Dataset Information

78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest.

ABSTRACT: The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Africa has been debated as a significant shift in human technological, cultural, and cognitive evolution. However, the majority of research on this transition is currently focused on southern Africa due to a lack of long-term, stratified sites across much of the African continent. Here, we report a 78,000-year-long archeological record from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya. Following a shift in toolkits ~67,000 years ago, novel symbolic and technological behaviors assemble in a non-unilinear manner. Against a backdrop of a persistent tropical forest-grassland ecotone, localized innovations better characterize the Late Pleistocene of this part of East Africa than alternative emphases on dramatic revolutions or migrations.

SUBMITTER: Shipton C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5943315 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest.

Shipton Ceri C Roberts Patrick P Archer Will W Armitage Simon J SJ Bita Caesar C Blinkhorn James J Courtney-Mustaphi Colin C Crowther Alison A Curtis Richard R Errico Francesco d' F Douka Katerina K Faulkner Patrick P Groucutt Huw S HS Helm Richard R Herries Andy I R AIR Jembe Severinus S Kourampas Nikos N Lee-Thorp Julia J Marchant Rob R Mercader Julio J Marti Africa Pitarch AP Prendergast Mary E ME Rowson Ben B Tengeza Amini A Tibesasa Ruth R White Tom S TS Petraglia Michael D MD Boivin Nicole N

Nature communications 20180509 1

The Middle to Later Stone Age transition in Africa has been debated as a significant shift in human technological, cultural, and cognitive evolution. However, the majority of research on this transition is currently focused on southern Africa due to a lack of long-term, stratified sites across much of the African continent. Here, we report a 78,000-year-long archeological record from Panga ya Saidi, a cave in the humid coastal forest of Kenya. Following a shift in toolkits ~67,000 years ago, nov ...[more]

PMID: 29743572

Similar Datasets

Project description:Soil characteristics have been hypothesised as one of the possible mechanisms leading to monodominance of Gilbertiodendron dewerei in some areas of Central Africa where higher-diversity forest would be expected. However, the differences in soil characteristics between the G. dewevrei-dominated forest and its adjacent mixed forest are still poorly understood. Here we present the soil characteristics of the G. dewevrei forest and quantify whether soil physical and chemical properties in this monodominant forest are significantly different from the adjacent mixed forest.We sampled top soil (0-5, 5-10, 10-20, 20-30 cm) and subsoil (150-200 cm) using an augur in 6 × 1 ha areas of intact central Africa forest in SE Cameroon, three independent patches of G. dewevrei-dominated forest and three adjacent areas (450-800 m apart), all chosen to be topographically homogeneous. Analysis--subjected to Bonferroni correction procedure--revealed no significant differences between the monodominant and mixed forests in terms of soil texture, median particle size, bulk density, pH, carbon (C) content, nitrogen (N) content, C:N ratio, C:total NaOH-extractable P ratio and concentrations of labile phosphorous (P), inorganic NaOH-extractable P, total NaOH-extractable P, aluminium, barium, calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, potassium, selenium, silicon, sodium and zinc. Prior to Bonferroni correction procedure, there was a significant lower level of silicon concentration found in the monodominant than mixed forest deep soil; and a significant lower level of nickel concentration in the monodominant than mixed forest top soil. Nevertheless, these were likely to be the results of multiple tests of significance.Our results do not provide clear evidence of soil mediation for the location of monodominant forests in relation to adjacent mixed forests. It is also likely that G. dewevrei does not influence soil chemistry in the monodominant forests.

Project description:The transition from tropical to subtropical (warm temperate) evergreen forests is more clearly apparent in East Asia, from Nepal to the western Pacific coast, than elsewhere in the tropics. We review the nature of this transition and hypothesize the physical, ultimately climatic, factors that may maintain it, with a special focus on how the increasing instability and warming of climates will affect these forests. A primary climatic mediator of the transition is proposed, thereby offering a testable hypothesis for the climate-forest transition relationship. What is known of this transition is summarized in context of the primary climatic mediators of elevational zonation of forest formations in equatorial Asia to the tree line, in the Himalaya at the India-Indo-Burma northern tropical margin, and as both elevational and latitudinal zonation in southern China. Consequent secondary edaphic and other physical changes are described for the Himalaya, and hypothesized for southern China. The forest ecotones are seen to be primarily defined by tree floristic change, on which account changes in structure and physiognomy are determined. The montane tropical-subtropical transition in the Himalaya is narrow and observed to correlate with an as yet ill-defined frost line. A distinct tropical-subtropical transition forest is recognized in the southwest China mountains. There is a total change in canopy species at the Himalayan ecotone, but subcanopy tropical species persist along an elevational decline of c. 400 m. The latitudinal transition in South China is analogous, but here the tropical subcanopy component extends north over ten degrees latitude, albeit in decline. The tropical-subtropical transition is uniquely clear in East Asia because here alone a tropical wet summer-dry winter monsoon extends to 35° north latitude, encompassing the subtropical evergreen forest, whereas subtropical evergreen forests elsewhere exist under drier temperate summer climate regimes.

Project description:UnlabelledForest encroachment into savanna is occurring at an unprecedented rate across tropical Africa, leading to a loss of valuable savanna habitat. One of the first stages of forest encroachment is the establishment of tree seedlings at the forest-savanna transition. This study examines the demographic bottleneck in the seedlings of five species of tropical forest pioneer trees in a forest-savanna transition zone in West Africa. Five species of tropical pioneer forest tree seedlings were planted in savanna, mixed/transition, and forest vegetation types and grown for 12 months, during which time fire occurred in the area. We examined seedling survival rates, height, and stem diameter before and after fire; and seedling biomass and starch allocation patterns after fire. Seedling survival rates were significantly affected by fire, drought, and vegetation type. Seedlings that preferentially allocated more resources to increasing root and leaf starch (starch storage helps recovery from fire) survived better in savanna environments (frequently burnt), while seedlings that allocated more resources to growth and resource-capture traits (height, the number of leaves, stem diameter, specific leaf area, specific root length, root-to-shoot ratio) survived better in mixed/transition and forest environments. Larger (taller with a greater stem diameter) seedlings survived burning better than smaller seedlings. However, larger seedlings survived better than smaller ones even in the absence of fire. Bombax buonopozense was the forest species that survived best in the savanna environment, likely as a result of increased access to light allowing greater investment in belowground starch storage capacity and therefore a greater ability to cope with fire.SynthesisForest pioneer tree species survived best through fire and drought in the savanna compared to the other two vegetation types. This was likely a result of the open-canopied savanna providing greater access to light, thereby releasing seedlings from light limitation and enabling them to make and store more starch. Fire can be used as a management tool for controlling forest encroachment into savanna as it significantly affects seedling survival. However, if rainfall increases as a result of global change factors, encroachment may be more difficult to control as seedling survival ostensibly increases when the pressure of drought is lifted. We propose B. buonopozense as an indicator species for forest encroachment into savanna in West African forest-savanna transitions.

Dataset Information

78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest.

Publications

78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets