Period· The columns of time

Middle Stone Age

315 ka → 50 ka

The Middle Stone Age, from 315,000 to 50,000 years ago, is the period of flake tools struck from prepared cores, the time of the first Homo sapiens.

Period characterised by flake tools obtained from prepared cores, the best documented method being Levallois reduction. It covers about two hundred and sixty-five thousand years, during which the technical repertoire varies little while the species appears, spreads across Africa and then leaves it.

What the evidence shows

Middle Stone Age in Africa and Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia designate the same technical conception: the knapper first shapes the block, so that the flake to be detached already possesses the sought-after form. The operation presupposes a measurable cognitive constraint. The final tool must be held in representation throughout a series of preparatory blows, none of which resembles it and none of which has any use taken in isolation, and an error at the last blow annuls the whole of the work engaged. Prehistorians read the prepared core for this reason as a threshold and not as a mere refinement. The Jebel Irhoud assemblage, dated with the human fossils to 315,000 years, is among the oldest directly dated, which explains why the band opens with the first fossils of the species. It closes when another knapping method spreads across Eurasia, about 50,000 years ago, at dates varying by region.

Bounds and conventions

Neither limit is the date of an event. The left-hand one follows the oldest well-dated assemblage, information relating to the state of excavation rather than to the past itself. The right-hand one follows a transition spread over several millennia, occurring at different moments by region and which, locally, did not take place.

MSA in Africa, Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia: two regional names for the flake tool industry of this period.