ArticleNature communications2018
78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest.
Article in Nature communications, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pan-African model explainsbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Lithic Miniaturization Provides a Signature of an MIS4-3 Southern Dispersal of Homo sapiens.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Review
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- A dataset of scientific dates from archaeological sites in eastern Africa spanning 5000 BCE to 1800 CE.Scientific data · 2025Article
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- Back(s) to basics: The concept of backing in stone tool technologies for tracing hominins' technical innovations.Evolutionary anthropology · 2024Review
- Assigning a social status from face adornments: an fMRI study.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Delayed increase in stone tool cutting-edge productivity at the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition in southern Jordan.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Longstanding behavioural stability in West Africa extends to the Middle Pleistocene at Bargny, coastal Senegal.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Cooling-induced expansions of Afromontane forests in the Horn of Africa since the Last Glacial Maximum.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Tropical forests in the deep human past.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Riddles wrapped inside an enigma. Lupemban MSA technology as a rainforest adaptation: revisiting the lanceolate point.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The climate and vegetation backdrop to hominin evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Evaluating refugia in recent human evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework for the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Neural correlates of perceiving and interpreting engraved prehistoric patterns as human production: Effect of archaeological expertise.PloS one · 2022Article
- Homo sapiens origins and evolution in the Kalahari Basin, southern Africa.Evolutionary anthropology · 2021Review
- Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Earliest known human burial in Africa.Nature · 2021Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
28 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Africa has been debated as a significant shift in human technological, cultural, and cognitive evolution. However, the majority of research on this transition is currently focused on southern Africa due to a lack of long-term, stratified sites across much of the African continent. Here, we report a 78,000-year-long archeological record from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya. Following a shift in toolkits ~67,000 years ago, novel symbolic and technological behaviors assemble in a non-unilinear manner. Against a backdrop of a persistent tropical forest-grassland ecotone, localized innovations better characterize the Late Pleistocene of this part of East Africa than alternative emphases on dramatic revolutions or migrations.
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