Inside and outside Africa, to 48,000 bce
From the available evidence, as scanty and uneven as it often is, it appears that the full development of Later Stone Age/Upper Palaeolithic technology and cultural behaviors took shape in the 20,000 years preceding 48,000 bce.
East Africa and possibly also the Horn of Africa were crucial regions of this transition. In all the other parts of Africa, archaic humans with Middle Stone Age industries still predominated. Our common human ancestors acquired the enabling evolutionary advance, the hardwiring for full syntactic language and a modern vocal tract, by around 70,000 bce. Down to 48,000 bce, they accumulated the knowledge and experience - the software - for taking full advantage of these new capacities. By 48,000 bce, equipped with those capacities, modern human beings began to spread out of Africa and into other parts of the globe. At the same time, others of our common fully human ancestors began to spread their cultures and technologies southward and westward into other parts of the continent. In each of these expansions, they took with them also, it can be proposed, an understanding of the world and their existence in it that rested on shamanistic beliefs and practices and, very possibly already, an artistic tradition, one of the aspects of which would have been rock art expressive of that belief system.Where were the staging grounds of the first movements of fully modern humans out of Africa and into Eurasia? The archaeology of the likely pivotal regions, from South Sudan and the Ethiopian highlands north to Egypt, remains almost unknown for the crucial era just before and around 48,000 bce. In Egypt the latest securely dated Middle Stone Age finds belong to the period preceding 50,000 bce,[451] in keeping with a history in which fully modern humans spread in the immediately succeeding era north out of Africa via the Red Sea hills and the Nile.
Positive attestation of such a history does not yet exist, however. The current archaeological knowledge of Egypt and the Red Sea hills between around 50,000 and 42,000 bce is pretty much a blank page; and even for the period from 42,000 down to 23,000 bce, the known sites are few and scattered.The finds from those later scattered sites, though, highlight just how important filling in the archaeological gap for this period in the Red Sea hills and Nile Valley is likely to be. In both regions the characteristic tools of the sites dating after 42,000 bce have notable affinities with the Upper Palaeolithic tools that fully modern humans brought into the Levant at around 48,000 bce. These features suggest that the African antecedents of the Upper Palaeolithic, as we call the Eurasian varieties of the Later Stone Age, may well have lain specifically in Egypt and the Horn of Africa.
A second set of our early fully modern human ancestors may have followed an alternative route, moving eastward more directly from the Horn of Africa, across the Bab-el-Mandab strait and southern Arabia, and then through southern Asia to island South Asia and Sahul.[452] Again, however, the archaeology of the crucial intermediate areas in South Sudan and the Horn of Africa in the period around and just before 48,000 bce remains too poorly known for this proposed history to be adequately tested.
By around 50,000-48,000 bce, then, the common African ancestors of us all inhabited a broad stretch of Africa, from East Africa at the south to the shores of the Red Sea at the north (see Map 14.2). They were poised at the threshold of a new era, in which some of them would migrate outward from the northeastern parts of Africa and across Eurasia into lands previously inhabited by more archaic hominins. Others would advance contemporaneously southward and westward from East Africa into other African regions still dominated by Middle Stone Age, archaic humans.