Iberomaurusian

gigatos | February 1, 2022

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Summary

The Iberomaurusian is a prehistoric archaeological culture that developed in the present-day Maghreb, occupying a coastal strip from northern Tunisia to southern Morocco. This Upper Paleolithic culture extends from about 25,000 to 10,000 years before present (AP). The rock shelters of Mouillah, near Maghnia (Algeria), are the typical site.

The Iberomaurusian was so named around 1909 by Paul Pallary, who believed to find in this industry similarities with the microlithic tools that Louis Siret discovered at the same time in southern Spain. The source of this culture, which emerged about 25,000 years ago and lasted nearly fifteen millennia, is debated among specialists, however, this theory on the relationship with southern Spain is now generally dismissed.

The Iberomaurusian was preceded in North Africa by the Aterian industries, whose author was Homo sapiens, present in North Africa for at least 300 000 years.

The Iberomaurusian deposits have yielded a microlithic lithic industry with numerous flakes. These are frequently transformed into flakes with backs or segments, using the microburin technique. There is an important temporal variability.

Hunting, fishing, and gathering provided all food resources; the main species hunted was the bighorn sheep (Ammotragus lervia), associated with bovids, deer, and suids. The use of fishing and the collection of shells and snails became more important from 15,000 BP onwards.

Very old terracotta animal figurines (20,200 years ago), ostrich eggshell ornaments and numerous traces of ochre testify to artistic concerns. Numerous primary burials are known, sometimes in constructed tombs.

The Ibero-Maurusian industrial complex covered a large part of North Africa; it occupied, from the north of Tunisia to western Morocco, the phyto-climatic zone that geographers call the Tell: a region of contrasting relief occupied by medium-sized mountains (the Tellian Atlas), intersected by narrow valleys and plains developed in a chain, an area with a Mediterranean climate which, at the time, had much higher rainfall than today.

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Tafoghalt (Morocco)

The Iberomaurusian deposit of Tafoughalt (or Taforalt) is a cave located in Morocco, in the mountainous massif of Beni-Snassen, 1 km from the village of Taforalt in the north-east of Morocco in the province of Berkane. It is a cave of thirty meters of opening and twenty-eight meters of depth from front to back. The Taforalt cave was excavated from 1951 to 1955 by the Abbot Jean Roche. The stratigraphic study of the cave revealed ten Iberomaurusian levels overlying an Aterian level.

The paleoanthropological study of the site carried out by Denise Ferembach in 1962 inventoried the fossil remains of 86 adults and 98 children, in a good state of preservation, distributed among the 40 burials in the cave. The burials, dated to at least 12,000 years ago, were discovered in the ten Iberomaurusian levels. The men of Taforalt were of the Mechta-Afalou type.

A 2013 study showed that the site was occupied by Aterian groups until 24,500 years ago (radiocarbon calibrated date), followed by an archaeological hiatus, after which an Iberomaurusian industry appears 21,160 years ago. The latter continues until 10,800 years ago.

Afalou Bou Rhummel (Algeria)

Originally excavated by Camille Arambourg in 1928, the site of Afalou Bou Rhummel, near Béjaïa, in Algeria, had delivered at the time the first known ancient burials in Northwest Africa. It was occupied between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. The facies of the Mechta-Afalou Man was reconstructed in wax statue by Élisabeth Daynès.

Columnata (Algeria)

The prehistoric site of Columnata is located on the territory of the commune of Sidi Hosni, about 1,500 meters from the village of the same name in the wilaya of Tiaret. Of a total of 116 subjects in the necropolis, 48 adults and 68 children and adolescents were counted.

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Kef Oum Touiza and Demnet Elhassan (Algeria)

These Iberomaurusians are located in the mountainous region of the commune of Seraïdi, in the wilaya of Annaba, and will be classified in the list of Algerian prehistoric sites.

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Akarit (Tunisia)

From the bottom of the Gulf of Gabes, and more precisely from Wadi Akarit, we find in Tunisia flake industries attributed to the Iberomaurusian by some (Menchia, excavation A. Gragueb) and attached to another “cycle” by others (Gobert 1962).

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Ouchtata (Tunisia)

Deposits belonging to the Iberomaurusian industry have been found at Ouchtata, the place that gave its name to the Ouchtata flakes. Gobert and Vaufrey count 8 microburins, late Iberian burins of the Vignard “wick” type, at Ouchtata and 2 at Aïn-Roumane. The semi-abrupt retouch flakes were named “Ouchtata” by J. Tixier. The Iberomaurusian habitats found at Ouchtata are often open-air habitats established on sandy soils, preferably on fixed dunes. It is thanks to the study of the Tunisian deposit of Ouchtata that the characteristics of the Iberomaurusian culture were defined and specified.

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Morphology

The Iberomaurusian lithic industry is the work of a type of modern man, the Mechta-Afalou Man. Several origins have been proposed to explain its appearance in North Africa, including a European origin via Spain or a Near Eastern origin. According to the latter theory, defended by several authors, the Mechta-Afalou Man could come from a common Near Eastern focus from which two branches would have developed: one towards the Horn of Africa, hence the presence of the common marker E1B1B, and the other towards the Maghreb, giving the Mechta-Afalou Man.

Unlike their Aterian predecessors, the fossil remains of the Mechta-Afalou Man are very numerous and amount to nearly 500 specimens. They constitute one of the most voluminous collections of human fossils in the world.

Genetics

The various genetic studies conducted since 2005 have produced partially contradictory results, perhaps due in part to the potential divergence between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, and to the emphasis on different time horizons within the genomes studied.

A genetic study by Rym Kefi in 2005, having analyzed the mitochondrial genome (maternal lineage) extracted from thirty or so Tafoghalt skeletons (dated to 12,000 years ago), proposed to rule out a sub-Saharan origin of the Iberomaurusians and to conclude on a local origin of this population.

A new study by the same author in December 2016, involving mitochondrial DNA from 38 skeletons found at the sites of Tafoghalt in Morocco and Afalou in Algeria, confirmed the absence of sub-Saharan traces among Iberomaurusians, but noted in addition to local ancestry some Eurasian ancestry.

In March 2018, a collaborative genetic study by researchers from the University of Mohammed I (Oujda), the University of Oxford, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, analyzed nuclear DNA extracted from several Tafoghalt skeletons dated to about 15,000 years AP.

The following results were obtained for maternal (mtDNA) and paternal (Y-DNA) lineage haplogroups:

According to the authors, a genetic connection between North Africa and the Near East existed since the Upper Paleolithic. North Africa and the Near East would then have formed a continuous region without genetic barriers. The authors also confirmed the rejection of the old hypothesis of a gene flow from Spain to North Africa during the Gravettian period.

According to a study by Hodgson et al 2014 of autosomal DNA from many current populations in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Afro-Asiatic languages were likely spread across Africa by an ancestral population carrying a newly identified theoretical genetic component, which the researchers named “Ethio – Somali”. This “Ethio-Somali” component is found today mainly among the Cushitic and Etiho-Semitic language populations of the Horn of Africa. This component is close to the non-African genetic component found in North Africans, which is thought to have diverged from all other non-African ancestry at least 23,000 years ago. On this basis, researchers suggest that the “Maghrebi” and “Ethio-Somali” populations originated from a common prehistoric migration that probably originated in the Near East during the pre-agricultural period in northeast Africa via the Sinai Peninsula. This population then split into two branches, with one group heading west to the Maghreb (Maghrebi) and the other south to the Horn of Africa (Ethio-Somali).