ArticleScience advances2020
Increased ecological resource variability during a critical transition in hominin evolution.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 113 citations in OpenAlex.
- The archaeology of climate change: a blueprint for integrating environmental and cultural systems.Nature communications · 2025Review
- Climate seasonality and predictability during the middle stone age and implications for technological diversification in early Homo sapiens.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Late Acheulian stone-working by the riverbank: Patterns of continuity and change reflected in Jaljulia lithic assemblages, Israel.PloS one · 2025Article
- Mid-Pleistocene aridity and landscape shifts promoted Palearctic hominin dispersals.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Spatial sampling bias influences our understanding of early hominin evolution in eastern Africa.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Arid, mosaic environments during the Plio-Pleistocene transition and early hominin dispersals in northern Africa.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Lignin Nanoparticles: Transforming Environmental Remediation.Nanomaterials (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Oxygen and the Spark of Human Brain Evolution: Complex Interactions of Metabolism and Cortical Expansion across Development and Evolution.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2024Article
- Article
- Deep-rooted Indian Middle Palaeolithic: Terminal Middle Pleistocene lithic assemblage from Retlapalle, Andhra Pradesh, India.PloS one · 2024Article
- Open plains are not a level playing field for hominid consonant-like versus vowel-like calls.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Holocene bidirectional river system along the Kenya Rift and its influence on East African faunal exchange and diversity gradients.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Temporal mapping of derived high-frequency gene variants supports the mosaic nature of the evolution of Homo sapiens.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The climate and vegetation backdrop to hominin evolution in Africa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Plio-Pleistocene environmental variability in Africa and its implications for mammalian evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Article
- A late Middle Pleistocene Middle Stone Age sequence identified at Wadi Lazalim in southern Tunisia.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A spatiotemporally explicit paleoenvironmental framework for the Middle Stone Age of eastern Africa.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A biomechanical investigation of the efficiency hypothesis of hafted tool technology.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
32 authors at 20 institutions in 7 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated. We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site. Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores. Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover. Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of
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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.