Rezek presents his research on the biological and cultural evolution of Homo sapiens in northwestern Africa from 130,000 to 10,000 years ago, as revealed by excavations in two cave sites in Rabat-Temara in Morocco, Dar Es-Soltan 2 and Contrabandiers Cave.
The biological and cultural evolution of Homo sapiens is one of the greatest research subjects of evolutionary science. When, where, and how did our species emerge and disperse across the continents? How did it adapt behaviorally to different landscapes and climates? What was the extent of interaction with archaic humans like Neanderthals and Denisovans shaping our behavioral and genetic diversity? These are the major questions of our evolution. Over the last twenty years, northwestern Africa has emerged as one of the most important regions for the study of our origins and evolution. Especially in present-day Morocco, the rich record of human fossils including the earliest known Homo sapiens and artefacts is not only generating new, cross-African, models of our species’ speciation (Hublin et al. 2017), but is also producing new knowledge about our early behavior, adaptation, and survival. Sites like Jebel Irhoud (Hublin et al. 2017 ; Richter et al 2017), Ifri N’Ammar (Nami and Moser 2010), Taforalt (Barton et al. 2016), and Rhafas (Bouzouggar et al. 2019); caves on the Atlantic coast of Rabat-Temara (Bouzougar and Barton 2012; Debénath 1976; Dibble et al. 2012; El-Hajraoui 1994; Nespoulet et al. 2008), around Essaouira (Sehasseh et al. 2021), and in the vicinity of Casablanca (Reynal et al. 2010); and areas such as Ain Béni-Mathar Basin (Sala-Ramos et al. 2022), have been providing an invaluable record of the evolution of human morphological traits, of one-million-year developments in stone toolmaking and other technologies, of diversity in hunting and food procurement, of the earliest exploitation of marine resources, and of evidence of some of the earliest human symbolic behavior, cultural signaling, and abstract thought.
Author
Zeljko Rezek (PhD University of Pennsylvania 2015) is a researcher in the Department of Paleoanthropology, CIRB, Collège de France. He co-directs field operations of the Balzan-funded research project The Biological and Cultural Evolution of Homo sapiens: Early Humans of Dar Es-Soltan 2 and Contrebandiers Caves in Morocco. He also directs research on human evolution in projects in the Levant and Egypt.
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