The British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies Annual Lecture:
"Agencies of Behavioural Change in Early Humans in North Africa" by BILNAS President Professor Nick Barton.

Date Delivered: Tuesday 28 November 2023

Description: Wide–ranging behavioural and technological innovations have been described in the Middle and Later Stone Ages in North Africa from the early occurrence of symbolic culture over 100,000 years ago to the more recent appearance of cemeteries and inferred use of basketry c. 15,000 years ago.

Focusing on Morocco, this talk provides an overview of recent scientific developments and new archaeological discoveries and examines the impact of environmental change on early human populations in this region. The region of Morocco is particularly interesting because it lies on the north-western margins of the Sahara, in an area known to have experienced vast fluctuations in past rainfall, temperature, and vegetation, and which periodically became part of a ‘Green Sahara.’

Morocco also preserves caves with deep cultural and environmental sequences covering this timespan and containing some of the oldest fossils of Homo sapiens in Africa. As such, it provides a perfect test bed for examining environmental affordances and human responses (innovation, dispersal, population contraction) to changing climatic and environmental conditions over the last 150,000 years.

About the Speaker:

Nick Barton is Emeritus Professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include: Early symbolism; Modern human behaviour in the Middle and Later Stone Age of North Africa; Human adaptations to environmental change in the Later Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of Britain and northern Eurasia; Lithic technology and experimental archaeology; Cave taphonomy. His geographic areas of expertise include: Britain, North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia).