Biogeography and behavioral adaptations of late Quaternary hunter gatherers in the Sahara

Project BREATHE aims to contribute a new understanding of cultural and behavioral traits of North African early humans through the archaeological record of southern and northern Libya.

This is a crucial region for understanding the trans-Saharan connections that contributed to the global dispersal of our species.

However, the current scant archaeological and chronometric data for the Saharan and peri-Saharan regions limits our knowledge of biogeographic dynamics that linked different regions of North Africa at key moments of human biological and cultural evolution, especially around the emergence of H. sapiens ca. 300 ka.

The project research areas, the Jebel Gharbi to the north and the Acacus and Messak to the south, represent the extremes of an ideal North-South transect with different environments and archaeological records, an important axis between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean. These arid regions have deeply eroded landscapes where Pleistocene geoarchaeological archives are rare.

Except for few buried contexts, the evidence is mostly comprised of lithic artefacts found on open-air surfaces.

Nevertheless, these surface lithics can provide a wealth of information when an array of cutting-edge analytical techniques (geospatial statistics, geometric morphometrics and wear analyses) are combined in the way proposed by BREATHE.

These artefacts span the final phases of the Early Stone Age, the early emergence of the Middle Stone Age and its later manifestations, particularly the Aterian.

The spatial amplitude of the research areas enables large-scale landscape analyses to be carried out, identifying land use and occupation patterns not detectable at a site-oriented research scale.

This provides a unique window into past human behaviour and biogeographic dynamics in a central arid area that may have played a key role in the adaptive strategies that enabled our species to colonise new and challenging environments across Africa and beyond.