PIONEER · Palaeoenvironments of Human Behavioural Evolution in Africa

The emergence of Homo sapiens' behavioural complexity represents a fundamental milestone in the evolution of humankind. Still, the causes of this critical transformation remain debated. For the African Middle Stone Age (MSA, ~300 000–40 000 years) a key question is whether and how climate variability contributed to the increasing behavioural complexity in modern humans. However, behavioural-environmental hypotheses remain untestable because the existing palaeoclimatic datasets are spatially, stratigraphically, and causally disconnected from the archaeological record.PIONEER will overcome this impediment by developing a new analytical framework that allows testing of previously untestable hypotheses and thereby advances our understanding of human behavioural evolution. To achieve this, cutting-edge analytical (leaf wax isotope analyses) and computational approaches (climate- and agent-based modelling (ABM)) will be combined with African archaeology. Fundamental to my approach are high-resolution climate records from within the archaeology-bearing sediments, thus directly connecting environmental- and archaeological records. PIONEER will test behavioural-environmental hypotheses by interlinking several activities:1) establish unprecedented high-resolution datasets of past vegetation and palaeohydrology changes from five key cave sites, inhabited by early Homo sapiens, located along the South African coast2) create a high-resolution spatial representation of the environments experienced by our ancestors from novel climate simulations3) explore likelihoods for different behavioural-environmental scenarios via ABMAlthough PIONEER focuses on the South African MSA, my approach is applicable to most archaeological timeframes and locations. Consequently, PIONEER will transform future studies of climate-human interactions, clarifying key aspects of early human behaviour.