Technological analysis of the quartz industry of Maboué 5 – Layer 3 (Lopé National Park, Gabon): Implications for the Late Stone Age emergence in western Central Africa

•Maboué 5 presents a sedimentary sequence ranging from Late Pleistocene to Middle Holocene in Gabon.•Layer 3 (44 600–14770 cal. BP) delivered the richest quartz lithic industry of this sequence.•A combined productional and techno-functional analysis is applied to the Layer 3 lithic remains.•The technological analysis highlights the co-occurrence of both Late and Middle Stone Age patterns.•The results highlight the technological variability of the early Late Stone Age in Central Africa. In Central Africa, Late Stone Age (LSA) seems to emerge before the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM) usually associated to a fluctuating savanna expansion and forest cover reduction. However, few sites with a reliable chrono-stratigraphic context allow us to deal with the emergence, the diffusion and the specificities of the regional lithic assemblages associated to the Late Stone Age. The site of Maboué 5, located in the Lopé National Park in Gabon provided useful lithic corpus to consider these questions. This paper provides a detailed technological analysis of the Layer 3 dated between 44 600 and 14 770 cal. BP. We consider both the production patterns of the entire assemblage and the morpho-structural characteristics of the tools. Our results exhibit a lithic assemblage associating both Middle and Late Stone Age technological patterns and argue for regional technological variability among early LSA quartz assemblages. Finally, we highlight the specificities of quartz lithic industry of a site in the poorly documented region of western Central Africa and we question the validity of the regional nomenclature, namely the Tshitolian and Lupemban facies, to classify this final Late Pleistocene lithic assemblage.