Porc-Epic Cave, Ethiopia

Porc-Epic is a cave site (9.574° N, 41.889° E; c. 1450 m above sea level) located on a prominent ridge adjacent to the Babo Terara (Babo Hill) on the southern outskirts of the city of Dire-Dawa, southeastern Ethiopia. The cave is difficult to access, but its position provides a strategic view of the vast area of rugged gullies and riparian woodland below it. First discovered in 1929 by French prehistorians Henry de Monfried and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Porc-Epic cave is one of the first sites to be formally excavated in the Horn of Africa. The cave has provided a rich assemblage of archaeological remains that document the adaptive behaviors of its occupants. It yielded tens of thousands of lithics affiliated with the Middle Stone Age (MSA) technocomplex. Chert is the dominant raw material knapped at the site (making up c. 80% of the assemblage), followed by basalt (12%) and obsidian (6%). Retouched tools at the site are mainly composed of points (>50% of all retouched tools), scrapers, and notched tools. Obsidian was preferentially used for the manufacture of retouched pieces. The 1975–1976 excavation at the site recovered a very large sample of faunal remains that has proven useful for the reconstruction of the paleoecology of the area and the subsistence behavior of the cave’s MSA occupants. Expression of symbolic behavior during the MSA of East Africa has been identified at Porc-Epic and includes two types of materials: ochre and gastropod opercula. A high-resolution low-background gamma-ray spectrometry applied directly on a partial human-mandible specimen recovered from the MSA context yielded a date of about 50 ka. Other dating methods, such as optically stimulated luminescence, are currently being applied to further establish the chronology of human settlement at the cave.