Crossing deserts and avoiding seas: Aterian North African-European relations

This paper aims at presenting and discussing the most recent data on the Aterian in Africa and at correlating them with the archeological evidence from south-western Europe. It provides an Africanist’s interpretation of the cultural developments of the Aterian in North Africa and considers one of the putative passage-ways of the out of Africa dispersal of the Aterian, the Strait of Gibraltar. The present review does not attempt to interpret the local developments of the culturally and/or chronologically similar human groups in Europe, as this pertains to Europeanist, not Africanist archeologists. Several scenarios are discussed: the first three review Aterian mobility and diffusion in south-western Europe with Solutrean, Aurignacian, and Mousterian populations; the fourth scenario considers convergence as the most likely event and examines the most recent technological, anthropological, organizational, and environmental evidence.