Ethiopian site sheds new light on human behaviour in the Middle and Late Stone Age

1/2. The Horn of Africa with location of Goda Buticha and sites mentioned in the text. Credit: C. Tribolo et al in PLOS ONE

 
Recent sedimentological and dating results from the sequence of Goda Buticha cave, southeastern Ethiopia, yield new data on human occupation of the region during the period 65,000 to 1,000 years ago.

While eastern Africa was a departure point for modern human dispersals Out of Africa in the Upper Pleistocene, little is known about the modern humans who lived in the Horn of Africa during the period between 70,000 and 5,000 years ago, partly due to the lack of well-dated archaeological sites in the region. As a result, the important behavioral change from Middle Stone Age (~300,000-30,000 years ago) to Later Stone Age (from >50,000 years ago), occurring within this time frame is not well documented in the Horn of Africa.

An international team of researchers from Ethiopia, France, Israel and the USA have recently published in journal PLOS ONE the results of an extensive sedimentological and geochronological study at the Goda Buticha cave, in southeastern Ethiopia. The site has yielded a rich assemblage of stone artefacts, assigned to the Middle Stone Age in its lower sequence and to the Later Stone Age in the upper part of the sequence. [...] Division of Archaeology