Stone Tools: Sangoan
By José-Manuel Benito Álvarez (España) —> Locutus Borg - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1605720
In sub-Saharan Africa, including the Sahel, the Sangoan lithic style was the dominant style from about 500,000-300,000 years ago and was characterized by picks, core axes, and other heavy-duty tools made of large cobbles or coarse grained stones. These tools have been found in many habitats, ranging from rainforests to savannas. It represents a transition between the Paleolithic and the Mesolithic era.
Most of the sites where tools have been found either don't preserve organic material well, like rainforests, or lack any organic material all together, leaving the tools to be dated by volcanic deposits and may have been disturbed after they were deposited or while they were being deposited. This results in date ranges that fall between 455 ± 103 to 39 ± 2 thousand years ago to being 'established by around 500 ka BP [thousand years before present]' to being in use up to about 182 ± 20 thousand years ago. In some regions, such as the Twin Rivers in Zambia, the Sangoan culture is completely missing from.
Source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-7520-5_8
The tools appear unrefined and robust compared to the Levallois tools, but researchers think this is because the tools were made to be used for digging and processing the plant material extracted from the soil. This has led to some debates as to where the Sangoan should be a distinct classification or if the tools should be considered to be of the Acheulean style. They also are fairly closely related to the Lupemban, which followed it, so creating a division between the two is also complicated, though the Lupemban tends to have tools that were retouched on both sides of the cutting edge and are leaf-shaped, but the Sangoan tend to be less standardized. Sangoan tends to be defined by what it isn't rather than what it is, leaving a lot of ambiguity and inability to describe it, with one researcher noting that '[a]lthough the term Sangoan has been in the literature for over sixty years [as of 1986], no excavated Sangoan assemblages has been formally described'.
Another source of on-going debate is whether these tools reached as far as the Mediterranean and Crete, or whether those tools are part of the Lepemban culture. If so, the tools may have traveled with population movements into the northern Nile Valley between about 243,000-191,000 years ago, during a time of climactic change. Because there is overlap between several tool styles both in chronology and geography, depending on what the hominins who created them needed, these debates likely will remain points of contention, though it is hoped that improvements in chronostratiography, the dating of layers of sediment deposits, will help resolve these questions. The ability to better examine use-wear or any residues that remain on the tools will also help researchers understand whether the Sangoan tools were a specific industry or whether it was just a transitional phase between two industries.
