La Grotte des Contrebandiers, which contains Middle Stone Age (MSA) occupations dating to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 and Later Stone Age (LSA) occupations in MIS 2, presents an opportunity to investigate the local impacts of late Pleistocene climate variability on the subsistence strategies of human groups in the Atlantic coastal region of Morocco. This study uses stable oxygen isotopes from large herbivore tooth enamel (δ18Oenamel values) to explore shifts in precipitation regimes and water deficit in plants through time at the site. In addition, δ18Oenamel values are paired with marine mollusk abundance data to explore variation in coastal resource use during climate intervals with variable sea levels. We find that δ18Oenamel values among evaporation-sensitive (ES) and evaporation-insensitive (EI) taxa reveal distinctions between MIS 2 and 5 as well as variation within MIS 5 consistent with orbital-scale climate shifts. Furthermore, we find that during climate intervals with higher inferred sea levels, marine resources were either incorporated into diets more frequently or less field processing occurred. Despite climate variability recorded in δ18Oenamel proxies, mammalian species composition among faunal assemblages at Contrebandiers do not vary drastically, indicating persistence of mixed scrubland-grassland habitats through time. Human diets at the site were affected most strongly by physical modification of coastal geography than by other climate factors, given that vegetation and animal communities of the Moroccan littoral generally had sufficient ecological flexibility to cope with local climate fluctuations in the late Pleistocene.

The earliest archaeological evidence from northern Africa dates to ca. 2.44 Ma. Nevertheless, the palaeoenvironmental setting of hominins living in this part of the continent at the Plio-Pleistocene transition remains poorly documented, particularly in comparison to eastern and southern Africa. The Guefait-4 fossil site in eastern Morocco sheds light on our knowledge of palaeoenvironments in northern Africa. Our study reveals the oldest known presence of C-4 plants in the northern part of the continent in a mosaic landscape that includes open grasslands, forested areas, wetlands, and seasonal aridity. This diverse landscape and resource availability likely facilitated the occupation of the region by mammals, including potentially hominins. Our regional-scale study provides a complementary perspective to global-scale studies and highlights the importance of considering the diversity of microhabitats within a given region when studying species-dispersal dynamics.

The Middle Atlas and particularly the Boulmane region is full of pre-Islamic funerary monuments. The overwhelming majority of them are circular tumuli. However, two burials from the “City of Stones” are completely different from this common pattern and are exceptional in many respects. They are an extension of each other. Each is topped by an imposing horizontal sandstone slab which gives it a megalithic appearance although they are natural formations in reality. The underlying cavity was used as a burial chamber. The first CPSI site displayed the incomplete skeleton of 3 individuals. One of them, found in lateral decubitus, is relatively complete in anatomical connection up to the pelvis. The remains of two incomplete skeletons without any anatomical connection are also present. The second burial of the CPSII monument, however, does not contain any anatomically connected skeleton but bones belonging to 4 different individuals. The pre-Islamic populations of the Moroccan Middle Atlas erected tumulus-type funerary monuments to accommodate primary burials which could be single or multiple. And at the same time they could desecrate some by exhuming the skeletons to redeposit them in natural rock cavities which serve as burial chambers for a secondary burial or a deposit.

This study presents the first isotopic evidence of the palaeodiet of the extinct Atlas bear, based on remains recovered from Ifri Oussaïd cave in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Comparative isotopic analysis with Holocene brown bears from Europe suggests an omnivorous diet with a notable intake of animal protein, in contrast to more herbivorous populations such as Holocene Cantabrian bears, although these conclusions should be taken with caution, as there is no local baseline with which to compare. This bear likely inhabited a closed, humid forest environment, with C3 plants at the base of the trophic chain. The calibrated radiocarbon dating places this individual shortly after the 8.2 kyr BP cooling event, during a period characterised by slightly warmer temperatures and greater arboreal vegetation compared to present-day conditions in the area.

In 2009, renewed excavations at the Middle Stone Age (MSA) site of Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, yielded a skull and partial skeleton of a child dated to Marine Isotope Stage 5. While much of the cranium was found shattered, the midface remained largely intact. In this study, we virtually reconstructed the maxilla and quantified its shape using three-dimensional geometric morphometric methods and compared it to an extensive sample of non-adult and adult Eurasian Neanderthals and Homo sapiens spanning the Middle Pleistocene to Holocene. We used developmental simulations to predict the adult shape of the Contrebandiers maxilla by simulating development along three ontogenetic trajectories: Neanderthal, African, and Levantine early H. sapiens and Holocene H. sapiens. Our results confirm the H. sapiens-like morphology of the Contrebandiers fossil. Both shape and size align it with other North African MSA fossils and Late Pleistocene humans from Qafzeh, Israel. Interestingly, the evaluation of the ontogenetic trajectories suggests that during late ontogeny the facial growth pattern of the Contrebandiers and the Qafzeh children is more similar to that of Neanderthals than it is to recent humans. This suggests that the unique facial growth pattern of Homo sapiens post-dated the MSA. This study is an important step in addressing ontogenetic variability in the African MSA, a period characterized by the origins, emergence, and dispersal of our species, but poorly understood because of the fragmentary and scant human fossil record.

The Ain Beni Mathar-Guefait Basin, in the High Plateau Region (Morocco), is dissected by the Za River, the main eastern tributary of the Moulouya, which incises more than 150 m into Plio-Pleistocene sediments. The main goal of the present study is to provide an initial geochronologic framework for such basin infill based on a combination of magnetostratigraphy and electron spin resonance (ESR). The combined results have implications on the age of the paleontological record, the evolution of the Moulouya River, and the activity of the faults that delimit the basin. We have studied sedimentary rocks that are essentially flat -lying and of an alluvial and lacustrine/palustrine origin. An approximately 140 m-thick section has been sampled at an average of 2.5 m per site, allowing to build a local magnetic polarity stratigraphy that includes nine geomagnetic reversals. Although no fold test is available, the presence of dual polarities and rockmagnetic analysis give us confidence that magnetization directions are primary. We then anchored the obtained magnetozones to the Geomagnetic Polarity Timescale (GPTS) using the biostrati-graphic data as well as local geological observations. Our proposed magnetostratigraphy-based chronol-ogy reveals a Plio-Pleistocene sedimentary infill spanning from Gauss to Olduvai Chrons. The lower, detrital formations mostly fall within the normal Gauss Chron, whereas the upper lacustrine and palus-trine carbonates, which are almost widespread to the top of the sedimentary fill, are Olduvai in age. These results provide the first chronological constraints for the basin fill in one of the largest intermontane basins of the High Plateaus. The new magnetostratigraphy also reveals that the major environmental change that triggered a switch from alluvial to lacustrine-palustrine conditions in Northern Maghreb occurred near the Gauss-Matuyama reversal, ca. 2.6 Ma. In addition, it shows that the age of the paleon-tological site Guefait-4 is approximately 1 myr older than the ESR ages obtained from the quartz grains. The possible sources for this underestimation are discussed. However, we also acknowledge and discuss other possible chronostratigraphic interpretations of the current data, although less likely.(c) 2023 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Le littoral atlantique des environs de Rabat offre différentes configurations renseignant sur l’évolution du trait de côte depuis le Pléistocène moyen. La falaise vive de Salé-Kénitra, située immédiatement au nord de Rabat, porte à l’affleurement une succession de séquences sédimentaires du SIM 7 au SIM 5 (stade isotopique marin), l’ensemble étant recouvert par une grande dune avec intercalations de paléosols rougeâtres (SIM 4 à 2). Quelques kilomètres plus au sud, de Rabat à Témara, le trait de côte est formé de deux cordons : un cordon récent (SIM 5) armant la falaise vive d’un sillon intercordon appelé « Oulja », et un cordon intérieur (polyclique : SIM 11 à SIM 6), sculpté par une falaise fossile d’âge SIM 5e et riches en sites préhistoriques. Les mieux documentés de ces sites sont des grottes ouvertes sur la paléofalaise, et dont le contenu archéologique s’échelonne du Middle Stone Age au Néolithique. Durant l’Holocène ou lors des pulsations positives du niveau marin postérieur au SIM 5e, la géodynamique marine a façonné les anciens cordons pour offrir une variété de structures morphologiques : encoches, plateformes d’abrasion, lapiaz, falaises et microfalaises. Plus au sud encore, au niveau de Skhirat, le cordon holocène développé à la faveur de l’embouchure de l’oued Cherrat recèle la nécropole de Rouazi. Sa morphologie et ses structures sédimentaires indiquent que ce cordon résulte de dépôts de tempête dans sa partie basale, et de dépôts dunaires conjugués au développement des paléosols dans sa partie sommitale.

The genus Macaca belongs to Cercopithecidae (Old World monkeys), Cercopithecinae, Papionini. The presence of Macaca in North Africa is well known from the Late Miocene to the Late Pleistocene. However, the diet of fossil Macaca has been poorly described in the literature. In this study, we investigated the feeding habits of Macaca cf. sylvanus (n = 4) from the Plio-Pleistocene site Guefaït-4.2 in eastern Morocco through multiproxy analysis combining analyses of stable carbon and oxygen isotopes from tooth enamel, buccal microtexture, and low-magnification occlusal dental microwear. For both microwear analyses, we compared the macaques with a new reference collection of extant members of Cercopithecoidea. Our occlusal microwear results show for the fossil macaque a pattern similar to the extant Cercocebus atys and Lophocebus albigena, African forest-dwelling species that are characterized by a durophagous diet based mainly on hard fruit and seed intake. Buccal microtexture results also suggest the consumption of some grasses and the exploitation of more open habitats, similar to that observed in Theropithecus gelada. The δ13C of M. cf. sylvanus indicates a C3 based-diet without the presence of C4 plants typical of the savanna grassland in eastern Africa during this period. The high δ18O values of M. cf. sylvanus, compared with the contemporary ungulates recovered from Guefaït-4.2, could be associated with the consumption of a different resource by the primate such as leaves or fresh fruits from the upper part of trees. The complementarity of these methods allows for a dietary reconstruction covering a large part of the individual’s life.

This work has been funded by Palarq Foundation, Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport (42-T002018042853 and 170-T002019038589), Direction of Cultural Heritage (Ministry of Culture and Communication, Morocco), Faculty of Sciences (Mohamed 1r University of Oujda, Morocco), INSAP (Institut National des Sciences de l’Archeologie et du Patrimoine), Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities: CGL2016-76431-P, CGL2016-80975-P, CGL2016-80000-P, CGL2017-82654-P, PGC2018-095489-B-I00, and PGC2018-093925-B-C31, AEI/FEDER-UE), and Research Group Support of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR 116, 2017 SGR836, and 2017 SGR 859). The research by D.M.A., R.S-R, M.G.C., P.S., C.L., and E.D. is funded by CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya. A.M.A and M.F. are beneficiaries of a fellowship from the Erasmus Mundus Program to do the Master in Quaternary and Prehistory at the Universitat Rovia i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). A.R.-H. is the beneficiary of a postdoctoral scholarship from the MICINN, Subprograma Juan de la Cierva (IJC-037447-I), and member of theconsolidated research group 2017 SGR 1040 of the Generalitat de Catalunya. The Institut Catala de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolucio Social (IPHES-CERCA) has received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the ‘Maria de Maeztu’ program for Units of Excellence (CEX2019-000945-M).

We describe small-sized specimens of the metailurine felid Dinofelis from a new Plio-Pleistocene site in North Africa. Dinofelis is a genus of saber-toothed cats mainly recorded from East and South Africa with numerous leopard to jaguar-sized species. The described specimens, clearly smaller than all the other African Dinofelis, resemble isolated remains from the Late Pliocene of France and the Early Pleistocene of Africa. Present evidence suggests that our form represents a new species and/or new lineage of Dinofelis, smaller and probably occupying a different ecological niche compared to the previously known members of the genus, and thus it adds complexity to the high intraspecific competition among large carnivorans in the Plio-Pleistocene of Africa.

The Kebibat quarry locates on the coastal area of Rabat. It is also known as "The Rabat Human deposit" due to the presence of human cranial bones in the quarry deposit. These remains of Hominines are related to the archaic Homo sapiens. The revision of the geological and geochronological context of Kebibat and its surroundings allowed clarifying the morpholitho-stratigraphic aspects of the different formations that constitute it, as well as their evolution during the Middle-Upper Pleistocene. The sedimentary unit that fossilized the human remains corresponds to a dune deposit (eolianite), which is part of a high-resolution sedimentary sequence (parasequence). Luminescence and U-Th dating indicate that this sequence was deposited between the end of the marine isotopic stage 7 (MIS 7) until the end of MIS 6.

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.

Morocco hosts numerous archaeological sites, some of which are part of the UNESCO world heritage. Many of these sites, especially funerary mounds also called tumuli, or rock engravings and ceramics, are located in remote areas with limited access, particularly in the Saharan Morocco desert. We developed a remote sensing and GIS model to identify areas with high potential for hosting archaeological sites in the Awserd region of southern Morocco. A field campaign in a “reference site” zone of 21km2 has revealed 233 archaeological sites. Here we use satellite images and Digital Elevation Models to examine with various techniques (spatial analysis, statistical techniques, and fuzzy logic functions) the relations between the distribution of the archaeological sites and geo-environmental variables such as ground geology, topographic elevation and slope, orientation (aspect), and distance to water sources. We derive empirical relations that reveal that the distribution of archaeological sites depends on the above geo-environmental variables. We then use the empirical relations to anticipate the potential locations of archaeological sites in a region of 980km2 enclosing the reference site area. The model proves capable of predicting 582 sites in the larger region. Subsequent field observations there confirmed that about 80% of the model anticipations were correct. Our Archaeological Predictive Model (APM) can be scaled to larger areas and varied geographic settings, and hence can be a useful guide for archeological studies in desert regions.