197New Data on Animal Exploitation from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic periods New Data on Animal Exploitation from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic

Northern Sudan and southern Egypt are important regions for the under-standing of climatic variations at the beginning of the Holocene period and of the first steps towards the adoption of domesticated cattle in Africa. How-ever, insufficient research has been conducted to propose a precise scenario of these phenomena, and the archaeological sites considered are often very eroded. This is particularly the case with the well known sites of the Nabta Playa area (Wendorf & Schild 2001). There is still much discussion, there-fore, about the dating of these sites, about the chronological homogeneity of the remains collected and the high degree of fragmentation of animal bones (e.g. Wengrow 2003). The scenario of the first steps in local cattle domestica-tion in southern Egypt at the beginning of the Holocene remains a hypoth-esis more than a demonstration