Hunter-gatherers of the Nile Valley and the Sahara before 12,000 years ago

Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared in North Africa when they spread out of East Africa slightly earlier than 200,000 years ago. Recently dated, or re-dated, fossil remains and archaeological units have provided consistent chronologies for the origin and spread of modern humans, concurringly supported by different radiometric dating methods. North Africa has a tremendous potential to address relevant questions related to the adaptation and behaviour of human groups during MIS 6 (125,000-186,000 BP) and during the Upper Pleistocene (12,000-125,000 BP). MIS 6 was a period of extremely cold and dry conditions in North Africa, but yet East African newcomers must have been cognitively and technologically well-equipped to push their frontiers farther north and north-west, along the Nile Valley and into the Sahara desert. Their successful means of subsistence derived from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) technology. When climatic conditions improved during the Upper Pleistocene, human occupation intensified even in the Sahara and the first regional cultural unit, typical of North Africa, developed with the Aterian, which is a further stage of the generalised MSA. Modern humans had made earlier attempts to move out of Africa, but Aterian peoples now appear as the most likely candidates for the finally successful out-of-Africa movement into Eurasia from North Africa.