For several decades, southern Africa has been at the center of debates on the origin of technological and symbolic innovations among Homo sapiens. Abundant archaeological studies have documented remarkable cultural developments during this period, including the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort technocomplexes. While many works have explored possible links between climate change and innovation, a coherent reconstruction of ecosystem evolution on a regional scale, and their interaction with cultural trajectories, was lacking.
A new study addresses this gap by using an archive that has been underutilized but particularly powerful: marine pollen records preserved in deep sediment cores. Researchers combined high-resolution pollen data from two strategically located cores off the eastern and western margins of southern Africa. These cores incorporate signals of vegetation transported by two of the largest drainage basins on the subcontinent – the Limpopo basin in the east and the Orange basin in the west – covering most of the regional surface together.
Unlike continental archives, often influenced by very local conditions and specific taphonomic processes at sites, these marine archives integrate vegetation signals over large drainage areas. They provide a robust and regionally coherent picture of ecosystem dynamics, showing how forests, grasslands, fynbos, and semi-arid biomes expanded or retracted in response to orbital and millennial climate variations.
Integrating these environmental reconstructions, a new chronological modeling of major technocomplexes of the Middle Stone Age, the study enables, for the first time, a coherent comparison between ecosystem dynamics and cultural evolution. It offers a new basis for understanding how early Homo sapiens adapted, innovated, and reorganized their societies in a constantly changing world.
Rather than supporting a simplistic model where climate directly “determines” innovation, the study sheds light on a more nuanced picture. Environmental changes have acted both as constraints and opportunities, reshaping ecosystem structure, influencing population connectivity, and interacting complexly with demographic and social dynamics.
This study is based on a close collaboration between the EPOC (CNRS/University of Bordeaux/Bordeaux INP/EPHE-PSL) and PACEA (CNRS/Ministry of Culture/University of Bordeaux) laboratories, the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE-PSL), the Institute of History (IH-CSIC), as well as the universities of Exeter and Bergen. It combines expertise in marine palynology, climate science, archaeology, and paleoanthropology.
