EMERGING ENVIRONMENTAL AND GEOARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORDS FROM THE NE SAHARA AND THEIR RELEVANCE IN DISPERSALS ‘OUT OF AFRICA’ DURING THE QUATERNARY (Invited Presentation)

Due to its landscape attributes and reliable perennial flow, the Nile River Basin has long been idealized as a “lifeline” through the harsh Sahara. Sourced by monsoonal tropical rainfall, the Nile traverses ~6800 km through the northeastern Sahara and flows toward the Mediterranean coastline and Levant. Anthropologists have long studied the Nile Valley as an important corridor for dispersals of species from the Eastern African ‘cradle of evolution’ to Eurasia, and beyond. A prevailing paradigm holds that environmental conditions have facilitated hominin occupation within, and migration routes in and out of Africa, and that the desert acted as a “pump”, forcing cultures out, and preventing migrations during dry intervals. This model is limited, yet remains entrenched because of the paucity of documented sites and the limited number of radiometrically dated archaeological and environmental contexts located outside of the Nile Valley, particularly in the modern desert areas. Across the NE Sahara region, a variety of new geoarchaeological records suggest that wetter conditions occurred during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6a–5e and occasionally during MIS 4, which coincides with an apparent migration of Anatomically Modern Humans “Out of Africa”. Reconstructing habitable paleoenvironmental contexts is critical for understanding lifeways during antiquity. We present a synthesis of archaeological and environmental records from the “desert” areas across Saharan Northeast Africa, with particular emphasis on Quaternary contexts with MSA (Middle Stone Age) remains. We review the evidence for (1) episodic flow along modern defunct Nile tributaries near Aswan in Upper Egypt; and (2) paleosprings, lakes, and other ecological refugia ‘oases populations’ that were persisting or occasionally present within the desert areas during the Pleistocene.