For several decades, southern Africa has been central to debates on the origin of technological and symbolic innovations in Homo sapiens. Abundant archaeological studies have documented remarkable cultural developments during this period, including the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort technocomplexes. While many studies have explored possible links between climate change and innovation, one element was lacking: a coherent reconstruction of the evolution of ecosystems across the entire region, and how they intersect with cultural trajectories.
A new study addresses this gap by utilizing an archive that has been underutilized but particularly powerful: marine pollen records preserved in deep sediment cores. Researchers have combined high-resolution pollen data from two strategically located cores off the eastern and western margins of southern Africa. These cores incorporate vegetation signals carried by two of the largest watersheds on the subcontinent – the Limpopo basin to the east and the Orange basin to the west – which together cover most of the regional surface.
Unlike continental archives, which are often influenced by very local conditions and specific taphonomic processes at sites, these marine archives include vegetation signals over vast drainage areas. They provide a robust and regionally coherent picture of ecosystem dynamics, showing how forests, grasslands, fynbos, and semi-arid biomes expanded or contracted in response to orbital and millennial climatic variations.
Integrating these environmental reconstructions is a new chronological modeling of the major technocomplexes of the Middle Stone Age. For the first time, the study enables a coherent comparison between ecosystem dynamics and cultural evolution. It provides 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 in which climate directly “determines” innovation, the study highlights a more nuanced picture. Environmental changes have acted both as constraints and opportunities, shaping 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.
