Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6398, USA.
J Hum Evol. 2013 Mar;64(3):194-210. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.10.010. Epub 2013 Feb 9.
North Africa is quickly emerging as one of the more important regions yielding information on the origins of modern Homo sapiens. Associated with significant fossil hominin remains are two stone tool industries, the Aterian and Mousterian, which have been differentiated, respectively, primarily on the basis of the presence and absence of tanged, or stemmed, stone tools. Largely because of historical reasons, these two industries have been attributed to the western Eurasian Middle Paleolithic rather than the African Middle Stone Age. In this paper, drawing on our recent excavation of Contrebandiers Cave and other published data, we show that, aside from the presence or absence of tanged pieces, there are no other distinctions between these two industries in terms of either lithic attributes or chronology. Together, these results demonstrate that these two 'industries' are instead variants of the same entity. Moreover, several additional characteristics of these assemblages, such as distinctive stone implements and the manufacture and use of bone tools and possible shell ornaments, suggest a closer affinity to other Late Pleistocene African Middle Stone Age industries rather than to the Middle Paleolithic of western Eurasia.
北非正迅速成为提供现代人类起源信息的一个更重要的地区。与重要的古人类遗骸相关联的是两个石器工业，阿舍利工业和莫斯特工业，它们分别主要基于是否存在有刺或有柄的石器来区分。由于历史原因，这两个工业主要被归因于欧洲西部的中更新世石器时代，而不是非洲的中石器时代。在本文中，我们借鉴了最近对 Contrabandiers 洞穴的挖掘和其他已发表的数据，表明除了有刺的石器外，这两个工业在石器属性或年代方面没有其他区别。这些结果表明，这两个“工业”实际上是同一实体的变体。此外，这些组合的其他几个特征，如独特的石器工具以及骨工具和可能的贝壳装饰品的制造和使用，表明它们与其他更新世晚期非洲中石器时代的工业更接近，而不是与欧洲西部的中更新世石器时代更接近。
