphasizing that Aterian deposits about 82,000 years old elsewhere in Morocco, have been associated with pierced shells most likely used as personal ornaments, the earliest evidence for that behavior anywhere in the world (as I discussed previously on this blog). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the site has yielded in more recent levels

"two Nassarius gibbosulus et Nassarius sp. shells used as ornaments by the Aterians. They are older than 80,000 years BP. Both are similar in size and display identical intentional perforations. Microscopic and mineralogical analyses have revealed wear traces clearly resulting from their having being worn as ornaments, and traces of red ochre with which they had been intentionally covered" (my translation).

Pierced Nassarius shells from Ifri n’Ammar. © Moroccan Ministry of Culture.

Overall,if the preliminary findings reported in this press release are borne out by future publications, Ifri n’Ammar definitely looks like it offers the potential to greatly refine our understanding of the Aterian and its origins as a whole.

References:

Banks, William E., Francesco d'Errico, Harold L. Dibble, Leonard Krishtalka, Dixie West, Deborah I. Olszewski, A. Townsend Peterson, David G. Anderson, J. Christopher Gilliam, Anta Montet-White, Michel Crucifix, Curtis W. Marean, María-Fernanda Sánchez-Goñi, Barbara Wohlfarth, and Marian Vanhaeren. 2006. Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling: New Tools for Reconstructing the Geography and Ecology of Past Human Populations. PaleoAnthropology 2006:68-83

Barton, R., Bouzouggar, A., Collcutt, S., Schwenninger, J., & Clark-Balzan, L. (2009). OSL dating of the Aterian levels at Dar es-Soltan I (Rabat, Morocco) and implications for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens Quaternary Science Reviews, 28 (19-20), 1914-1931 DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2009.03.010

Shea, J. (2006). The origins of lithic projectile point technology: evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe Journal of Archaeological Science, 33 (6), 823-846 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.10.015

Shelling it out

Very old pierced shells are back in the headlines, heralding a new paper by a group of archaeologists working in Morocco. As the paper’s still unavailable at PNAS, I can only really comment on what’s in the press reports, but the paper in question likely builds on two earlier reports that more pierced shells had been found at Grotte des Pigeons over the past couple of years.

I’ve discussed early pierced shell ornament earlier on this blog, so I won’t really reiterate the argument for why they matter. That these shells can be referred to as ornaments is based on the presence of intentional perforations, use wear along the edges of those holes, and some of the beads having been covered in ochre. Another report suggests that there is even evidence that at leats one shell was burned in order to change its color, which would be pretty cool in light of recent reports about heat-treating of silcrete dating to ca. 75,000BP in South Africa (Brown et al. 2009).

Similar items of roughly the same age are know from both South Africa (Henshilwood et al. 2004) and from North Africa and the Near East (Vanhaeren et al. 2006, Bouzouggar et al. 2007), so that’s not the main novelty here. Rather, the real news is that similar shell ornaments (all made on Nassarius gibbosolus shells) have been found in roughly contemporaneous deposits in four distinct sites in Morocco. This is a pretty big deal because it suggests that people at more than one point in space and time were using ornaments, which provides some much needed empirical support for the notion that these ornaments represent some kind of visual language shared by several groups of hunter-gatherers at that time. Obviously, if you’re hoping to make an argument about the social implications of ornaments at a specific moment in prehistory, you have to be able to demonstrate with some degree of certainty that these objects were found distributed pretty widely. Otherwise, you might be talking about an idiosyncratic behavior that might actually not have a social dimension at all, no matter what referents tell us about ornament use in ethnographically documented foragers. So, on that level, it seems that this paper establishes this. I can see people raising quibbles about the fact that we’re only talking about ca. 25 shells across four sites spanning a period of 15,000 years (these all apparently date to between 85-70,000 BP), but really, for these time periods, this is a pretty decent argument for contemporaneity in behavior within a relatively small area.

One especially interesting aspect of this study is that some of these sites seem to be located relatively far inland, far enough to imply that humans must have brought these shells there from quite far away. In the newsreport, F. d’Errico is quoted as saying

“Either people went to sea and collected them, or more likely marine shell beads helped create and maintain exchange networks between coastal and inland peoples. This shows well-structured human culture that attributed meaning to these things… Organised networks would also assist trading of other items, as well as genetic and cultural exchange – so these shells help reveal the connections between cognition and culture.”

This provides a testable hypothesis for the existence of such networks, namely that some ‘inland’ material would need to have made its way to the coastal sites. If this can be shown to have occurred, you also have the most solid evidence for the oldest trade networks in the archaeological record. Of course, what may have been traded need not have left archaeologically-visible traces (i.e., it could have been knowledge of resource distribution further inland, rituals, etc.). But if it did, this is an even bigger deal than has been suggested so far in the reports.


References:

Bouzouggar, A., N. Barton, M. Vanhaeren, F. d'Errico, S. Colcutt, T. Higham, E. Hodge,S. Parfitt, E. Rhodes, J.-L. Schwenninger, C. Stringer, E. Turner, S. Wardo, A. Moutmir, and A. Stambouli. 2007 82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104:9964-9969.

Brown, K. S., C.W. Marean, A.I. R. Herries, Z. Jacobs, C. Tribolo, D. Braun, D. L. Roberts, M. C. Meyer, and J. Bernatchezet. 2009 Fire As an Engineering Tool of Early Modern Humans. Science 325:859-862.

Henshilwood, C., F. d'Errico, M. Vanhaeren, K. van Niekerk, and Z. Jacobs. 2004.Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa. Science 304:404.

Vanhaeren, M., F. d'Errico, C. Stringer, S. L. James, J. A. Todd, and H. K. Mienis. 2006. Middle Paleolithic Shell Beads in Israel and Algeria. Science 312:1785 - 1788.

New pierced shells from Grotte des Pigeons

From: http://www.minculture.gov.ma/Images/Taforalt1.jpg

It appears, that they have found yet more pierced Nassarius gibbosulus shells in Grotte des Pigeons (near Taforalt, Morocco) during excavation conducted in March and April 2008. That would be 20 more shells, to be precise, which may be as old as 85,000 years BP, or slightly older than the ones Bouzouggar et al. (2007) published last year.

From: http://www.minculture.gov.ma/Images/Taforalt02.jpg

From the news report:

In 2007, Bouzouggar and Barton discovered 14 perforated shells in the same cave.

"This discovery shows that the making and use of objects of finery is very anchored in the traditions of Morocco's prehistoric people," said Bouzouggar, in whose opinion the country is the original centre of artistic and symbolic creation.

Objects of finery discovered in Morocco are "now considered to be even more ancient than those discovered in Algeria, South Africa and in Palestine", said the culture ministry.

Well, I don't know that these new finds do anything to establish that the practice of piercing and wearing shells is older in Morocco than it is at Skhul (ca. 100-135kya), but we can't say without seeing more information on the finds. From what I gather from a press release by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture (in French), this claim may be based on an assessment that the two shells from Skuhl cave (which I talked about here) "are difficult to date due to uncertainties about the context in which they were found," in part because they were recovered so long ago, in the 1930's. If you buy this, then the earliest shell beads would, in fact, be from Morocco.

The burials of five children dated to at least 12kya were also apparently found during the same field season. The children's remains were covered in ochre, buried under stone blocks with animal bones. Can't wait to hear more about these finds!