It’s a warm midday on the plains of Northwest Africa circa 8000 BC. This woman of the Capsian culture is cooling herself off with water drunk from an ostrich egg converted to a bottle.
Named for the town of Qafsah in southern Tunisia, the Mesolithic culture known as the Capsian occupied the region of northwestern Africa south of the Atlas Mountains between 8000 and 2700 BC. Traces of their culture left behind include rock paintings, jewelry made from seashells and ostrich-eggshell beads, and whole ostrich eggs converted into containers such as the bottle pictured here.
Some archaeologists speculate that the Capsian people would have represented the earliest speakers of Afrasan (or Afroasiatic) languages to colonize Northwest Africa after migrating from further southeast (that is, from the Afrasan linguistic homeland in Northeast Africa). If so, the Capsian language could have evolved into modern Berber, with its original speakers intermixing with more Mediterranean-looking people from further north (along with later colonists from Phoenicia, southern Europe, Arabia, etc.) to produce the current Northwest African population.