-
Climate, Environment and Early Human Innovation: Stable Isotope and Faunal Proxy Evidence from Archaeological Sites (98-59ka) in the Southern Cape, South Africa.
July 13, 2016 Editor 0
Climate, Environment and Early Human Innovation: Stable Isotope and Faunal Proxy Evidence from Archaeological Sites (98-59ka) in the Southern Cape, South Africa.
PLoS One. 2016;11(7):e0157408
Authors: Roberts P, Henshilwood CS, van Niekerk KL, Keene P, Gledhill A, Reynard J, Badenhorst S, Lee-Thorp J
Abstract
The Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa, and in particular its Still Bay and Howiesons Poort lithic traditions, represents a period of dramatic subsistence, cultural, and technological innovation by our species, Homo sapiens. Climate change has frequently been postulated as a primary driver of the appearance of these innovative behaviours, with researchers invoking either climate instability as a reason for the development of buffering mechanisms, or environmentally stable refugia as providing a stable setting for experimentation. Testing these alternative models has proved intractable, however, as existing regional palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental records remain spatially, stratigraphically, and chronologically disconnected from the archaeological record. Here we report high-resolution records of environmental shifts based on stable carbon and oxygen isotopes in ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments, faunal remains, and shellfish assemblages excavated from two key MSA archaeological sequences, Blombos Cave and Klipdrift Shelter. We compare these records with archaeological material remains in the same strata. The results from both sites, spanning the periods 98-73 ka and 72-59 ka, respectively, show significant changes in vegetation, aridity, rainfall seasonality, and sea temperature in the vicinity of the sites during periods of human occupation. While these changes clearly influenced human subsistence strategies, we find that the remarkable cultural and technological innovations seen in the sites cannot be linked directly to climate shifts. Our results demonstrate the need for scale-appropriate, on-site testing of behavioural-environmental links, rather than broader, regional comparisons.PMID: 27383620 [PubMed – in process]
Related Posts
Crowdsourcing An Application Repository
- Local Firms Raise $100,000
Who Advises the Entrepreneur?
Harnessing the Power of Networks to Help Businesses and Improve Lives in Africa
- Four Decades of Creative Vision: Insights from an Evaluation of the Future Problem Solving Program International (FPSPI)
Examining the national innovation capacity and economic growth of Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka: a comparative study
Categories: Feature Articles, Health
Tags: Early Human Innovation
Let’s talk business: Knowledge-sharing helps make Sub-Saharan Africa more competitive START-Ups and SCALE-Ups in Western Europe and the World
Subscribe to our stories
Recent Posts
- SL Crowd Green Solutions September 21, 2020
- Digital transformation in the banking sector: surveys exploration and analytics August 3, 2020
- Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey! August 3, 2020
- 5 Tips for Crowdfunding During the Pandemic August 3, 2020
- innovation + africa; +639 new citations August 3, 2020
Categories
Archives
Popular Post-All time
- A review on biomass-based... 0.9k views
- Can blockchain disrupt ge... 669 views
- Prize-winning projects pr... 646 views
- Apply Now: $500,000 for Y... 602 views
- Test Your Value Propositi... 523 views