Sangoan

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The sometimes referred to as epithelial Acheuléen called sangoan (formerly Tumbian ) is a variant of Jungacheuléen in central, southern and eastern Africa with rather small unique tracks in West Africa. It probably developed from older Acheuléen types and was often seen as an "intermediate complex" between the beginning of the Old and the beginning of the Middle Paleolithic with the center in the Congo Basin , where the Sangoan finds represent the earliest traces of man. The intermediate concept has since been abandoned. The now controversial one is named and in the dating of the beginnings well up to 400,000BP moved the Technokomplex back to the Sango Bay site on the west coast of Lake Victoria in Uganda , where it was first discovered in 1920. (For technical terminology with the distinctions between complex, industry and inventory, see Prehistoric terminology and systematics .)

Periodization and Carrier

Periodization: The Sangoan, which also includes the inventories sometimes referred to as “Charaman” after a site in Zimbabwe , is approximately Middle Paleolithic in the European sense and corresponds technologically roughly to the local Moustéria , but with massive features of the Early Stone Age Late Acheuléen , to which it is sometimes also asked. In tropical Central Africa it extends to the beginning of the Epipalaeolithic with the technocomplexes of the Lupemban type , with which it is already mixed or superimposed from around 250,000 BP - a Lupemban site in central Zambia was dated to 250,000 / 170,000 BP - and of the following Chitolian .
The Sangoan and Fauresmith industries used to be combined as First Intermediate , i.e. as an intermediate phase between the Early and Middle Stone Age. (The "Second Intermediate" referred to the intermediate phase between the Middle and Later Stone Age). The attempt was made to characterize the sub-Saharan find complexes which, as intermediate phases , can be roughly paralleled with the late Old Paleolithic and the Middle Paleolithic of North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, while the subsequent Later Stone Age roughly corresponds to the circum-Mediterranean Upper Paleolithic . In the meantime, the name has largely been abandoned due to the increasingly visible heterogeneity of the find complexes, especially since the Sangoan and the Fauresmith can no longer speak of an actual hand ax industry, since at the same time neighboring non-Acheuléen inventories, partly still associated with Acheulén- Types, and it is particularly problematic with Sangoan to define a whole, centuries-long period using just a single device type. In addition, apart from the gradual reduction in size of the hand axes, concrete transitional forms between the Acheuleans and the Middle Stone Age or Sangoan are missing. However, there seems to have been a very long (up to 150,000 years) transition phase in which the two industries mixed and partially and regionally overlapped, so that the Early and Middle Stone Age can be separated much less clearly than previously assumed. The same applies to the transition to the Later Stone Age in sub-Saharan Africa.

The porters were hunters and gatherers who, judging by their stock of tools, apparently lived primarily in forests or their fringes. Before the dates, which were much earlier, were known, the beginning of the Sangoan was set with the beginning of the last interglacial , the European Eem warm period before 130,000 BP. However, too close a connection between climate changes and Stone Age cultural phenomena, especially in the sub-Saharan area, is now generally viewed more critically, especially since the individual complexes, especially Acheuléen and Sangoan, cannot be separated as sharply as such an interpretation would require and the effects of the European one Cold and warm periods in the equatorial area are disputed because of the pluvial problem and the very different geographical , topographical , geological etc. conditions locally .
Because of the very heterogeneous paleoanthropological picture for this early period, the question of the bearer can only be answered to a limited extent. The tools from Broken Hill (now Kabwe ), for example, are associated with fragments of skulls from Lake Easy and the Levallois tool finds there that may possibly be assigned to the Sangoan and suggest that at least in the early and middle period it was a form similar to Homo heidelbergensis to Homo rhodesiensis could have acted a suspected Intermediärform between Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens , which was then in sub-Saharan Africa to have been widespread. The main source is Kabwe (formerly Broken Hill), in the vicinity of which tool inventories were found that can be assigned to the Sangoan, and whose age with the help of amino acid dating resulted in 110,000 BP. The anthropogenetic assessment is, however , extremely difficult because of the poor conservation conditions, mainly in today's rainforest areas, based on mostly acidic soils, which practically exclude hominid finds .

Distribution, dating and tool inventory

Distribution: The Sangoan industry, which was roughly the same as the Fauresmith industry in South Africa from approx. 200,000 BP, and which is barely occupied in South Africa, extended roughly from today's Botswana to Ethiopia and includes Sudan and West Africa, especially to the large rivers in Cameroon and Nigeria as well as on the coasts and in Ghana , whose inventories, however, show formal differences from those further east. There are other sites in today's areas of Uganda, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo (until 1997 Zaire ), Kenya and Zambia. In addition to the most important ones at the Kalambo Falls , important Sangoan inventories were found in the Kagera Valley west of Lake Victoria, but impaired by their non-primary location in the river gravel and therefore not as clear as those at the Kalambo Falls. In general, there are so far only a few Sangoan sites in an undisturbed location in East Africa, i.e. in situ . Similar complexes can also be found in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Muguruk in western Kenya is an exception, where an inventory was discovered in an almost undisturbed, but paleozoologically undated location, which also contains Sangoan types.
The Sangoan differs from the Fauresmith industry , at least in part, through its inventory, which is more typical for forest dwellers, with large, heavy equipment, presumably for woodworking ( wear analysis ), while the Fauresmith industry is more characteristic for people who live in savannahs , so that one assumes two different population groups. However, based on findings from pollen analysis, it is also true that the habitats must have been located at least temporarily in areas with precipitation of less than 1000 mm per year, as is typical for tree and wet savannahs and gallery forests , which were the rainforests of the previous Eem during the Würm Ice Age -Warm time possibly displaced. In the Kalahari , which, like the Sahara, at least at times offered significantly better living conditions than today, many similar stone tools have been discovered that can be dated at least as early as the Sangoan culture. The Sangoan of today's West African rainforest is also only sparsely occupied and is found as the Sangoan- Lupemban complex , mainly equatorial along the rivers.
Whether the Sangoan (as well as the Fauresmith and the later Lupemban and Tschitolian) was a reaction to the environmental conditions of the tropical rainforest region and its later semi-arid changes to savannah landscapes remains unclear and is sometimes doubted because of the uncertain location and dating, especially since the changes in the equatorial rainforest have only been well documented for the past 20,000 years. It is believed, however, that even the densest forests were occasionally visited by humans. According to the latest dating, the Sangoan developed much earlier and covered several warm and cold periods in Europe and their potential sub-Saharan effects in its Acheuléen transition phase, but then in its most concrete forms culminated in the potential through 130,000 BP in the Upper Pleistocene the European Eem warm period caused climate changes and persisted in the Congo Basin until after the introduction of the Neolithic .
Overall, however, due to the enormous size of the area and its very inconsistent topographical and landscape conditions (highlands, river valleys, rainforests, savannas, coasts), one should not assume an all-too direct connection between these and the artifact morphology and rather from certain characteristics typical of the landscape Device groups such as the heavy devices of the Sangoan originate from which it is assumed that they were intended more for woodworking, but which only represent a part of the techno complex, which in addition hardly or not everywhere in the Middle Paleolithic, while the rest of the inventory also includes others, Includes lighter tools.

Dating: As in the area of ​​the Fauresmith industry , a number of sites are known in the valleys of the Vaal and Zambezi (especially in the area of ​​the Victoria Falls ) where devices of the Sangoan type are attached to younger river terraces than find complexes with old Paleolithic characteristics . However, dating is made very difficult by the lack of associated fauna finds ; in addition, as in the Bambata and Pomongwe caves in the Matopo Mountains, they are mostly very small complexes, although they are up to 250,000 years old. At the Kalambo Falls , where the Sangoan begins at around 200,000 BP as the terminus post quem , there was a Sangoan layer, the so-called Chipeta industry here , above the youngest of a series of layers from the Jungacheuléen and therefore appears to be 46,000 to BP 37,500 BP too young. But there are more recent inventories elsewhere, although the dating is uncertain, for example in Zimbabwe . The transition from Sangoan as Epi-Acheuléen to Lupemban, which no longer belongs to the Acheuléen, is assumed for approx. 50,000 BP or earlier. (However, at Mumbwa in Zambia and other places there are inventories with Lupemban trains that could possibly be between 250,000 and 170,000 years old.) In the meantime, especially in the Congo area, the Sangoan is viewed less as an independent cultural stage than as a transitional form of an Acheuléen -Sangoan-Lupemban complex, which does not necessarily have to represent an independent cultural form and is sometimes also apostrophized as the early Lupemban. With the help of amino acid dating, 0.19 million years BP were determined. A deposit in Rooidam near Kimberley resulted in a uranium-thorium dating of approximately 115,000 years BP.
According to the latest findings, the dating of the beginning Sangoan must be relocated significantly back to the Endacheuléen, to Phillipson up to 400,000 BP, that of Lupemban to approx. 250,000. They are also nowhere near as uniform as previously assumed.

Tool inventory: On stone tools, there are especially core tools that could be used for more difficult tasks: triangular picks or hoes, i.e. pointed, heavy, hook-shaped core axes or triangles with a triangular retouching at the tip . The heavy core tools, which are continuously present in the Sangoan depending on the habitat, are found mainly in river valleys and heavily forested areas, while lighter tools predominate in more open terrain, such as on the Zambezi and Limpopo . The latter were also assigned to the so-called Charaman industry, which got its name from an open site in north-west Zimbabwe. However, both are now viewed as a continuum that began to form at the end of the Acheuléen. Smaller and their dating according to older inventories, there are blade-tip-like devices, as they are similarly documented for Europe. There are also the classic hand axes , which are now apparently becoming smaller, some of which have micoquia-like shapes, as well as cleavers and other cutting devices such as knives and side scrapers , many elongated, double-sided tips that may have served as lance or spear tips, and large, flat devices , presumably mainly for woodworking. A special characteristic, also typical of the later Fauresmith industry, is the appearance of blades developed from cuts that are now twice as long as they are wide.

The Acheuléen / Sangoan-Lupemban-Tschitolian complex

John Desmond Clark identified two complexes of the Early / Middle and Late Stone Age in his "Cambridge History of Africa" ​​published together with John Donnelly Fage : a Sangoan-Lupemban and a Lupembo-Tschitolian . The overlapping with the Endacheuléen in the early stages and that is partially emerged or associated sangoan forms in sub-Saharan Africa together with the later onset lupemban culture and the subsequent Tschitolian one but loose and not nearly ubiquitous medium and Upper Palaeolithic cultural sequence Acheuléen / Sangoan - Lupemban - Tschitolian , in which, however, numerous, often only small techno complexes are embedded, some of which are only local or regional (especially in South Africa) or more or less narrow variants. Examples are Fauresmith, Elandsfontein, Magosian, Stillbay, Sterkfontein, Smithfield, Wilton, Pietersburg, Nachikufan etc. Both Acheuléen / Sangoan and Lupemban as well as Lupemban and Tschitolian partially overlap or merge and thus result in two interlocking complexes that can be combined regionally to form the overall Acheuléen / Sangoan-Lupemban-Tschitolian complex, without, however, resulting in a consequent cultural development in the narrower sense, rather a mosaic of interregional variants. This cultural sequence, which started around 400,000 / 250,000 BP in the end of the Early Stone Age and the early African Middle Stone Age and in some African ethnic groups with the Chitolian repertoire until the 19th century AD, was possibly due to sub-Saharan environmental changes in the wake of the European Cold and warm periods from 400,000 BP, especially the Eem warm period , the Würm glacial period and the subsequent Holocene . In the final phase Tschitolian this sequence then flows into the partial and regional developing Neolithic and / or often without previous Neolithic and almost always without Bronze Age occurring Iron Age .
If one takes this climatic concept as a basis, then, depending on this, new tool groups emerged, which could have taken into account the corresponding environmental changes between tropical forest and open savannah, even if a parallelism of different carrier groups in different habitats seems possible, even a seasonal variation of the same carrier for hunting in the valley or on the plateau.
The earliest phase of the overall development goes back to the Epipalaeolithic and shows shapes like hand axes , which are typical for the Acheuléen des ( Lower Paleolithic ). The core of this complex was Central and East Africa (with the main finding site at the Kalambo Falls , southeast of Lake Tanganyika ), but foothills extend far into South Africa , while West Africa can only be traced back to weaker traces that are less determined by large equipment in the core of the Congo basin due to the poor conservation conditions and the fact that there were permanent rainforest conditions, so that this area was only settled very late neolithically and especially along the river courses, as the lack of lithic findings and the appearance of ceramics there suggest leaves. Homo rhodesiensis and Homo erectus or their variants come into question
as carriers of the Sangoan and Fauresmith as well as possibly the early Lupemban phase, although their relationships are still largely unclear, and which was finally followed by Homo sapiens . The connections with the ethnic groups living there today , the Bantu peoples who only immigrated there in the Holocene , the much older pygmies , Bushmen or San and Khoikhoi (Hottentots) are still unclear.

Literature and Sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1., pp. 211, 312; Phillipson, p. 58.
  2. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 246, 250.
  3. ↑ The Stone Age period in Africa differs greatly from that of Europe. See cultural historical periodics
  4. ↑ Phillipson, pp. 84 f.
  5. ^ Phillipson, p. 117.
  6. ↑ Fiedler, p. 329 .; Clark, Vol. 1, p. 212.
  7. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 246, 250.
  8. ↑ Brockhaus, Vol. 7, p. 142; Müller-Karpe, p. 108.
  9. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, p. 289.
  10. ↑ Phillipson, p. 85, fig. 42.
  11. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 211 f .; Phillipson, pp. 81, 91.
  12. ↑ For the sake of simplicity, this term is used uniformly here, as is the case with the Mindel, Riss and Würm glacial periods, some of which have different names in the Alpine, Eastern European, North American and Asian regions.
  13. ↑ Phillipson, pp. 83 f., 89, 91 f.
  14. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 293, 295, 320; Phlilipson, p. 124.
  15. ↑ Phillipson, p. 96.
  16. ^ Fiedler, p. 294
  17. ^ Britannica, Vol. 4, p. 702.
  18. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 59-62.
  19. ^ Richter, p. 166 f.
  20. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 213-216, 245 f., 292.
  21. ↑ Phillipson, p. 116 f.
  22. ↑ Phillipson, pp. 84, 116 f.
  23. ↑ Britannica, Vol. 26, p. 57; Clark, Vol. 1, p. 788; Phillipson, pp. 81-84.
  24. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 289, 293; Müller-Karpe, p. 108 f.
  25. ↑ Müller-Karpe, p. 109.
  26. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 290 f .; Phillipson, p. 82.
  27. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, p. 204.
  28. ↑ Phillipson, p. 108.
  29. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 61, 202 ff., 246, 315.
  30. ↑ Fiedler, p. 294, Sherratt, p. 75; Britannica, Vol. 10, pp. 416f; Phillipson, pp. 81-84.
  31. ↑ Phillipson, pp. 82, 85, 117.
  32. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 289, 293, 315.
  33. ↑ Hoffmann, p. 310.
  34. ↑ Hahn, pp. 181, 190 f .; Clark, Vol. 1, p. 289.
  35. ↑ Müller-Karpe, p. 109; Clark, Vol. 1, p. 212.
  36. ↑ CFage, p. 49 f.
  37. ↑ Britannica, Vol. 26, p. 57, Vol. 11, p. 286.
  38. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 186, 204, 213 ff., 241, 246, 290, 317, 423, 426.
  39. ↑ Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 205, 317, 423-427; Fage, pp. 62 f, 65; Phillipson, p. 121 f.
  40. ^ Richter, p. 283.
  41. ↑ Baumann, p. 31 ff .; Müller-Karpe, pp. 109 ff., Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 61, 202 ff., 246, 293, 315, 320, 423 f., 427, 469, 790; Fage, p. 66 f.