Evaluating the potential for tactical hunting in the Middle Stone Age: Insights from a bonebed of the extinct bovid, Rusingoryx atopocranion.

The foraging behaviors of Middle Stone Age (MSA) early modern humans have largely been based on evidence from well-stratified cave sites in South Africa. Whereas these sites have provided an abundance of data for behavioral reconstruction that are unmatched elsewhere in Africa, they are unlikely to preserve evidence of the diversity of foraging strategies employed by MSA hunters who lived in a variety of ecological and landscape settings across the African continent. Here we describe the results of recent excavations at the open-air site of Bovid Hill at Wakondo, Rusinga Island, Kenya, which yielded 24 in situ MSA artifacts within an assemblage of bones comprised exclusively of the extinct alcelaphin bovid Rusingoryx atopocranion. The excavated faunal assemblage is characterized by a prime-age-dominated mortality profile and includes cut-marked specimens and an associated MSA Levallois blade-based artifact industry recovered from a channel deposit dated to 68 ± 5 ka by optically stimulated luminescence. Taphonomic, geologic, and faunal evidence points to mass exploitation of Rusingoryx by humans at Bovid Hill, which likely represents an initial processing site that was altered post-depositionally by fluvial processes. This site highlights the importance of rivers and streams for mass procurement in an open and seasonal landscape, and provides important new insights into MSA behavioral variability with respect to environmental conditions, site function, and tactical foraging strategies in eastern Africa. Bovid Hill thus joins a growing number of MSA and Middle Paleolithic localities that are suggestive of tactical hunting behaviors and mass capture of gregarious ungulate prey.

Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa.

Modern Homo sapiens engage in substantial ecosystem modification, but it is difficult to detect the origins or early consequences of these behaviors. Archaeological, geochronological, geomorphological, and paleoenvironmental data from northern Malawi document a changing relationship between forager presence, ecosystem organization, and alluvial fan formation in the Late Pleistocene. Dense concentrations of Middle Stone Age artifacts and alluvial fan systems formed after ca. 92 thousand years ago, within a paleoecological context with no analog in the preceding half-million-year record. Archaeological data and principal coordinates analysis indicate that early anthropogenic fire relaxed seasonal constraints on ignitions, influencing vegetation composition and erosion. This operated in tandem with climate-driven changes in precipitation to culminate in an ecological transition to an early, pre-agricultural anthropogenic landscape.

Remnants of an ancient forest provide ecological context for Early Miocene fossil apes.

The lineage of apes and humans (Hominoidea) evolved and radiated across Afro-Arabia in the early Neogene during a time of global climatic changes and ongoing tectonic processes that formed the East African Rift. These changes probably created highly variable environments and introduced selective pressures influencing the diversification of early apes. However, interpreting the connection between environmental dynamics and adaptive evolution is hampered by difficulties in locating taxa within specific ecological contexts: time-averaged or reworked deposits may not faithfully represent individual palaeohabitats. Here we present multiproxy evidence from Early Miocene deposits on Rusinga Island, Kenya, which directly ties the early ape Proconsul to a widespread, dense, multistoried, closed-canopy tropical seasonal forest set in a warm and relatively wet, local climate. These results underscore the importance of forested environments in the evolution of early apes.