Lithic technological responses to Late Pleistocene glacial cycling at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa

There are multiple hypotheses for human responses to glacial cycling in the Late Pleistocene, including changes in population size, interconnectedness, and mobility. Lithic technological analysis informs us of human responses to environmental change because lithic assemblage characteristics are a reflection of raw material transport, reduction, and discard behaviors that depend on hunter-gatherer social and economic decisions. Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6), Western Cape, South Africa is an ideal locality for examining the influence of glacial cycling on early modern human behaviors because it preserves a long sequence spanning marine isotope stages (MIS) 5, 4, and 3 and is associated with robust records of paleoenvironmental change. The analysis presented here addresses the question, what, if any, lithic assemblage traits at PP5-6 represent changing behavioral responses to the MIS 5-4-3 interglacial-glacial cycle? It statistically evaluates changes in 93 traits with no a priori assumptions about which traits may significantly associate with MIS. In contrast to other studies that claim that there is little relationship between broad-scale patterns of climate change and lithic technology, we identified the following characteristics that are associated with MIS 4: increased use of quartz, increased evidence for outcrop sources of quartzite and silcrete, increased evidence for earlier stages of reduction in silcrete, evidence for increased flaking efficiency in all raw material types, and changes in tool types and function for silcrete. Based on these results, we suggest that foragers responded to MIS 4 glacial environmental conditions at PP5-6 with increased population or group sizes, 'place provisioning', longer and/or more intense site occupations, and decreased residential mobility. Several other traits, including silcrete frequency, do not exhibit an association with MIS. Backed pieces, once they appear in the PP5-6 record during MIS 4, persist through MIS 3. Changing paleoenvironments explain some, but not all temporal technological variability at PP5-6.Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; NORAM; American-Scandinavian Foundation; Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia [SFRH/BPD/73598/2010]; IGERT [DGE 0801634]; Hyde Family Foundations; Institute of Human Origins; National Science Foundation [BCS-9912465, BCS-0130713, BCS-0524087, BCS-1138073]; John Templeton Foundation to the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State Universit

82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior

The first appearance of explicitly symbolic objects in the archaeological record marks a fundamental stage in the emergence of modern social behavior in Homo. Ornaments such as shell beads represent some of the earliest objects of this kind. We report on examples of perforated Nassarius gibbosulus shell beads from Grotte des Pigeons (Taforalt, Morocco), North Africa. These marine shells come from archaeological levels dated by luminescence and uranium-series techniques to ≈82,000 years ago. They confirm evidence of similar ornaments from other less well dated sites in North Africa and adjacent areas of southwest Asia. The shells are of the same genus as shell beads from slightly younger levels at Blombos Cave in South Africa. Wear patterns on the shells imply that some of them were suspended, and, as at Blombos, they were covered in red ochre. These findings imply an early distribution of bead-making in Africa and southwest Asia at least 40 millennia before the appearance of similar cultural manifestations in Europe

Marks, Pictures and Art: Their Contribution to Revolutions in Communication

This paper addresses the question of the nature of art, how it came to be, how it fits with other communications revolutions, and the implications of the emergence of art as a means of visual communication. How did iconic imagery emerge from other mark-making among humans and their ancestors and what has been its significance? I situate visual communication as the second revolution of the six communication revolutions during human evolution: the emergence of language, iconic imagery, writing, printing, various means of communication at a distance, and the digital electronic revolution. I begin by discussing the context of deliberate production of marks in the environment, with emphasis on the relations between (1) the producer of the mark and the mark, (2) the producer of the mark and an informed observer at the time, (3) the mark and the informed observer in the absence of the producer and (4) the uninformed observer and the mark. It is fundamental that at some stage the producer intended the mark to represent something, a subject in the real or imagined world. I emphasize the importance of telling stories and singing songs in secular and ritual contexts. Out of this framework, I discuss some of the earliest objects called art in relation to their semiotic elements. I outline my arguments about how these semiotic categories were transformed in the emergence of pictures during archaeohistory. I go on to discuss how all these examples of image production connect to that which is called art in western society. I conclude by reflecting on the impact of these changes of means of communication on human cognition. Each of the revolutions involved changes in the relationships among the communicative act (sensu lato), the agent and receivers of the communication, the perception and interpretation of the communication and the persistence of it through time and ultimately across space