Abstract
Homo sapiens have adapted to an incredible diversity of habitats around the globe. This capacity to adapt to different landscapes is clearly expressed within Africa, with Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens populations occupying savannahs, woodlands, coastlines and mountainous terrain. As the only area of the world where Homo sapiens have clearly persisted through multiple glacial-interglacial cycles, Africa is the only continent where classic refugia models can be formulated and tested to examine and describe changing patterns of past distributions and human phylogeographies. The potential role of refugia has frequently been acknowledged in the Late Pleistocene palaeoanthropological literature, yet explicit identification of potential refugia has been limited by the patchy nature of palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records, and the low temporal resolution of climate or ecological models. Here, we apply potential climatic thresholds on human habitation, rooted in ethnographic studies, in combination with high-resolution model datasets for precipitation and biome distributions to identify persistent refugia spanning the Late Pleistocene (130–10 ka). We present two alternate models suggesting that between 27% and 66% of Africa may have provided refugia to Late Pleistocene human populations, and examine variability in precipitation, biome and ecotone distributions within these refugial zones.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.
Highlights
Today, humans occupy an incredible diversity of habitats
The potential refugia we identify suggest persistent occupations of between 27.5% and 66.3% of Africa throughout the Late Pleistocene were possible
In both narrow and broad refugia, potential zones of habitability are geographically diverse rather than centring on any single region. These results, in part, support the breadth of landscapes previously proposed as potential refugia for Late Pleistocene human populations
Summary
With the exception of Antarctica, Homo sapiens had colonized all continents by the start of the Holocene, expanding into new and unfamiliar landscapes, such as the remote island chains of the Pacific Ocean, within a relatively short time frame Examining and explaining this capacity to expand into new habitats is central to understanding why we are the only extant human population, in contrast with the hominin landscape at the start of the Late Pleistocene. The term ‘refugia’ has been widely adopted by palaeoanthropologists [7] and is employed to describe those landscapes and ecological contexts supporting enduring human presence in the face of global climatic change It is, rare that either the ecological parameters for such refugia are made explicit, or that models for the potential impact of refugia are clearly contrasted with other hypothetical explanations for changes in population distributions through time. We review how human refugia have been identified in the Late Pleistocene record of Africa and, through the application of modelled datasets spanning 130–10 ka, aim to identify potential climatic and ecological parameters for such refugia
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