Dispersals Out of Africa and Back to Africa: Modern origins in North Africa Elena A.A. Garcea University of Cassino and Southern Latium, Department of Letters and Philosophy, Via Zamosch 43, 03043 Cassino, FR, Italy article info Article history: Available online 18 April 2016 Keywords: Out-of-Africa dispersal Back-to-Africa movement North Africa Modern human origins Aterian Jebel Gharbi abstract This paper focuses on the dispersals of Homo sapiens out-of-Africa and discusses the succession of ‘Out- of-Africa’ and ‘Back-to-Africa’ movements from a North African perspective, as a major corridor of dispersal. Specifically, the consequences of anatomically modern human (AMH) dispersals both from North Africa into Eurasia and from there back into North Africa are investigated, and the archaeological and genetic outcomes of such forward and back migrations subsequently considered. In order to achieve these aims, this paper focuses on the dispersals of early modern humans out of North Africa during the Upper Pleistocene, explores possible hypotheses of interbreeding between AMH and Neanderthals, and analyzes the Back-to-Africa movement which appears to have occurred during the final Pleistocene. The debate on the possibilities, timing, and location of interbreeding has recently emphasized the importance of the encounters and genetic admixture between African AMH and Neanderthals when they met as a result of dispersal out of North Africa. The genetic evidence has also suggested a Back to-Africa migration by some AMH who had interbred with Neanderthals outside of Africa before resettling in North Africa. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Migrations of early anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa occurred during Marine Isotopic Stage (MIS) 5 (130e74 ka BP) and at the beginning of MIS 3 (59e24 ka BP) through different geographic routes (cf., among others, Lahr and Foley, 1994; Van Peer, 1998; Petraglia and Alsharekh, 2003; Drake et al., 2008, 2011; Osborne et al., 2008; Garcea, 2010a, 2012b; Van Peer et al., 2010; Armitage et al., 2011; Beyin, 2011; Groucutt et al., 2015a). A wide range of datasets support multiple dispersals from Africa, including chronological (Grün et al., 2005), environmental (Drake et al., 2011), behavioural (Bouzouggar et al., 2007; d'Errico et al., 2009), and technological ones (Groucutt et al., 2015b). These mi- grations can be grouped into two major passageways: a northern dispersal and a southern dispersal. The northern dispersal includes northeastern Africa through the Nile corridor (Van Peer, 1998; Vermeersch, 2010), the Sahara, and the Mediterranean coast (Osborne et al., 2008; Drake et al., 2011, 2013), which lead to the Levant; the southern dispersal involves the Horn of Africa and the Bab el Mandab strait, which lead to southern Arabia (Lahr and Foley, 1994; Armitage et al., 2011; Beyin, 2011). This paper focuses on the northern route, as northwestern Libya, where I conducted fieldwork from 2000 to 2010 as Co-Director of the ItalianeLibyan Archaeological Project in the Jebel Gharbi, can contribute to this argument (see also Barich et al., 2006; Garcea and Giraudi, 2006; Garcea, 2010a, 2010c, 2012b, 2013; Spinapolice and Garcea, 2013, 2014). When early modern humans moved into the Levantine region of southwestern Asia, another human population was possibly living there: Neanderthals. Although there is no solid evidence that Ne- anderthals and AMH chronologically overlapped (cf., e.g., Groucutt et al., 2015a), a certain degree of coexistence and continuity has not been ruled out (Hovers, 2006). Interrelations may have been at social and cultural level, or biological, or both. Given the evidence of domestic space allocation and differentiation, raw material con- centration and redistribution, and delayed returns in food sharing, it has been suggested that the social relationship of Levantine Middle Palaeolithic modern and Neanderthal hominins “extended beyond immediate economic returns and was formally con- structed” (Hovers and Belfer-Cohen, 2013: S348). Interspecific competition for the same ecological niche between AMH and Ne- anderthals has also been postulated (Shea, 2007). On the other hand, there may have also been imitations of reciprocal cultural traditions. Technological comparisons of the lithic toolkits made by AMH and Neanderthals in the Levant showed that the assemblages E-mail address: egarcea@fastwebnet.it. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.02.024 1040-6182/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Quaternary International 408 (2016) 79e89