H.— ANTHROPOLOGY 165 



by Zumoffen in the early years of the century, belong to this cycle, and 

 Pittard has recently identified a similar facies in a rock shelter near 

 Adi Yaman, in southern Anatolia. The closing stages of the Upper 

 Palaeolithic in Palestine are represented by an industry in which steep 

 scrapers and polyhedric burins predominate, in association with occasional 

 Chatelperron points. This does not correspond very closely with any 

 other blade industry so far known, but descriptions given by Efimenko 

 and Bontch-Osmolovski suggest, as I have already pointed out, a possible 

 analogy with a late stage of the Upper Palaeolithic in South Russia 

 and with the final stage in the Crimea, though the Chatelperron point 

 is apparently absent in those regions. Finally, it should be noted that, 

 in contrast with the West, bone tools are excessively rare in the Aurignacian 

 of Palestine, and so far no specimen of the split-base point has been found. 



When we pass into Egypt we enter a world which was apparently 

 cut off from the main line of development in Upper Palaeolithic times, 

 since blade industries proper are unknown before the appearance of 

 the microlithic cultures which mark the close of the Pleistocene. Their 

 place is taken by the Aterian, whose Upper Palaeolithic dating 

 has been demonstrated by G. Caton Thompson and E. W. Gardner 

 in the Kharga Oasis, and by a peculiarly Egyptian culture, the 

 Sabylian of Vignard, an industry of diminutive Levallois cores and 

 small truncated flakes which at its first appearance has Levalloiso- 

 Mousterian affinities, but eventually leads up to a form of Tardenoisian. 

 For Vignard, indeed, the Sabylian is the parent of all the microlithic 

 industries which surrounded and spread out from the Mediterranean 

 basin in Mesolithic times, but this extreme view is not generally accepted, 

 and most prehistorians would give greater weight than he does to regional 

 differences in this stage. 



I have said that until recently North Africa was regarded as the region 

 from which successive Aurignacian invasions entered Europe. This 

 part of the world still awaits systematic excavation, but Vaufrey's recent 

 investigations have done much to discredit the old view, and it now 

 seems more probable that in Little Africa the true blade cultures arrived 

 late, their place in early Upper Palaeolithic times being taken, as in 

 Upper Egypt, by an industry in which Mousterian tradition was strong — 

 the Aterian, in which triangular points and racloirs are associated with 

 burins and end-scrapers and a peculiar, characteristic tanged point. 

 The true blade industries fall into two groups, the Capsian proper, which 

 is now perceived to be an inland culture, with its centre in the region of 

 Gafsa, and the Oranian, or Iberomaurusian, which occupies the coast-line, 

 its present identified limits being, roughly, Tunis on the east and 

 Casablanca on the west. 



Vaufrey has shown that the former division of the Capsian into a 

 lower stage characterised by large angle-burins and curved points, and 

 an upper stage in which microliths appear, is based on faulty methods 

 of excavation. His own soundings in various sites have proved that 

 microliths, and even micro-burins, occur already in the Lower Capsian, 

 side by side with the larger tools. It therefore becomes impossible to 

 correlate this stage with the Chatelperron level of Europe ; it must fall 



