Human and Cultural Dynamics in the West African Middle Stone Age

The origins of modern humans are hotly debated among researchers.

However, fossils, genetic and archaeological data are increasingly supporting a deep, long-lasting and complex evolution, with key biological and cultural changes occurring relatively recently.

These changes include possible genetic exchanges between Homo sapiens and late (i.e. ~45ka) “ghost” archaic specimens in Africa, the surprisingly late persistence of archaic morphological traits in Homo sapiens (i.e. ~16-12ka) and a concurrent late persistence of Middle Stone Age technology (i.e. 12ka), usually associated with time periods in excess of 30 thousand years.

These key Late Pleistocene features all have West Africa in common and point to this long-neglected region as critically important for understanding the final stages of human evolution prior to the development, spread and homogenizing effects of agriculture.

Given that these changes occurred prior to a significant period of mixing and migration both within Africa and beyond, understanding processes of late human evolution in West Africa are critically important, if chronically understudied.

Was West Africa isolated from other regions of the continent, thus forming an important reservoir of biological diversity?

Or were these unique features of the West African record the result of cultural boundaries, and therefore perhaps among the earliest examples of the defining features of cultural diversity today.

The WAMSA project will test these hypotheses and unravel the cultural patterning and sequence of the West African MSA between ~40-11 ka, thus elucidating key late processes of human evolution from a major – and critically under researched - world region.

To adequately address this question the project will use an interdisciplinary approach which combines results of archaeological investigations with computational model (ecology, demography) underpinned by the ""human niche approach”.