ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Identifying early modern human ecological niche expansions and associated cultural dynamics in the South African Middle Stone Age.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- roadDB: An R package for exploring early human prehistory and environments with the ROCEEH Out of Africa Database.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- Ancient levantine demography follows ecological stochasticity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The evolving three-dimensional landscape of human adaptation.Science advances · 2024Article
- Article
- Howiesons Poort backed artifacts provide evidence for social connectivity across southern Africa during the Final Pleistocene.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Population interconnectivity over the past 120,000 years explains distribution and diversity of Central African hunter-gatherers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- An ecological niche shift for Neanderthal populations in Western Europe 70,000 years ago.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Article
- Article
- Regional impacts of climate change and its relevance to human evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- Middle Paleolithic complex technology and a Neandertal tar-backed tool from the Dutch North Sea.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter?Trends in ecology & evolution · 2018Article
- 78,000-year-old record of Middle and Later stone age innovation in an East African tropical forest.Nature communications · 2018Article
- The Howiesons Poort lithic sequence of Klipdrift Shelter, southern Cape, South Africa.PloS one · 2018Article
- Still Bay and Howiesons Poort sites (South Africa) are consistent with the risk hypothesis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Reply to Read: Middle Stone Age cultural variability and the risk hypothesis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- The extension of biology through culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The archaeological record shows that typically human cultural traits emerged at different times, in different parts of the world, and among different hominin taxa. This pattern suggests that their emergence is the outcome of complex and nonlinear evolutionary trajectories, influenced by environmental, demographic, and social factors, that need to be understood and traced at regional scales. The application of predictive algorithms using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data allows one to estimate the ecological niches occupied by past human populations and identify niche changes through time, thus providing the possibility of investigating relationships between cultural innovations and possible niche shifts. By using such methods to examine two key southern Africa archaeological cultures, the Still Bay [76-71 thousand years before present (ka)] and the Howiesons Poort (HP; 66-59 ka), we identify a niche shift characterized by a significant expansion in the breadth of the HP ecological niche. This expansion is coincident with aridification occurring across Marine Isotope Stage 4 (
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.