Audax ZP Mabulla

University of Dar es Salaam | UDSM · Department of Archaeology and Heritage

Olduvai Gorge, nestled between the East African Rift Valley and the Mozambique Belt, is key to understanding human evolution. Even though extensive archaeological and palaeoanthropological findings have been unearthed here since the 1930s, the Middle Stone Age in this area has nonetheless received less attention than the Oldowan or the Acheulean. T...

Human evolutionary ecology stands to benefit by integrating theory and methods developed in movement ecology, and in turn, to make contributions to the broader field of movement ecology by leveraging our species’ distinct attributes. In this paper, we review data and evolutionary models suggesting that major changes in socio-spatial behaviour accom...

The Mumba rockshelter, located in the northwest of Lake Eyasi is key to understanding the Stone Age in East Africa. The stratigraphy of the site spans the last 130 ka BP and comprises levels from the Middle Stone Age, the Later Stone Age, the Pastoral Neolithic, and the Iron Age. In terms of the Middle Stone Age (MSA), Mumba has helped to define tw...

The function of dreams is a longstanding scientific research question. Simulation theories of dream function, which are based on the premise that dreams represent evolutionary past selective pressures and fitness improvement through modified states of consciousness, have yet to be tested in cross-cultural populations that include small-scale forage...

Objectives Physically active lifestyles are associated with several health benefits. Physical activity (PA) levels are low in post‐industrial populations, but generally high throughout life in subsistence populations. The Hadza are a subsistence‐oriented foraging population in Tanzania known for being physically active, but it is unknown how recent...

The urban peoples of the Swahili coast traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were among the first practitioners of Islam among sub-Saharan people1,2. The extent to which these early interactions between Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic exchange remains unknown. Here we report ancient DNA data for 80 individuals...

Objectives: Previous research showed that male and female members of the Maasai from Northern Tanzania judge images of facial morphs calibrated to greater handgrip strength (HGS) higher on strength and attractiveness, but lower on aggressiveness than those calibrated to lower HGS. The accurate assessment of male physical strength from facial infor...

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations acro...

Multiple lines of genetic and archaeological evidence suggest that there were major demographic changes in the terminal Late Pleistocene epoch and early Holocene epoch of sub-Saharan Africa1,2,3,4. Inferences about this period are challenging to make because demographic shifts in the past 5,000 years have obscured the structures of more ancient pop...

Common assumptions about the ephemeral archaeological signature of pastoralist settlements have limited the application of geophysical techniques in the investigation of past herding societies. Here, the authors present a geophysical survey of Luxmanda, Tanzania, the largest-known settlement documented for the Pastoral Neolithic era in eastern Afri...

Male physical formidability may reflect capacities to provision and protect, resource holding potential, and social status. Handgrip strength (HGS) is a robust measure of overall muscular strength and function that correlates positively with ratings of male facial attractiveness and dominance. Here, we examine strength, attractiveness, and aggressi...

In eastern Africa, ecologists have found that when mobile pastoralists abandon their temporary encampments, the accumulation of burned animal dung, wood, and other organic waste enriches the concentration of nutrients (e.g., calcium, phosphorous, magnesium) essential to soil health, in comparison to other soils without prior human habitation. These...

Understanding how gendered economic roles structure space use is critical to evolutionary models of foraging behaviour, social organization and cognition. Here, we examine hunter-gatherer spatial behaviour on a very large scale, using GPS devices worn by Hadza foragers to record 2,078 person-days of movement. Theory in movement ecology suggests tha...

The initial spread of food production in eastern Africa is associated with livestock herding during the Pastoral Neolithic. Recent excavation at Luxmanda, Tanzania, a site dating to c. 3000 BP, revealed circular installations of lower grinding stones and numerous handstones. This discovery, unprecedented for this era, challenges previous ideas abou...

Numerous factors, including family planning and modern contraception, disturb the potential associations between the number of children born and genetic factors in modern Western societies. The current progress of medicine and a relatively high level of well-being make it hard to test the association between children's survival rates and genetic fa...

The Nasera rockshelter is one of the key sites for our understanding of human occupations of East Africa during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. Excavated by L. Leakey and M. Mehlman, the stratigraphy provides a long sequence of Middle Stone Age, Later Stone Age and Pastoral Neolithic periods. In this paper we carry out a technological study of the...

Human lifespans are exceptionally long compared with those of other primates. A key element in exploring the evolution of human longevity is understanding how modern humans grow older. Our current understanding of common age-related changes in human health and function stems mostly from studies in industrialized societies, where older adulthood is...

Significance Inactivity is a growing public health risk in industrialized societies, leading some to suggest that our bodies did not evolve to be sedentary. Here, we show that, in a group of hunter-gatherers, time spent sedentary is similar to that found in industrialized populations. However, sedentary time in hunter-gatherers is often spent in po...

The invention and proliferation of stone tool technology in the Early Stone Age (ESA) marks a watershed in human evolution. Patterns of lithic procurement, manufacture, use, and discard have much to tell us about ESA hominin cognition and land use. However, these issues cannot be fully explored outside the context of the physical attributes and spa...

Loiyangalani is important to the understanding of human occupation patterns in the Serengeti and Northern Tanzania during the Middle Stone Age in terms of food-processing activities and lithic technology. The abundant faunal remains at the site show that it was used for game processing. The lithic technology was based on prepared core methods, domi...

How food production first entered eastern Africa ~5000 years ago and the extent to which people moved with livestock is unclear. We present genome-wide data from 41 individuals associated with Later Stone Age, Pastoral Neolithic (PN), and Iron Age contexts in what are now Kenya and Tanzania to examine the genetic impacts of the spreads of herding a...

The rapid adoption of lightweight activity tracking sensors demonstrates that precise measures of physical activity hold great value for a wide variety of applications. The corresponding growth of physical activity data creates an urgent need for methods to integrate such data. In this paper, we demonstrate methods for 1) synchronizing acceleromete...

Objectives To determine the effects of age and sex on physical activity and time budgets of Hadza children and juveniles, 5‐14 years old, including both in‐camp and out‐of‐camp activities. Methods Behavioral data were derived from ~15 000 hourly in‐camp scan observations of 76 individuals and 13 out‐of‐camp focal follows on nine individuals. The d...

Background: Current knowledge on genetic basis of aggressive behavior is still contradictory. This may be due to the fact that the majority of studies targeting associations between candidate genes and aggression are conducted on industrial societies and mainly dealing with various types of psychopathology and disorders. Because of that, our study...

Objectives: The lunar cycle is expected to influence sleep-wake patterns in human populations that have greater exposure to the environment, as might be found in forager populations that experience few environmental buffers. We investigated this “moonlight” hypothesis in two African populations: one composed of hunter-gatherers (with minimal enviro...

Objective: Despite widespread interest in maternal–infant co-sleeping, few quantified data on sleep patterns outside of the cultural west exist. Here, we provide the first report on co-sleeping behavior and maternal sleep quality among habitually co-sleeping hunter-gatherers. Design: Data were collected among the Hadza of Tanzania who live in domic...

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the bifacial shaping and the spatial distribution of 85 bifaces recorded in an area of 51.9 m2 on the Lower Floor of the TK site, located alongside the Trench I excavated by M. Leakey in 1963. The repeated use of shaping schemes and patterns demonstrates that the knappers who produced these tools had a goo...

The key regulator in the control of aggressive behavior is dopamine receptors. Association of variants in these genes with aggression has been shown in modern populations. However, these studies have not been conducted in traditional cultures. The aim of our study was to investigate population features in distributions of allele and genotype freque...

The archaeology of East Africa during the last ~65,000 years plays a central role in debates about the origins and dispersal of modern humans, Homo sapiens. Despite the historical importance of the region to these discussions, reliable chronologies for the nature, tempo, and timing of human behavioral changes seen among Middle Stone Age (MSA) and L...

Code used in OxCal 4.2 [65] software to produce a mixed model for radiocarbon dates incorporating both the northern hemisphere (IntCal13) and southern hemisphere (SHCal13) calibration curves [66, 67]. (DOCX)

The development of the bow and arrow was an important milestone in the evolution of foraging technology. Experimental approaches to interpreting lithics and other archeological evidence for early archery have led to important insights into their manufacture and use, but these studies are limited by a lack of data on the mechanics of traditional arc...

The use of innovative techniques such as micro-photogrammetry and geometric morphometrics may have a major impact on the differentiation of cut marks made with different raw materials and, thus, link butchering processes with stone tool reduction sequences. This work focuses on a sample of cut-marked bones from the Bell's Korongo (BK) site (Upper B...

Sleep is essential for survival, yet it also represents a time of extreme vulnerability to predation, hostile conspecifics and environmental dangers. To reduce the risks of sleeping, the sentinel hypothesis proposes that group-living animals share the task of vigilance during sleep, with some individuals sleeping while others are awake. To investig...

Spatial statistical models are powerful tools for creating simulation and prediction models. Here, we apply such models to the newly discovered 1.84 Ma site of DS (Bed I, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania). Ongoing excavation has already exposed 370 m2 of the same discrete archaeological level. This is the biggest window into an Early Pleistocene anthropogen...

The 3.6 Ma Laetoli hominin trackway has long been recognized for its significance in understanding the evolution of upright posture and bipedalism in hominins. This ichnofossil record also provide us with a snapshot of the paleoecological settings in which the Pliocene Laetoli hominins lived. Advances in imaging technology, particularly photogramme...

Based on detailed stratigraphic correlation and framework studies for FLK-W, in lowermost Bed II and containing the oldest Acheulian artifacts (dated to 1.7 Ma) in Olduvai Gorge, it is possible to document significant changes in the paleolandscape. This study uses outcrops up to 1.6 km from the FLK-W locality to aid in the understanding of the envi...

No agreement on what constitutes a safe and reproducible anticontamination protocol exists for ancient starch research. Protocols applied to laboratory work may represent ‘symptomatic treatment’ only, as contamination of archaeological materials in the field may be more extensive than realized. This paper is the first systematic study on the impact...

Conventional wisdom holds that a decline in oral health accompanies the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, given increased consumption of carbohydrates. This widely touted example of the mismatch between our biology and modern lifestyle has been intuited largely from the bioarchaeological record of the Neolithic Revolution in the...

Diet composition. (DOC)

Code sheet for interviews and oral health measures. (DOC)

Residence interviews and oral health measures. (CSV)

Abstract AMK (Amin Mturi Korongo) is a newly discovered site situated under Tuff IC (Bed I, 1.84 Ma). It contains several fossiliferous levels and the top one is situated on the same paleosurface as FLK-Zinj. For the first time this allows sampling the “Zinj” paleoenvironment well into the Secondary Gorge and expands the known area of this paleolan...

Excavations at BK have provided insights into the behavior of early hominins through the study of several archaeological levels. The present study shows the results for a new archaeological sub-level (BK4c). The main goal is to contribute to the knowledge of the different taphonomic processes that shaped BK4c and to better understand the role playe...

Core preparation has been documented in Developed Oldowan assemblages dated between 1.5–1.3 Ma. However, its correct identification and significance is a matter of debate. In order to shed light on this issue, this paper attempts to reconstruct the flake production processes of the lithic assemblages currently recovered in SHK and BK at Olduvai Gor...

Objectives: Cross-cultural sleep research is critical to deciphering whether modern sleep expression is the product of recent selective pressures, or an example of evolutionary mismatch to ancestral sleep ecology. We worked with the Hadza, an equatorial, hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania, to better understand ancestral sleep patterns and to te...

Taphonomic analysis carried out at BK4b has provided compelling evidence for megafaunal acquisition and consumption, and the amount of meat that hominins consumed is far greater than documented at any other early Pleistocene site. The aim of the present work is to characterize the lithic assemblage associated with such a special subsistence context...

Objective: To compare different scoring parameter settings in actigraphy software for inferring sleep and wake bouts for validating analytical techniques outside of laboratory environments. Design: To identify parameter settings that best identify napping during periods of wakefulness, we analyzed 137 days on which participants reported daytime...

Objectives: Time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) is a strong predictor of cardiovascular health, yet few humans living in industrialized societies meet current recommendations (150 min/week). Researchers have long suggested that human physiological requirements for aerobic exercise reflect an evolutionary shift to a hunting...

The foraging and food sharing of hunter-gatherers have provided the backdrop to several different evolutionary hypotheses about human life history. Men’s foraging has often been characterized as primarily targeting animals, with high variance and high rates of failure. To the best of our knowledge, however, there are as yet no quantitative studies...

The appearance of the Acheulean is one of the hallmarks of human evolution. It represents the emergence of a complex behavior, expressed in the recurrent manufacture of large-sized tools, with standardized forms, implying more advance forethought and planning by hominins than those required by the precedent Oldowan technology. The earliest known ev...

The androgen receptor (AR) gene polymorphism in humans is linked to aggression and may also be linked to reproduction. Here we report associations between AR gene polymorphism and aggression and reproduction in two small-scale societies in northern Tanzania (Africa)-the Hadza (monogamous foragers) and the Datoga (polygynous pastoralists). We secure...

Modern humans are characterized by specialized hand morphology that is associated with advanced manipulative skills. Thus, there is important debate in paleoanthropology about the possible cause–effect relationship of this modern human-like (MHL) hand anatomy, its associated grips and the invention and use of stone tools by early hominins. Here we...

New research and excavations at Bell Korongo (BK, Olduvai Gorge, Upper Bed II) have uncovered a dense concentration of megafauna that contributes to our understanding of Homo erectus subsistence strategies around 1.34 Ma. Recent work has yielded clear taphonomic evidence for the exploitation of large-sized animals. The frequency and distribution of...

Age and sex selection of prey is an aspect of predator ecology which has been extensively studied in both temperate and African ecosystems. This dimension, along with fecundity, survival rates of prey and mortality factors other than predation are important in laying down the population dynamics of prey and have important implications in the manage...

Ever since Mary Leakey's initial excavations in the 1960s, TK (Thiongo Korongo) has been recognized as one of Olduvai Gorge's most important Acheulean sites. The significant concentrations of lithics and fauna reported by Mary Leakey have been augmented in recent years by Santonja et al., who argue that human activities appear to be largely related...

The study of contemporary traditional pastoralist societies of Eastern Africa provide perfect examples of norms enforcement by third parties , and the life cycle ceremonies is a good example. The Datoga are characterized by exceptionally well-preserved traditional childbirth and postpartum rites, as well as by multistage system of integration of an...

Studies of total energy expenditure, (TEE; kcal/day) among traditional populations have challenged current models relating habitual physical activity to daily energy requirements. Here, we examine the relationship between physical activity and TEE among traditional Hadza hunter-gatherers living in northern Tanzania. Hadza adults were studied at two...

Background Investigations of running gait among barefoot and populations have revealed a diversity of foot strike behaviors, with some preferentially employing a rear-foot strike (RFS) as the foot touches down while others employ a mid-foot strike (MFS) or fore-foot strike (FFS). Here, we report foot strike behavior and joint angles among tradition...

This paper presents and contextualizes two radiocarbon dates directly obtained from Kansyore and Savanna Pastoral Neolithic (Narosura) ceramic sherds from sites near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. The dates improve upon those obtained during prior research, which were compromised by problematic samples and stratigraphic disturbance. This underscores the i...

Human gut microbiota directly influences health and provides an extra means of adaptive potential to different lifestyles. To explore variation in gut microbiota and to understand how these bacteria may have co-evolved with humans, here we investigate the phylogenetic diversity and metabolite production of the gut microbiota from a community of hum...

The multi component FLK North archaeological site was discovered over 50 years ago, and its inter-pretation has been highly controversial since. Explanations of the dense bone and stone tool accumu-lation range from a site on a featureless lake margin that is dominantly anthropogenic in origin to a site near a freshwater wetland that is dominated b...

At TK, 113 m2 were excavated in 2010–2012 in the two areas immediately adjacent to the trenches dug by M. Leakey in 1963. Extensive lithic and faunal assemblages were retrieved from several levels of the archaeological site. TK is located at the exposed top of Olduvai's Bed II, recently dated to 1.353 ± 0.035 Ma. From a geo-archaeological perspecti...

A geomorphological, sedimentological, stratigraphic, and geometric study of 30 trenches excavated around FLK Zinj (Bed I, Olduvai Gorge) has enabled the partial reconstruction of the paleolandscape surrounding this site for a radius of ∼1000 m. This is the largest sample of geological and archaeological information yet available to reconstruct the...

This paper describes the motivation, procedures, and results of archaeological and geological field survey of the Ndutu Unit, Olduvai Gorge, conducted in June and July of 2013. Survey focused upon the area of Olduvai Gorge between the second fault and the Olbalal, although selective survey occurred in other areas in and around the Gorge. Over 72 ar...