Period· The columns of time
Middle Stone Age
315 ka → 50 ka
For two hundred and sixty-five thousand years the way of making a tool barely changes, while almost everything else about our species does. This is the technical world in which Homo sapiens appears, spreads across Africa, and leaves it.
What the evidence shows
Middle Stone Age in Africa, Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia: two names for a single idea, which is that the core is shaped first, so that the flake struck from it already has the form wanted. It is a way of thinking ahead in stone, and it is old. The assemblage at Jebel Irhoud, dated with the human fossils to 315,000 years, is among the oldest to have been directly dated, which is why this band opens where the first fossils of the species do. It closes only when a different way of working stone spreads across Eurasia, around 50,000 years ago, and even then not everywhere at once.
Bounds and conventions
Neither edge is a date in the way a battle has one. The left one follows the oldest well-dated assemblage, which records the state of excavation rather than the state of the past. The right one follows a change that took several millennia, arrived at different times in different regions, and in some places never took this form at all.
MSA in Africa, Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia: two regional names for the flake industries of this period.