With warmer weather globally in the early Holocene, glaciers in the northern hemisphere began to melt and sea levels rose worldwide. In the Nile Valley many occupation sites of the last Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are probably deeply buried under alluvium. Consequently, little evidence of the Epipaleolithic has been recovered from within the Nile Valley. Only two Epipaleolithic cultures have been found, both dating to ca. 7000 bc: the Qarunian culture with sites in the Faiyum region, where a much larger lake existed than the present one, and the Elkabian, in southern Upper Egypt.
At some Epipaleolithic sites in the Middle East, such as Abu Hureyra in Syria and Natufian sites in Israel, there is evidence of transitional cultures which led to the important inventions of the Neolithic (see Box 4-C). But such evidence, especially the transition from harvesting wild cereals to cultivating domesticated ones, is lacking in Egypt because the innovations of a Neolithic economy were introduced into Egypt and not invented there. While Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers at Natufian sites (ca. 10,000-8,000 bc) were living in permanent villages occupied year round, such evidence is missing in Egypt until much later, in the Predynastic Period, and even then the evidence of permanent villages and towns is ephemeral (see 3.3).
Working in the Faiyum, Gertrude Caton Thompson (see 1.4) identified two Neolithic cultures, which she termed Faiyum A and Faiyum B. The latter was thought to be a degenerated culture that followed Faiyum A. More recent investigations in the Faiyum in the 1960s, by Fred Wendorf and Romuald Schild (of the Combined Prehistoric Expedition), have identified Faiyum B as the Epipaleolithic Qarunian culture, ca. 1,000 years before the Neolithic Faiyum A. The Qarunian people were hunter-gatherer-fishers who lived near the shore of the lake. There is no evidence to suggest that they were experimenting with the domestication of plants and animals. They hunted large mammals such as gazelle, hartebeest, and hippopotamus, and fishing of catfish and other species provided a major source of protein. The tool kit was microlithic, with many small chert blades.
Fishing was also important for the Epipaleolithic peoples at Elkab, and they may have used (reed?) boats for deep-water fishing in the main Nile. Originally these sites were located next to a channel of the Nile. The evidence has been relatively well preserved because the sites were later accidentally protected by a huge enclosure built at Elkab in the Late Period, long after the Nile channel had silted up.
Like the Qarunian, the tools at these Elkab sites are microlithic, with many small burins (chisel-like stone tools). Grinding stones are also present. These were probably used to grind pigment, still in evidence on the stone, not to process cereals or other wild plants for consumption. Mammals, such as dorcas gazelle and barbery sheep, were also hunted. The sites were camps with no evidence of permanent occupation, and the hunters may have gone out of the Valley for seasonal hunting in the desert, which in the early Holocene had become a less arid environment.
World History
