Brian Stewart

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Anthropology

Bringing together archaeological, paleoenvironmental, paleontological and genetic data, this book makes a first attempt to reconstruct African population histories from our species' evolution to the Holocene. Africa during Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 6 to 2 (~190-12,000 years ago) witnessed the biological development and behavioral florescence of o...

South Africa's northern Namaqualand coastal desert is the southern extension of the Namib. Today, this region is semi-desert with patchy subsistence resources and scarce, unpredictable rainfall. Yet this ancient desert landscape possesses residues of human activity stretching back into the Middle Pleistocene, evidenced by heavily weathered surface...

The Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains are southern Africa’s highest and give rise to South Africa’s largest river, the Orange-Senqu. At Melikane Rockshelter in highland Lesotho (~1800 m a.s.l.), project AMEMSA (Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Age) has documented a pulsed human presence since at least MIS 5. Melikane can be inter...

Analogies are an important tool of archaeological reasoning. The Kalahari San are frequently depicted in introductory texts as archetypal, mobile hunter-gatherers, and they have influenced approaches to archaeological, genetic and linguistic research. But is this analogy fundamentally flawed? Recent arguments have linked the San populations of sout...

Africa possesses one of the world’s longest legacies of pottery production. From several early Holocene centers of innovation across the Sahara and Sahel, ceramic technology spread south, arriving at the opposite end of the continent some six millennia later. This paper examines the final chapter of the technology’s long journey through the African...

Ostriches are peculiar birds and their strangeness has been recognised by southern African hunter-gatherers through multiple symbolic associations. Such qualities are likely to have been enhanced where people had access to beads made from their eggshell but did not have direct knowledge of the birds themselves. Southeastern southern Africa, encompa...

Ostrich eggshell beads are some of the smallest artefacts recovered from archaeological sites in southern Africa, but are among those that moved furthest and have endured longest. Manufactured in the region over a period of at least 40,000 years, they were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers for nearly as long, as recently demonstrated by stronti...

With new direct dates from rock paintings comes an unprecedented opportunity to relate excavated archaeological data to the parietal record in southern Africa’s Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains. Anchoring dated art to recovered palaeoenvironmental, faunal and technological data enables the incorporation into socioecological models of ideational inferen...

Spitzkloof A Rockshelter (28.863° S, 17.077° E) is currently located 30 km due south of the Orange River and 30 km inland from the Atlantic Ocean, in the Richtersveld Municipality, Namaqualand, South Africa (Fig. 1). The shelter is the largest of three eroded bowls within a folded outcrop of quartzite in the Stinkfontein subgroup overlooking quartz...

Melikane, a large sandstone rockshelter in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains of highland Lesotho, preserves an 80,000-year-old archaeological sequence including an occupation pulse dated to the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), ~27–23 kcal BP. Paleoenvironmental proxies indicate that temperature depressions of ~6 °C below present values provo...

High-elevation (>2500 m a.s.l.) environments pose severe challenges for human adaptation, and the timing and catalysts of their sustained year-round occupation remain a matter of debate. This article reviews recent archaeological and genetic research on the peopling of the Tibetan Plateau, and presents the results of new least cost path modeling. I...

Determining the timing and drivers of Pleistocene hydrological change in the interior of South Africa is critical for testing hypotheses regarding the presence, dynamics, and resilience of human populations. Combining geological data and physically based distributed hydrological modeling, we demonstrate the presence of large paleolakes in South Afr...

Investigation of Homo sapiens’ palaeogeographic expansion into African mountain environments are changing the understanding of our species’ adaptions to various extreme Pleistocene climates and habitats. Here, we present a vegetation and precipitation record from the Ha Makotoko rockshelter in western Lesotho, which extends from ~60,000 to 1,000 ye...

Melikane, a large sandstone rockshelter in the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains of highland Lesotho, preserves an 80,000 year-old archaeological sequence including two layers (4 & 5) dated to the onset of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), ~ 24 kcal BP. Paleoenvironmental proxies indicate that these layers were associated with increasing aridification and...

The Maloti-Drakensberg of Lesotho and South Africa is Africa's highest and most expansive mountain system south of Kilimanjaro (Tanzania). Its name is hyphenated because the mountain ranges it incorporates span political and modern language and cultural regions and, accordingly, the mountains are seen from different perspectives. Maloti in the Seso...

A multidisciplinary fieldwork and research project was recently begun at the Yangshang site (220-140 ka), a late Early Paleolithic locale in the western Chinese Loess Plateau. 1696 lithic artifacts and 337 faunal remains were recovered during the excavation. Sedimentological and paleoenvironmental investigations indicate the site preserves a relati...

Multidisciplinary research suggests that Marine Isotope Stage 5 (~130–74 ka) was an important evolutionary stage in African deep history. Population expansion and growth spurred changes in material culture as well as the exploration of previously unoccupied regions and ecosystems. The archaeological sequence at Melikane Rockshelter (1860 masl) in t...

Significance Hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoãnsi (!Kung) San use exchange networks to dampen subsistence and reproductive risks, but almost nothing is known of how, when, and why such practices emerged. Strontium isotope analysis of one preferred San exchange item, ostrich eggshell beads, from highland Lesotho shows that since the late Middle Ston...

Today's social media platforms are the outermost branches of an evolutionary tree whose roots run deep. At some point in the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers began exchanging non-utilitarian artifacts like beads and other ornaments over hundreds, and sometimes thousands of kilometers. Among ethnographically documented foragers these networks symbolica...

In the 1970s and 1980s several late Pleistocene palaeo-lakes were proposed to have existed within the South African interior. In particular, the ~44 km 2 Alexandersfontein pan, south of Kimberley, in the central interior summer rainfall region, was identified as providing evidence for major lake phases at 19 and 17-13 ka. The presence of Middle Sto...

The roots of long-distance social networking run deeper than Facebook. At some point in the Pleistocene, hunter-gatherers began exchanging 'non-utilitarian' artifacts like beads and other ornaments over hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of kilometers. Among ethnographically documented foragers these networks symbolically link distant groups, actin...

The marginalization of surviving hunter-gatherer groups to Africa’s ecological and sociopolitical fringes makes it certain that very different societal forms existed in the past. In relatively recent periods, such as the late Holocene, rich, well preserved archaeological records can mitigate this issue. Much more challenging are the problems create...

Rose Cottage Cave in the southern African interior preserves an exceptional record of hunter-gatherer occupation across the late Pleistocene and Holocene. The site is situated to the west of the Maluti-Drakensberg Escarpment, which structures regional temperature and precipitation gradients between the eastern coastal lowlands, mountainous highland...

Definitions of our species as unique within the hominin clade have tended to focus on differences in capacities for symbolism, language, social networking, technological competence and cognitive development. More recently, however, attention has been turned towards humans’ unique ecological plasticity. Here, we critically review the growing archaeo...

Definitions of our species as unique within the hominin clade have tended to focus on differences in capacities for symbolism, language, social networking, technological competence and cognitive development. More recently, however, attention has been turned towards humans’ unique ecological plasticity. Here, we critically review the growing archaeo...

The Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains are southern Africa's highest and lie at a crucial interface between the sub-continent's drier, colder, more seasonal interior and its perennially productive subtropical coastal belt. Their location, high elevation, and topography make them ideal for exploring human responses to late Quaternary climatic change. This...

Humans have frequented southern Africa's highest reaches – Lesotho's Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains – for c. 90,000 years. As with many high mountain systems worldwide, the Maloti-Drakensberg cast a rainshadow over closely neighboring arid lowlands (the eastern Karoo Desert). Based on previous archaeological and paleoenvironmental work in highland Le...

The Namaqualand rockshelter Spitzkloof A experienced pulsed human occupations at 51 ka, 23 ka, and 19 ka to 17 ka. These deposits provide evidence of humans inhabiting a semi-arid desert site in the Winter Rainfall Zone (WRZ) during mid-MIS 3 and MIS 2. These periods are not well represented in the archaeological record of more productive regions s...

In order to expand on the potential range of early human experiences and adaptive strategies, it is first necessary to determine the paleoenvironmental signatures for a given region of study. In this study we report on proxy terrestrial, marine and sea level data in order to reconstruct past environments of northern Namaqualand, South Africa, durin...

One of the more interesting questions in palaeodemographic studies during MIS stage 6-2, is how and under what climatic conditions were people able to colonize 'hard' environments. In order to contribute to this question, we study the arid regions of southern Africa, conducting research in the coastal desert of Namaqualand and its hinterland, the R...

Boomplaas Cave, South Africa, contains a rich archaeological record, with evidence of human occupation from >66,000 years ago until the protohistoric period. Notwithstanding a long history of research at the site, its existing chronology can benefit from revision. Many of the site’s members are currently delimited by only a single conventional radi...

We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence is against the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into the Pleistocene (e.g. Lee & DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway & Lee 1990; MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not our Stone Age ancestors. Current protest...

Africa from Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) 6-2 saw the crystallization of long-term evolutionary processes that culminated in our species' anatomical form, behavioral florescence, and global dispersion. Over this *200 kyr period, Africa experienced environmental changes on a variety of spatiotemporal scales, from the long-term disappearance of whole d...

In order to expand on the potential range of early human experiences and adaptive strategies, it is first necessary to determine the paleoenvironmental signatures for a given region of study. In this paper we report on proxy terrestrial, marine, and sea level data in order to reconstruct past environments of Namaqualand, South Africa, during MIS 6-...

Evidence for human occupation of southern Africa's high-altitude Maloti–Drakensberg Mountains is surprisingly common in the last glacial, yet the attraction of this relatively severe, cold region for hunter-foragers remains unclear. Sehonghong Rockshelter (1870 m asl), in the eastern Lesotho Highlands, provides evidence for human occupation spannin...

A consensus on Bantu-speaking populations being genetically similar has emerged in the last few years, but the demographic scenarios associated with their dispersal are still a matter of debate. The frontier model proposed by archaeologists postulates different degrees of interaction among incoming agro-pastoralist and resident foraging groups in t...

The recent excavation of Spitzkloof Rockshelter in Namaqualand, South Africa is part of a larger project called AMEMSA: Adaptations to Marginal Environments in the Middle Stone Age. This project is aimed at answering the questions: How, when and under what environmental conditions were so marginal environments permanently colonized during the Middl...

This paper provides a preliminary chronostratigraphic and palaeoenvironmental framework for the Late Pleistocene archaeological sequence at Melikane Rockshelter in mountainous eastern Lesotho. Renewed excavations at Melikane form part of a larger project investigating marginal landscape use by Late Pleistocene foragers in southern Africa. Geoarchae...

This paper presents the second and third stages of a multivariate taphonomic analysis of the bovid bone assemblage from Dunefield Midden (DFM), a Later Stone Age site on South Africa's west coast. The second stage investigates bovid skeletal element abundance and longbone fragmentation patterns at the site. The third stage integrates these data wit...

A three-stage taphonomic analysis was performed on the small, small-medium and large bovid bone assemblages from Dunefield Midden, an open-air Later Stone Age site on South Africa's west coast. The results of the first stage of the analysis, which focuses on surface and subsurface bone modifications, are presented here. A forthcoming paper will det...

This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further e...

Ethnographic observations from ceramic-using cultures around the world highlight a direct connection between ceramic vessel form and function. In southwestern southern Africa archaeological assemblages containing ceramic vessels associated historically with Khoekhoen pastoralists are heavily dominated by pots that conform to a very uniform shape –...