Stable isotope paleoecology of Late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age humans from the Lake Victoria basin, Kenya

Paleoanthropologists have long argued that environmental pressures played a key role in human evolution. However, our understanding of how these pressures mediated the behavioral and biological diversity of early modern humans and their migration patterns within and out of Africa is limited by a lack of archaeological evidence associated with detailed paleoenvironmental data. Here, we present the first stable isotopic data from paleosols and fauna associated with Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites in East Africa. Late Pleistocene (∼100-45 ka, thousands of years ago) sediments on Rusinga and Mfangano Islands in eastern Lake Victoria (Kenya) preserve a taxonomically diverse, non-analog faunal community associated with MSA artifacts. We analyzed the stable carbon and oxygen isotope composition of paleosol carbonate and organic matter and fossil mammalian tooth enamel, including the first analyses for several extinct bovids such as Rusingoryx atopocranion, Damaliscus hypsodon, and an unnamed impala species. Both paleosol carbonate and organic matter data suggest that local habitats associated with human activities were primarily riverine woodland ecosystems. However, mammalian tooth enamel data indicate that most large-bodied mammals consumed a predominantly C4 diet, suggesting an extensive C4 grassland surrounding these riverine woodlands in the region at the time. These data are consistent with other lines of paleoenvironmental evidence that imply a substantially reduced Lake Victoria at this time, and demonstrate that C4 grasslands were significantly expanded into equatorial Africa compared with their present distribution, which could have facilitated dispersal of human populations and other biotic communities. Our results indicate that early populations of Homo sapiens from the Lake Victoria region exploited locally wooded and well-watered habitats within a larger grassland ecosystem.

Late Pleistocene age and archaeological context for the hominin calvaria from GvJm-22 (Lukenya Hill, Kenya)

Kenya National Museums Lukenya Hill Hominid 1 (KNM-LH 1) is a Homo sapiens partial calvaria from site GvJm-22 at Lukenya Hill, Kenya, associated with Later Stone Age (LSA) archaeological deposits. KNM-LH 1 is securely dated to the Late Pleistocene, and samples a time and region important for understanding the origins of modern human diversity. A revised chronology based on 26 accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates on ostrich eggshells indicates an age range of 23,576-22,887 y B.P. for KNM-LH 1, confirming prior attribution to the Last Glacial Maximum. Additional dates extend the maximum age for archaeological deposits at GvJm-22 to >46,000 y B.P. (>46 kya). These dates are consistent with new analyses identifying both Middle Stone Age and LSA lithic technologies at the site, making GvJm-22 a rare eastern African record of major human behavioral shifts during the Late Pleistocene. Comparative morphometric analyses of the KNM-LH 1 cranium document the temporal and spatial complexity of early modern human morphological variability. Features of cranial shape distinguish KNM-LH 1 and other Middle and Late Pleistocene African fossils from crania of recent Africans and samples from Holocene LSA and European Upper Paleolithic sites.

Early Levallois technology and the Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition in the Southern Caucasus

The Lower to Middle Paleolithic transition (~400,000 to 200,000 years ago) is marked by technical, behavioral, and anatomical changes among hominin populations throughout Africa and Eurasia. The replacement of bifacial stone tools, such as handaxes, by tools made on flakes detached from Levallois cores documents the most important conceptual shift in stone tool production strategies since the advent of bifacial technology more than one million years earlier and has been argued to result from the expansion of archaic Homo sapiens out of Africa. Our data from Nor Geghi 1, Armenia, record the earliest synchronic use of bifacial and Levallois technology outside Africa and are consistent with the hypothesis that this transition occurred independently within geographically dispersed, technologically precocious hominin populations with a shared technological ancestry.