THE UISPP JOURNAL
Aicha Oujaa, Julie Arnaud, Morgane Bardey-Vaillant, Dominique Grimaud-Hervé – REASSESSMENT OF THE MIDDLE PLEISTOCENE HUMAN REMAINS FROM RABAT-KÉBIBAT (MOROCCO)
The peopling of North Africa and the emergence of the first Homo sapiens is an ongoing debate, recently enriched by the discovery of a new human fossil remain in Jebel Irhoud (Morocco), attributed to a modern human and dated to ca 300 ka. In this context, it seems important to reassess all the human fossil record available in the area, integrating also new discoveries and data in order to precisely understand the dynamic of the peopling of this region. We propose here a reevaluation of the human fossils remains collected by Marçais in the early twentieth century in the Rabat-Kébibat quarry and belonging to the Middle Pleistocene period. The Rabat-Kébibat quarry, situated on the Atlantic littoral some 10km south of Rabat, is known geologically and chronologically since the 1930s. Recently, a Franco-Moroccan team has undertaken new investigation of the coastal region of Rabat with the aim of reconstructing the evolution of landscape of the Moroccan North Atlantic coast from the end of the Middle Pleistocene to the Upper Pleistocene. In this framework, different stratigraphical sequences from several sites has been analyzed and compared. This study has allowed to hypothesize that the human fossil remains from Rabat-Kébibat probably belong to a MIS 7 stratigraphical level.
Reference as:
Oujaa A, Arnaud J, Bardey-Vaillant M, Grimaud-Hervé D. 2019. Reassessment of the Middle Pleistocene human remains from Rabat-Kébibat (Morocco). UISPP Journal 2(2), pp 27–31. https://doi.org/10.62526/CX5CFA
