Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Developing a Paleoenvironmental context for Middle Stone Age Behavioral Transitions: A Multi-site Approach

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In the distant past, our ancestors experienced highly variable environmental and climatic conditions. During the Middle Stone Age, a period extending from 250,000 to 30,000 years ago, early humans experienced a series of wet/dry cycles in Africa related to ice age climates in more temperate parts of the world. Although theories of modern human origins and the evolution of human-like culture and behavior are generally based in the Middle Stone Age of Africa, our understanding of what makes the Middle Stone Age so important for these modern human features is limited.One avenue of research is to investigate the nature of these cycles of glaciation in equatorial and southern African habitats where the earliest evidence for evolution of our species exists. In this project, conducted by Emory University doctoral student Joshua Robinson, under the mentorship of Dr. John Kingston, a series of established Middle Stone Age sites in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo will be utilized to study the local manifestations of global and regional environmental and climatic events. Through chemical analyses of the teeth of fossil animals from these archaeological sites, the research will reconstruct dietary patterns and climatic conditions. Specifically, carbon and oxygen isotopic analyses will form the basis for reconstructing vegetation, humidity, and rainfall at eight sample sites. These analyses will directly test the hypothesis that regional records fail to document local conditions that might be associated with these evolutionary innovations.The ultimate goal of the research is to improve our understanding of the development of distinctly modern human behaviors, and the relationship between behavior and climate. This relationship is one of the enduring questions in anthropology, and the data to be collected here will provide new insights into when modern behavior emerged and delineate possible reasons for this emergence. The high-resolution, long-term database of environmental and climatic data generated by the study also will find broader application as an innovative framework for contextualizing and understanding modern climate change.