With funding from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Britt Bousman and James Brink from Texas State University and a team of colleagues from American, British, South African and Australian universities and museums will conduct archaeological investigations at Erfkroon an archaeological site located in the western Free State of South Africa. The team brings together archaeologists, geologists, soil scientists, paleontologists, paleobotanists and dating experts to examine the evolution of modern human behavior and cognition during the Middle Stone Age period. By approximately 200,000 years ago anatomically modern humans had appeared in Africa, but 100,000 years passed before reliable evidence of modern human behavior is documented. Also, there appears to be a difference between events on the coast of Southern Africa and the interior grasslands with earlier evidence for modern human behavior along the coasts. This time lag and geographic discontinuity present a significant puzzle for paleoanthropologists. If human anatomy and cognition evolved together, why would there be such a vast disjunction between the development of anatomically modern humans and modern human behavior? These excavations promise to provide unique evidence of the transition to modern human behavior in the interior, a poorly studied region of Africa that could play a critical role for solving this puzzle.
In order to address these disjunctions in human development, excavations in Middle and Late Pleistocene terrace deposits in the Modder River valley at Erfkroon will undertaken. Preliminary investigations demonstrate that Erfkroon can provide a highly detailed record, and this record can be compared to the much better known coastal regions of Southern Africa. The Erfkroon research will 1) excavate occupations dating to the Middle and Late Pleistocene spanning the last 165,000 years, 2) affix these occupations within a firm geochronological framework based on well stratified terrace deposits, 3) reconstruct past environments with geological, soils, phytolith, paleobotanical and stable isotope data, 4) analyze the faunal remains to determine the nature of animal exploitation and hunting preferences and methods, 5) document the nature of technological strategies during the MSA, and 6) integrate these various sources of evidence to assess the nature of human behavior and cognition during the period when modern humans first emerged in Africa.
The Erfkroon excavations may provide critical information on the mode and tempo of human evolution during the Middle and Late Pleistocene period in Africa. The intellectual merit of this project rests on the testing of four specific models of human evolution and cognition. These models link or reject links between human cognition and anatomical evolution in early populations of Homo sapiens sapiens.
The broader impacts of this study will address evolutionary questions of human behavior and cognition. These issues are significant to paleoanthropologists and evolutionary psychologists. South African, British and U.S. archaeology, geology and environmental sciences students will take part in this project. This will contribute directly to their training in their respective fields and dramatically increase our knowledge of modern human evolution in Southern Africa.
