Middle Stone Age
The Middle Stone Age (or MSA) was a period of African prehistory between the Early Stone Age and the Later Stone Age. It is generally considered to have begun around 280,000 years ago and ended around 50–25,000 years ago. The beginnings of particular MSA stone tools have their origins as far back as 550–500,000 years ago and as such some researchers consider this to be the beginnings of the MSA. The MSA is often mistakenly understood to be synonymous with the Middle Paleolithic of Europe, especially due to their roughly contemporaneous time span, however, the Middle Paleolithic of Europe represents an entirely different hominin population, "Homo neanderthalensis", than the MSA of Africa, which did not have Neanderthal populations. Additionally, current archaeological research in Africa has yielded much evidence to suggest that modern human behavior and cognition was beginning to develop much earlier in Africa during the MSA than it was in Europe during the Middle Paleolithic. The MSA is associated with both anatomically modern humans ("Homo sapiens") as well as archaic "Homo sapiens", sometimes referred to as "Homo helmei". Early physical evidence comes from the Gademotta Formation in Ethiopia, the Kapthurin Formation in Kenya and Kathu Pan in South Africa.
Middle Bronze Age migrations (Ancient Near East)
Various and currently outdated theories have been proposed that postulate waves of migration during the Middle Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East. While the turmoils that separate the Late Bronze Age from the Early Iron Age are well documented (see Bronze Age collapse), theories of migration during the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BCE) have little direct support. Some suggestions connect these alleged "mass migrations" with the coming of the Greeks, moving from their former settlements into the southern and central Balkans displacing the former pre-Greek inhabitants of Greece. Others make reference to a supposed migration of the Hittites to their earliest known home in Kültepe during the same period.