Palaeolithic research in the Egyptian Nile Valley is almost as old as the term itself (Lubbock 1865). Adrien Arcelin was the first to identify prehistoric flint tools in Egypt at the end of the 1860s, only a few years after the scientific community recognised the existence of an ‘Ante-diluvian Man’, as argued by J. Boucher de Perthes in his 1847 publication (Boucher de Perthes 1847; Tristant 2017). However, it was the publication of the first volume on the origins of Egypt by J. de Morgan in 1896 that truly marked the beginning of the study of Egyptian Palaeolithic (Morgan 1896, 1897). Morgan’s work was not unanimously accepted at the time of the publication, resulting in sometimes heated debates (Maspéro 1897: 128). Some scholars, mainly Egyptologists, considered the evidence to be insufficient because of the absence of stratified sites clearly demonstrating the antiquity of the flint tools since flint-working persisted until very late in Ancient Egypt. In 1921, an article published by C.G. Seligman (Seligman 1921) compared the finds from Abydos and Thebes to those of the eastern desert. Using European terminology, he assigned the artefacts to the Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian and Capsian. It was only in 1926 that P. Bovier-Lapierre’s investigations in the plain of the Abbassieh near Cairo brought stratified evidence for a succession of stone tool industries: ‘Pre-chellean’ at the base, Chellean and then Mousterian tools in the overlying strata (Bovier-Lapierre 1925, 1926). This discovery is not only important because it provided the evidence that Morgan lacked to demonstrate the antiquity of stone tools in Egypt, but also because it remains even now one of the only possible examples of the presence of pre-Acheulean industries in Egypt (Vermeersch 2001; Lahr 2010).