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.
Highlights
The Still Bay (c. 77–73 ka) and Howiesons Poort (c. 65–59 ka) Middle Stone Age (MSA) lithic traditions of southern Africa are argued to represent major periods of cultural, technological, and subsistence innovation by early Homo sapiens [1,2,3]
ostrich eggshell (OES) δ13C and δ18O data from BBC and Klipdrift Shelter (KDS) are shown in Fig 4 (Table E and Table F in S1 File)
Absolute chronologies have improved, studies linking the two are based largely on extrapolating generalizations from non-specific, often off-site, climatic records [13]. This is problematic given Jacobs et al.’s [2] observation that Still Bay and Howiesons Poort sites span a number of different biomes across southern Africa, making it unlikely that a given climatic shift can fully explain the entirety of the variance in these technologies
Summary
The Still Bay (c. 77–73 ka) and Howiesons Poort (c. 65–59 ka) Middle Stone Age (MSA) lithic traditions of southern Africa are argued to represent major periods of cultural, technological, and subsistence innovation by early Homo sapiens [1,2,3]. Sophisticated heat-treated, pressureflaked technologies are associated with the Still Bay [4] while the origins of complex hafting technologies and hunting strategies have been associated with the backed stone segments of the Howiesons Poort [5]. Research in the southern Cape of South Africa, where many of the important MSA sites bearing these industries are found, is currently limited by a general lack of well-understood palaeoenvironmental records with sound chronological control [14]. Where they do exist, they tend to remain spatially and chronologically disconnected from the archaeological sequences they have been used to explain, leading to broad generalisations and untestable correlations
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