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

Shipton, CeriRoberts, PatrickArcher, WillArmitage, Simon JBita, CaesarBlinkhorn, JamesCourtney-Mustaphi, ColinCrowther, AlisonCurtis, Richardd'Errico, FrancescoDouka, Katerina2019-12-032019-12-032041-1723http://hdl.handle.net/1885/187192The 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.Funding was provided by the SEALINKS project under a European Research Council (ERC) grant (no. 206148) awarded to N.B. Permission to conduct the research was granted by the Office of the President of the Republic of Kenya through affiliation with the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). We are grateful for the support of the NMK and the British Institute in Eastern Africa. P.R. was funded by NERC and the Boise Fund (University of Oxford). S.J.A. and F.D. acknowledge support from the Research Council of Norway, through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) (no. 262618). FD and AP were funded by the ERC grant, TRACSYMBOLS (no. 249587), and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-10- LABX-52), LaScArBx Cluster of Excellence. A.P.M. holds a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship (2014 BP-A 00122) from the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants, Government of Catalonia. A.C. and H.S.G. were funded by the British Academy. Additional support has been provided by the McDonald Institute for Archeological Research (University of Cambridge) and the Max Planck Society.application/pdfen-AU© The Author(s) 2018http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest201810.1038/s41467-018-04057-32019-06-23Creative Commons license