Late Quaternary palaeoenvironments and Middle-Late Stone Age habitat preferences in the Nakuru-Naivasha Basin, Kenya: phytolith-based evidence from the site of Prospect Farm
type: CreativeWork
description: The Central Rift Valley of East Africa has proven to be a key region for our understanding the emergence and diversification of our species. Genetic, fossil, archaeological, and palaeoclimatic evidence suggest that mosaic refugia may have existed here during the late Quaternary period. Such putative refugia are posited to have been centered around highland lake basins that could have buffered human populations, plant, and faunal communities from the most severe deteriorations of climate during the last glacial period. On a sub-regional scale, East Africa’s heterogeneous topography and localised expressions of regional climate is hypothesised to have created a ‘push-pull’ system in which repeated fragmentation, isolation, and expansion of populations occurred, allowing diversity to arise. Competing Middle Stone Age (MSA) behavioural-ecological models disagree in respect to their conceptualization of the nature of past human adaptations to xeric savanna, mesic savanna, and forest/wooded habitats, as well as how MSA groups responded to various palaeodemographic pressures. Consequently, these competing models propose contrasting changes in hunter-gatherer mobility and contact/isolation between MSA groups in reaction to the same underlying palaeoenvironmetal and palaeodemographic factors. Local late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental records from archaeological sites in highland areas of East Africa are at present temporally and spatially fragmentary. As such, the relative ecological stability of the Kenyan Central Rift (KCR) and its capacity to have acted as a refugium remain poorly understood, as are the various logistic and adaptive challenges that inhabitants of different ecological zones of East Africa faced. In order to evaluate which behavioural-ecological model(s) best explains patterns in the archaeological record in these settings, this thesis reports the results of phytolith-based vegetation reconstructions and geoarchaeological investigations from renewed excavat…
abstract: The Central Rift Valley of East Africa has proven to be a key region for our understanding the emergence and diversification of our species. Genetic, fossil, archaeological, and palaeoclimatic evidence suggest that mosaic refugia may have existed here during the late Quaternary period. Such putative refugia are posited to have been centered around highland lake basins that could have buffered human populations, plant, and faunal communities from the most severe deteriorations of climate during the last glacial period. On a sub-regional scale, East Africa’s heterogeneous topography and localised expressions of regional climate is hypothesised to have created a ‘push-pull’ system in which repeated fragmentation, isolation, and expansion of populations occurred, allowing diversity to arise. Competing Middle Stone Age (MSA) behavioural-ecological models disagree in respect to their conceptualization of the nature of past human adaptations to xeric savanna, mesic savanna, and forest/wooded habitats, as well as how MSA groups responded to various palaeodemographic pressures. Consequently, these competing models propose contrasting changes in hunter-gatherer mobility and contact/isolation between MSA groups in reaction to the same underlying palaeoenvironmetal and palaeodemographic factors. Local late Quaternary palaeoenvironmental records from archaeological sites in highland areas of East Africa are at present temporally and spatially fragmentary. As such, the relative ecological stability of the Kenyan Central Rift (KCR) and its capacity to have acted as a refugium remain poorly understood, as are the various logistic and adaptive challenges that inhabitants of different ecological zones of East Africa faced. In order to evaluate which behavioural-ecological model(s) best explains patterns in the archaeological record in these settings, this thesis reports the results of phytolith-based vegetation reconstructions and geoarchaeological investigations from renewed excavat…
author: Griffith, Peter
language: en
keywords: Human Evolution, Middle Stone Age, Palaeoecology, Refugia, Refugium Network, late Quaternary Palaeoenvironments, East Africa, Phytoliths, Palaeovegetation, Vegetation dynamics
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/877e2592-1e33-4a02-aac9-1407cae6b654/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-05-16
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:01Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.48354