Optimal adjustment or cultural backwardness? New data on the latest Levallois industries in the Nile Valley

摘要

Notwithstanding the ample evidence and abundant hypotheses corroborating the crucial significance of the central part of the Nile Valley in the spread of early cultures of Anatomically Modern Humans, research on the prehistory of the region remains insufficient. Investigations at the complex of sites around Affad (Southern Dongola Reach, Sudan) has furnished vital information about the functioning of human groups whose adaptation and technology corresponded to the MSA model even in the Terminal Pleistocene (c. 16-15 ka). A question therefore arises as to whether such a late presence of these groups mirrors the optimum adaptation to environmental conditions or rather the lack of other (cultural) factors of change. Both dynamic environmental changes and the influx of LSA communities from the Mediterranean region accelerated such changes in the case of Nubia - a territory located just a few hundred kilometres to the north.