Previous research suggests that the complex symbolic, technological, and socio-economic behaviors that typify
had roots in the middle Pleistocene <200 ka, but data bearing on human behavioral origins ...are limited. We present a series of excavated Middle Stone Age sites from the Olorgesailie Basin, southern Kenya, dated ≥295 to ~320 ka by
Ar/
Ar and U-Series methods. Hominins at these sites made prepared cores and points, exploited iron-rich rocks to obtain red pigment, and procured stone tool materials from ≥25-50 km distance. Associated fauna suggests a broad resource strategy that included large and small prey. These practices imply significant changes in how individuals and groups related to the landscape and one another, and provide documentation relevant to human social and cognitive evolution.
Development of the African Middle Stone Age (MSA) before 300 thousand years ago (ka) raises the question of how environmental change influenced the evolution of behaviors characteristic of early
We ...use temporally well-constrained sedimentological and paleoenvironmental data to investigate environmental dynamics before and after the appearance of the early MSA in the Olorgesailie Basin, Kenya. In contrast to the Acheulean archeological record in the same basin, MSA sites are associated with a dramatically different faunal community, more pronounced erosion-deposition cycles, tectonic activity, and enhanced wet-dry variability. As early as 615 ka, aspects of Acheulean technology in this region imply that greater stone material selectivity and wider resource procurement coincided with an increased pace of land-lake fluctuation, potentially anticipating the adaptability of MSA hominins.
Niche construction theory (NCT) has emerged as a promising theoretical tool for interpreting zooarchaeological material. However, its juxtaposition against more established frameworks like optimal ...foraging theory (OFT) has raised important criticism around the testability of NCT for interpreting hominin foraging behavior. Here, we present an optimization foraging model with NCT features designed to consider the destructive realities of the archaeological record after providing a brief review of OFT and NCT. Our model was designed to consider a foragers decision to exploit an environment given predation risk, mortality, and payoff ratios between different ecologies, like more‐open or more‐forested environments. We then discuss how the model can be used with zooarchaeological data for inferring environmental exploitation by a primitive hominin, Homo floresiensis, from the island of Flores in Southeast Asia. Our example demonstrates that NCT can be used in combination with OFT principles to generate testable foraging hypotheses suitable for zooarchaeological research.
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