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

在遥远的过去，我们的祖先经历了高度多变的环境和气候条件。 在中石器时代，从25万年到3万年前，早期人类在非洲经历了一系列与世界上更温和地区的冰河时代气候有关的干湿循环。 虽然现代人类起源的理论和类人文化和行为的进化一般都是基于非洲中石器时代，但我们对中石器时代对这些现代人类特征如此重要的原因的理解是有限的。研究的一个途径是调查赤道和南部非洲栖息地的冰川循环的性质，那里存在我们物种进化的最早证据。 该项目由埃默里大学博士生约书亚罗宾逊在约翰金斯顿博士的指导下进行，将利用肯尼亚、埃塞俄比亚、赞比亚和刚果民主共和国的一系列中石器时代遗址来研究全球和区域环境和气候事件的地方表现。 通过对这些考古遗址中动物化石牙齿的化学分析，研究将重建饮食模式和气候条件。 具体而言，碳和氧同位素分析将构成重建八个采样点植被、湿度和降雨量的基础。 这些分析将直接检验区域记录未能记录可能与这些进化创新有关的当地条件的假设。研究的最终目标是提高我们对现代人类行为发展以及行为与气候之间关系的理解。 这种关系是人类学中经久不衰的问题之一，这里收集的数据将为现代行为何时出现提供新的见解，并描述这种出现的可能原因。 该研究产生的高分辨率长期环境和气候数据库也将作为一个创新框架得到更广泛的应用，以了解现代气候变化的背景。

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.