Climate, Environment and Early Human Innovation: Stable Isotope and Faunal Proxy Evidence from Archaeological Sites (98-59ka) in the Southern Cape, South Africa.
Climate, Environment and Early Human Innovation: Stable Isotope and Faunal Proxy Evidence from Archaeological Sites (98-59ka) in the Southern Cape, South Africa.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0157408
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Lee-Thorp J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Roberts P;Henshilwood CS;van Niekerk KL;Keene P;Gledhill A;Reynard J;Badenhorst S;Lee-Thorp J
南部非洲的中石器时代(MSA)，特别是它的静湾和豪威逊港石器传统，代表了我们智人物种在生存、文化和技术方面的戏剧性创新时期。气候变化经常被认为是这些创新行为出现的主要驱动力，研究人员要么将气候不稳定作为开发缓冲机制的原因，要么将环境稳定的避难所作为提供稳定实验环境的理由。然而，测试这些替代模型被证明是困难的，因为现有的区域古气候和古环境记录在空间、地层和时间上仍然与考古记录脱节。在这里，我们报告了基于鸵鸟蛋壳(OES)碎片、动物群遗骸和贝类组合的高分辨率环境变化记录，这些碎片是从两个关键的MSA考古序列--Blombos Cave和Klipdrift Shelter--中挖掘出来的。我们将这些记录与同一地层中的考古材料遗骸进行比较。这两个地点的结果分别跨越98-73ka和72-59ka，表明在人类占领期间，地点附近的植被、干旱、降雨季节和海温发生了显著变化。虽然这些变化显然影响了人类的生存战略，但我们发现，遗址中所看到的非凡的文化和技术创新不能与气候变化直接联系起来。我们的结果表明，有必要对行为与环境的联系进行适当规模的现场测试，而不是进行更广泛的区域比较。
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.