Eleanor M L Scerri

• PhD Palaeolithic Archaeology
• Research Group Head at Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

The Saharo-Arabian Desert is one of the largest biogeographical barriers on Earth, impeding dispersals between Africa and Eurasia, including movements of past hominins. Recent research suggests that this barrier has been in place since at least 11 million years ago¹. In contrast, fossil evidence from the late Miocene epoch and the Pleistocene epoch...

The Maltese archipelago is a small island chain that is among the most remote in the Mediterranean. Humans were not thought to have reached and inhabited such small and isolated islands until the regional shift to Neolithic lifeways, around 7.5 thousand years ago (ka)¹. In the standard view, the limited resources and ecological vulnerabilities of s...

Regionalisation is considered to be a hallmark of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) compared to the Early Stone Age. Yet what drove diversification around a shared technological substrate that persisted across Africa for hundreds of thousands of years remains debated. Non-mutually exclusive hypotheses include region-specific styles in manufacture, social...

Humans emerged across Africa shortly before 300 thousand years ago (ka)1, 2–3. Although this pan-African evolutionary process implicates diverse environments in the human story, the role of tropical forests remains poorly understood. Here we report a clear association between late Middle Pleistocene material culture and a wet tropical forest in sou...

Archaeology and the branch of population genetics focusing on the human past have historically lived parallel lives, often having complicated encounters when it came to unravelling the origins and evolution of Homo sapiens. These interactions were proven invaluable to obtain a deeper and more complete understanding of our past. At the same time, th...

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) is the major chrono-cultural phase associated with the emergence and evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa. Despite its importance, the MSA has not been evenly investigated across Africa, and West Africa in particular remains poorly understood. Although new research is beginning to fill in this crucial gap of knowledge, the...

Video of the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4InGRZ05SmY&ab_channel=MethodsEcolEvol Abstract: By building on the modular infrastructure of tidymodels, tidysdm does not need to create complete solutions from scratch: objects created within tidysdm can be directly fed to functions from other packages. In addition to that, tidysdm facilitate...

Regionalisation is considered to be a hallmark of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) compared to the Early Stone Age. Yet what drove diversification around a shared technological substrate that persisted across Africa for hundreds of thousands of years remains debated. Non-mutually exclusive hypotheses include region-specific styles in manufacture, social...

In species distribution modelling (SDM), it is common practice to explore multiple machine learning (ML) algorithms and combine their results into ensembles. In R, many implementations of different ML algorithms are available but, as they were mostly developed independently, they often use inconsistent syntax and data structures. For this reason, r...

Both proxies and models provide key resources to explore how palaeoenvironmental changes may have impacted diverse biotic communities and cultural processes. Whilst proxies provide the gold standard in reconstructing the local environment, they only provide point estimates for a limited number of locations; on the other hand, models have the potent...

Recent advances in interdisciplinary archaeological research in Arabia have focused on the evolution and historical development of regional human populations as well as the diverse patterns of cultural change, migration, and adaptations to environmental fluctuations. Obtaining a comprehensive understanding of cultural developments such as the emerg...

This chapter synthesises the results of recent research in the Lower Senegal Valley. Palaeolithic surveys in the second half of the 20th century indicated the presence of Stone Age occupations of this landscape and described their broad character. Renewed survey in the region has helped refine this characterisation, illustrating the widespread pres...

The Ihò Eléérú rock shelter is located in SW Nigeria (Ondo State), approximately 20 km NNW of Akure (Fig. 1). The site name means “Cave of Ashes” in the Yoruba language. The site has typically been published using the name “Iwo Eleru”, which is an anglicized translation of its original Yoruba name. The name “Iho Eleru” will be used throughout this...

In species distribution modelling (SDM), it is common practice to explore multiple machine-learning algorithms and combine their results into ensembles. This is no easy task in R: different algorithms were developed independently, with inconsistent syntax and data structures. Specialised SDM packages integrate multiple algorithms by creating a comp...

The behavioral origins of Homo sapiens can be traced back to the first material culture produced by our species in Africa, the Middle Stone Age (MSA). Beyond this broad consensus, the origins, patterns, and causes of behavioral complexity in modern humans remain debated. Here, we consider whether recent findings continue to support popular scenario...

The ubiquity and durability of lithic artifacts inform archaeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Despite their importance, lithic artifacts can be problematic to study because lithic analysts differ widely in their theoretical approaches and the data they collect. The extent to which differences in lithic data relat...

The Ihò Eléérú (or Iho Eleru) rock shelter, located in Southwest Nigeria, is the only site from which Pleistocene-age hominin fossils have been recovered in western Africa. Excavations at Iho Eleru revealed regular human occupations ranging from the Later Stone Age (LSA) to the present day. Here, we present chronometric, archaeobotanical, and paleo...

The archaeology of the Maltese Islands, particularly the megalithic ‘temple’ structures and underground mass burial sites (hypogea) of the ‘Temple Period’ (ca. 3800 – 2300 BCE), has been the subject of considerable interest. Less is known about the prehistoric use of caves. In particular reports of prehistoric cave art at Għar Ħasan (Hasan’s Cave)...

African paleoanthropological studies typically focus on regions of the continent such as Eastern, Southern and Northern Africa, which hold the highest density of Pleistocene archaeological sites. Nevertheless, lesser known areas such as West Africa also feature a high number of sites. Here, we present a high-resolution map synthesising all well con...

Homo sapiens have adapted to an incredible diversity of habitats around the globe. This capacity to adapt to different landscapes is clearly expressed within Africa, with Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens populations occupying savannahs, woodlands, coastlines and mountainous terrain. As the only area of the world where Homo sapiens have clearly persist...

The most profound shift in the African hydroclimate of the last 1 million years occurred around 300 thousand years (ka) ago. This change in African hydroclimate is manifest as an east-west change in moisture balance that cannot be fully explained through linkages to high latitude climate systems. The east-west shift is, instead, probably driven by...

Since Darwin, studies of human evolution have tended to give primacy to open ‘savannah’ environments as the ecological cradle of our lineage, with dense tropical forests cast as hostile, unfavourable frontiers. These perceptions continue to shape both the geographical context of fieldwork as well as dominant narratives concerning hominin evolution....

The small size and relatively challenging environmental conditions of the semi-isolated Maltese archipelago mean that the area offers an important case study of societal change and human-environment interactions. Following an initial phase of Neolithic settlement, the “Temple Period” in Malta began ∼5.8 thousand years ago (ka), and came to a seemin...

The emergence of Homo sapiens in Pleistocene Africa is associated with a profound reconfiguration of technology. Symbolic expression and personal ornamentation, new tool forms, and regional technological traditions are widely recognized as the earliest indicators of complex culture and cognition in humans. Here we describe a bone tool tradition fro...

Pleistocene hominin dispersals out of, and back into, Africa necessarily involved traversing the diverse and often challenging environments of Southwest Asia 1–4 . Archaeological and palaeontological records from the Levantine woodland zone document major biological and cultural shifts, such as alternating occupations by Homo sapiens and Neandertha...

The emergence of Homo sapiens in Pleistocene Africa is associated with a profound reconfiguration of technology. Symbolic expression and personal ornamentation, new tool forms, and regional technological traditions are widely recognized as the earliest indicators of complex culture and cognition in humans. Here we describe a bone tool tradition fro...

Significance Our results identify the prime driver of climate variation in Africa’s low latitudes over the past 620 ky—the key time frame for the evolution of our species. Warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean paced by insolation changes modulated the tropical Walker circulation, driving opposing wet–dry states in eastern and western Af...

Attempts to identify a ‘homeland’ for our species from genetic data are widespread in the academic literature. However, even when putting aside the question of whether a ‘homeland’ is a useful concept, there are a number of inferential pitfalls in attempting to identify the geographic origin of a species from contemporary patterns of genetic variat...

Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5, ~ 130 to 71 thousand years ago, was a key period for the geographic expansion of Homo sapiens, including engagement with new landscapes within Africa and dispersal into Asia. Occupation of the Levant by Homo sapiens in MIS 5 is well established, while recent research has documented complementary evidence in Arabia. Her...

The Arabian Peninsula is a critical geographic landmass situated between Africa and the rest of Eurasia. Climatic shifts across the Pleistocene periodically produced wetter conditions in Arabia, dramatically altering the spatial distribution of hominins both within and between continents. This is particularly true of Acheulean hominins, who appear...

Neanderthals occurred widely across north Eurasian landscapes, but between ~ 70 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) they expanded southwards into the Levant, which had previously been inhabited by Homo sapiens. Palaeoanthropological research in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated alternate occupations of the Levant by Neanderthal and Ho...

New finds in the palaeoanthropological and genomic records have changed our view of the origins of modern human ancestry. Here we review our current understanding of how the ancestry of modern humans around the globe can be traced into the deep past, and which ancestors it passes through during our journey back in time. We identify three key phases...

The African Middle Stone Age (MSA, typically considered to span ca. 300–30 thousand years ago [ka]), represents our species’ first and longest lasting cultural phase. Although the MSA to Later Stone Age (LSA) transition is known to have had a degree of spatial and temporal variability, recent studies have implied that in some regions, the MSA persi...

The pandemic will allow us to fundamentally remodel the way field-based sciences are taught, conducted and funded — but only if we stop waiting for a ‘return to normal’.

A taxonomic and taphonomic study of Pleistocene fossil deposits from the western Nefud Desert, Saudi Arabia – Addendum - Mathew Stewart, Julien Louys, Paul S. Breeze, Richard Clark-Wilson, Nick A. Drake, Eleanor M.L. Scerri, Iyad S. Zalmout, Yahya S. A. Al-Mufarreh, Saleh A. Soubhi, Mohammad A. Haptari, Abdullah M. Alsharekh, Huw S. Groucutt, Micha...

Over the past decade, a growing interest has developed on the archaeology, palaeontology, and palaeoenvironments of the Arabian Peninsula. It is now clear that hominins repeatedly dispersed into Arabia, notably during pluvial interglacial periods when much of the peninsula was characterised by a semiarid grassland environment. During the intervenin...

North Africa features some of the earliest manifestations of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) and fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, as well as early examples of complex culture and the long distance transfer of exotic raw materials. As they are elsewhere, lithics (i.e., stone tools) present by far the most abundant source of information on this cultu...

Chan and colleagues in their paper titled “Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1714-1) report 198 novel whole mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences and infer that ‘anatomically modern humans’ originated in the Makgadikgadi–Okavango palaeo-wetland of southern Africa aroun...

Cultural taxonomy for the European Upper Palaeolithic: a wide-ranging problem - Volume 93 Issue 371 - Eleanor M.L. Scerri

We challenge the view that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved within a single population and/or region of Africa. Genetic data are consistent with a diverse and subdivided African ancestry, potentially including gene flow with currently unidentified African archaic populations. The chronology and physical diversity of Pleistocene human fossils also...

The past half century has seen a move from a multiregionalist view of human origins to widespread acceptance that modern humans emerged in Africa. Here the authors argue that a simple out-of-Africa model is also outdated, and that the current state of the evidence favours a structured African metapopulation model of human origins.

Despite its largely hyper-arid and inhospitable climate today, the Arabian Peninsula is emerging as an important area for investigating Pleistocene hominin dispersals. Recently, a member of our own species was found in northern Arabia dating to ca. 90 ka, while stone tools and fossil finds have hinted at an earlier, middle Pleistocene, hominin pres...

Abstract The Acheulean is the longest lasting cultural–technological tradition in human evolutionary history. However, considerable gaps remain in understanding the chronology and geographical distribution of Acheulean hominins. We present the first chronometrically dated Acheulean site from the Arabian Peninsula, a vast and poorly known region tha...

The origins of agriculture in South-west Asia is a topic of continued archaeological debate. Of particular interest is how agricultural populations and practices spread inter-regionally. Was the Arabian Neolithic, for example, spread through the movement of pastoral groups, or did ideas perhaps develop independently? Here, the authors report on rec...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200497.].

Despite occupying a central geographic position, investigations of hominin populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Lower Palaeolithic period are rare. The colonization of Eurasia below 55 degrees latitude indicates the success of the genus Homo in the Early and Middle Pleistocene, but the extent to which these hominins were capable of innov...

Statistical tests of Whalen excavation artefacts. (XLSX)

We challenge the view that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved within a single population and/or region of Africa. The chronology and physical diversity of Pleistocene human fossils suggest that morphologically varied populations pertaining to the H. sapiens clade lived throughout Africa. Similarly, the African archaeological record demonstrates the...

Understanding the timing and character of the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa is critical for inferring the colonization and admixture processes that underpin global population history. It has been argued that dispersal out of Africa had an early phase, particularly ~130–90 thousand years ago (ka), that reached only the East Mediterranean L...

Understanding the timing and character of the expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa is critical for inferring the colonization and admixture processes that underpin global population history. It has been argued that dispersal out of Africa had an early phase, particularly ~130–90 thousand years ago (ka), that reached only the East Mediterranean L...

The story of humanity's beginning has far more plot twists than we ever imagined, says Eleanor Scerri

The Levantine sites of Skhul and Qafzeh have been interpreted as indicating an early, short and unsuccessful expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa. Chronometric age estimates, however, indicate a history of prolonged occupation, and suggest that Skhul (~130-100 thousand years ago [ka]) may have been occupied earlier than Qafzeh (beginning ~110-90...

The North African Middle Stone Age (NAMSA, ∼300-24 thousand years ago, or ka) features what may be the oldest fossils of our species as well as extremely early examples of technological regionalization and ‘symbolic’ material culture (d'Errico, Vanhaeren, Barton, Bouzouggar, Mienis, Richter, Hublin, McPherron, Louzouet, & Klein, 2009; Scerri, 2013a...

Mid-latitude dune fields offer significant records of human occupations in southwest Asia, reflecting human responses to past climate changes. Currently arid, but episodically wetter in the past, the Nefud desert of northern Saudi Arabia provides numerous examples of human-environment interactions and population movements in the desert belt. Here w...

Déterminer l’organisation génétique et culturelle des premières populations d’Homo sapiens en Afrique est une question centrale en paléoanthropologie, afin d’expliquer les origines de la diversification culturelle et la colonisation globale (de la planète) des humains modernes. Dénouer l’histoire des populations du Middle Stone Age de l’Afrique du...

Several hundred Middle Palaeolithic (MP) archaeological sites have now been identified in the Arabian Peninsula. However, the study of lithic raw material properties and related procurement behaviours is still in its infancy. Here we describe raw material procurement and early stage lithic reduction at MP sites in the Jubbah palaeolake basin, in th...

The importance of Africa in human origins is widely recognised, yet knowledge remains strongly biased towards certain regions of the continent at the expense of others. West Africa in particular is a vast area with extremely limited archaeological, environmental and fossil records. In this paper, we contribute towards redressing this imbalance thou...

The current paucity of Pleistocene vertebrate records from the Arabian Peninsula - a landmass of over 3 million km2 - is a significant gap in our knowledge of the Quaternary. Such data are critical lines of contextual evidence for considering animal and hominin dispersals between Africa and Eurasia generally, and hominin palaeoecology in the Pleist...

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Quantitative, attribute-based analyses of stone tools (lithics) have been frequently used to facilitate large-scale comparative studies, attempt to mitigate problems of assemblage completeness and address interpretations of the co-occurrence of unrelated technological processes. However, a major barrier to the widespread acceptance of such methods...

Freshwater availability is critical for human survival, and in the Saharo-Arabian desert belt repeated fluctuations between aridity and humidity over the Quaternary mean the distribution of freshwater was likely a primary control upon routes and opportunities for hominin dispersals. However, our knowledge of the spatio-temporal distribution of pala...

Freshwater availability is critical for human survival, and in the Saharo-Arabian desert belt repeated fluctuations between aridity and humidity over the Quaternary mean the distribution of freshwater was likely a primary control upon routes and opportunities for hominin dispersals. However, our knowledge of the spatio-temporal distribution of pala...

The dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa has been extensively researched across several disciplines. Here we review the evidence for spatial and temporal variability in lithic (stone tool) technologies relative to the predictions of two major hypotheses: 1) that a single successful dispersal occurred 60–50 thousand years ago (ka), marked by a tr...

Recent archaeological discoveries indicate that the Arabian Peninsula played an important role in Late Pleistocene hominin dispersals. The presence of Middle Palaeolithic archaeological sites in the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia demonstrates that hominins moved far inland, probably following networks of ancient lakes and rivers deep into th...

The reconstruction of Pleistocene faunas and environments of the Arabian Peninsula is critical to un-derstanding faunal exchange and dispersal between Africa and Eurasia. However, the documented Quaternary vertebrate record of the Peninsula is currently sparse and poorly understood. Small collec-tions have provided a rare insight into the Pleistoce...

The Nefud Desert is crucial for resolving debates concerning hominin demography and behaviour in the Saharo-Arabian belt. Situated at the interface between the Mediterranean Westerlies and African Monsoonal climate systems, the Nefud lies at the centre of the arid zone crossed by Homo sapiens dispersing into Eurasia and the edges of the southernmos...

Understanding the structure and variation of Homo sapiens populations in Africa is critical for interpreting multiproxy evidence of their subsequent dispersals into Eurasia. However, there is no consensus on early Homo sapiens demographic structure, or its effects on intra-African dispersals. Here, we show how a patchwork of ecological corridors an...

The Aterian is a frequently cited manifestation of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of North Africa, yet its character and meaning have remained largely opaque, as attention has focused almost exclusively on the typology of ‘tanged’, or ‘pedunculated’, lithics. Observations of technological similarities between the Aterian and other regional technocomple...

The Aterian is perhaps the major manifestation of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in North Africa and is frequently framed in terms of the first modern human dispersals into the north of Africa. The possibility of an Aterian presence in the Arabian Peninsula is widely cited and is of particular interest, given the significant ongoing debate on the chara...