According to an international team, archaeologists from Morocco have announced the discovery of the oldest stone-age hand ax manufacturing site in North Africa, 1.3 million years old.
The find pushes back by hundreds of thousands of years the date of the beginning in North Africa of the Acheulean industry of stone tools associated with the human ancestor Homo erectus, researchers told reporters.
The discovery was made during excavations in a quarry on the outskirts of the economic capital of Morocco, Casablanca.
This “contributes to enriching the debate about the emergence of the Acheuleans in Africa,” said Abderrahim Mohib, co-director of Casablanca’s Franco-Moroccan Prehistory Program.
It used to be thought that the Acheulean stone tool industry in Morocco dates back 700,000 years. The discoveries in the quarry of Thomas I, which became famous in 1969 when half a human lower jaw was discovered in the cave, means that the Acheulians are almost twice their age there.
The 17-person team behind the discovery included Moroccan, French and Italian explorers, and their findings are based on studies of stone tools recovered from the site.
Moroccan archaeologist Abdeluahed Ben-Nser called the news a “chronological rollback.” He said that the beginning of the Acheulean period in Morocco is now close to the dates of the beginning in southern and eastern Africa – 1.6 and 1.8 million years ago, respectively.
Previously, humans were content with the more primitive pebble tools known as Oldowen, after their East African type of location. The Casablanca site has been explored for decades and, according to Mohib, “some of the richest Acheulean complexes in Africa were obtained.” “This is very important because we are talking about prehistoric times, a difficult period for which little data exists.”
Mohib said the study also provided evidence for “the earliest presence in Morocco of humans” who were “variants of Homo erectus.”
In 2017, the discovery of five fossils about 300,000 years old 100 km west of Marrakech in Jebel Irhud turned evolutionary science upside down when they were designated Homo sapiens.
The Moroccan fossils were much older than some of the similar facial features found at Omo Kibish in Ethiopia, dating from about 195,000 years ago.
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