The Earliest Dated Pictures in the Dispersal of Psychologically Modern Humans: A Middle Paleolithic Painted Rock Shelter (C. 45KA) at Wadi Defeit, Egypt

Abstract

The paper reports the discovery in 2018 of a Middle Paleolithic painted rock shelter (dubbed “The Hunter’s Shelter”) in the remote upper reaches of the Wadi Defeit in far southeastern Egypt (just north of the climatologically significant latitude 22° N) by a team from the University of California at Berkeley. The paintings depict two elephants being attacked by encircling human beings wielding spears, in dangerous procedures documented by ethnohistorical accounts of indigenous elephant hunts in central Africa. One of the elephants is partly superimposed on a running or leaping lion (not in scale with the figures of humans and elephants), which might have been made in an earlier episode of painting. The paintings can be dated in three ways: acacia gum inserted into gouges in one elephant’s belly yielded calibrated radiocarbon dates of c. 45 ka; the lion was partly covered by an oxolate crust dated by Uranium-Thorium decay to 60–45 ka; and windswept sand that partly covered the paintings yielded OSL dates of 45–40 ka. At present, the shelter is the earliest known dated painting site in the global prehistoric record. In addition to reporting the motivations and parameters of the project and its preliminary results, the paper discusses the “naturalistic” and “realistic” elements of the configurations and evaluates the regional MP cultural affiliations of the site and the people who likely made the paintings. It explores the idea, given the shelter’s location, that the makers were a Middle Paleolithic population of anatomically and “psychologically” modern humans who moved out of central East Africa through the mountains and wadi systems of the western Red Sea coast in a wave of dispersal dated to c. 75–45 ka; ultimately some of them left the continent altogether by way of land and/or sea travel to the Levant and/or Arabia at the tip(s) of the Red Sea, eventually populating much of the world with modern humans. The second half of the paper considers methodological and theoretical issues raised by the empirical findings of the project, speculating that picture making played a role in effecting the global dispersal of psychologically modern humans, presumably by helping them to remember and communicate lifeways and to understand and adapt to new environments and ecologies as they moved into them, though these possibilities remain to be investigated in detail on a global scale.