Recent work on the middle Paleolithic at Bir Tarfawi, in the hyperarid Eastern Sahara (<1 mm of rain per annum), has yielded a rich faunal assemblage, including several thousand remains of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and small mammals. They are derived from the sediments of two consecutive lakes dated by several techniques to about 135,000 yr B.P. Fifty-nine taxa have been identified and indicate that at times during the Last Interglaciation the area received at least 500 mm of rainfall as a result of the northward shift of the monsoon belt, and that, on several occasions, there may have been water connections between Bir Tarfawi and unidentified but permanent bodies of water elsewhere.

Dated and stratified potsherds excavated at Nabta Playa belong to the earliest phase of pottery-making in the Sahara – relatively sophisticated bowls decorated with a toothed wheel. The authors explore the origins of post-Pleistocene settlers in the Sahara and the Nile Valley and discuss what prompted them to make pottery.

The remains of a hunting site dated to 15000 years ago, captured in an ice wedge, included woolly rhinoceros, horse and arctic fox. Also present were 30 flint plaquettes with curvy feminine outlines. The authors show that these unworn flint profiles can be assigned to a canon of Magdalenian art that extends over much of northern Europe.

The authors report the discovery of a cemetery of richly furnished graves in the western desert of south Egypt. Artefacts, burial rites and radiocarbon dates relate the cemetery to pastoralists practising transhumance in the later Neolithic period. The first such cemetery to be investigated, its cultural affiliations offer a pre-echo of what would become the Egyptian civilisation.

The role of plants in the subsistence economy of pre-agricultural societies of the eastern Sahara is poorly known because vegetal remains, except for wood charcoal, are seldom found in archaeological sites. Site E-75-6 at Nabta Playa, with rich assemblages of charred seeds and fruits, is exceptional. Around 8000 b.p. the inhabitants of this site collected a wide spectrum of wild food plants. Wild sorghum was of special interest and its occasional cultivation cannot be excluded.

A new examination of the polish on Late Palaeolithic tools from the Nile identifies some kind of siliceous sheen, but shows no ‘sickle gloss’. This is consistent with the demonstration that cereals were not in precociously early cultivation in Egypt.

Vegetable remains are a rarity in Palueolithic contexts. These new determinations on material from southern Egypt establish securely the date of an intensive grass-tuber and fish economy in the Nile Valley towards 20,000 years ago.