Jan De Vynck

University of the Witwatersrand | wits · Evolutionary Studies Institute

The extent to which modern humans relied upon intertidal resources, and the impact that this food source had on their cognitive and social development, remains contentious. An outstanding question is whether such a resource could have provided a sufficiently reliable and essentially continuous supply of resources to support communities during the M...

An improved understanding of indigenous plant use by humans over time may assist in our understanding of how the Greater Cape Floristic Region's flora (GCFR) contributed to the survival of modern humans. To address this issue, two databases were created documenting all archaeological (all plant species found in archaeological sites dating 0–80,000...

Even a simple human foraging system has a large number of moving parts. Foragers require a complex decision making process to effectively exploit the spatially and temporally variable resources in an environment. Here we present an agent-based modelling framework, based in optimal foraging theory, for agent foragers to make mobility and foraging de...

East of Still Bay on the Cape south coast of South Africa lies a rugged, remote stretch of sea cliffs that expose Late Pleistocene aeolianites. A zone of dense concentration of fossil tracks occurs within this area. Two large rocks, which we call Roberts Rock and Megafauna Rock, were identified ~400 metres apart. These rocks contained a variety of...

Until now there have been no reliable historical or skeletal fossil records for the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) south of the Orange River or northern Namaqualand. The recent discovery of fossil giraffe tracks in coastal aeolianites east of Still Bay, South Africa, significantly increases the geographical range for this species, and has implica...

A basic tenet of the behavioural ecological approach to anthropology is that local ecology, the density and distribution of resources in time and space, determine optimal patterns of economic exploitation of resources. Those optimal foraging, mobility, and grouping patterns then constrain all other aspects of social behaviour, and interact with mat...

South Africa continues to receive substantial attention from scholars researching modern human origins. The importance of this region lies in the many caves and rock shelters containing well preserved evidence of human activity, cultural material complexity and a growing number of early modern human fossils dating to the Middle Stone Age (MSA). Sou...

Underground storage organs (USOs) serve as a staple source of carbohydrates for many hunter-gatherer societies and they feature prominently in discussions of diets of early modern humans. While the way of life of hunter-gatherers in South Africa's Cape no longer exists, there is extensive ethnographic, historical, and archaeological evidence of hun...

The south coast of South Africa provides the earliest evidence for Middle Stone Age (MSA) coastal resource exploitation by early Homo sapiens. In coastal archaeology worldwide, there has been a debate over the general productivity of intertidal foraging, leading to studies that directly measure productivity in some regions, but there have been no s...

The coastal environments of South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region (CFR) provide some of the earliest and most abundant evidence for the emergence of cognitively modern humans. In particular, the south coast of the CFR provided a uniquely diverse resource base for hunter-gatherers, which included marine shellfish, game, and carbohydrate-bearing plant...

Supplementary Material Methods. An index of all supplementary tables and figures. Phenological phase synchronicity is explained in detail and the methods which were employed in creating Fig. S3. References for the phenological phase synchronicity description.

Biophysical information. Biophysical information for the four study sites.

Climate diagrams. Climate diagrams showing temperature and rainfall patterns for the study sites during the survey period (May 2010–April 2012). Temperature and rainfall axes and shading follow Walter-Lieth conventions. Mean values of temperature and rainfall for the period are shown in parentheses. The positions of weather stations relative to sur...

Climate map. Locations of the vegetation survey plots and the weather stations (shown in Fig. S1).

Phenological phase synchronicity. A hierarchical classification to establish phenological phase synchronicity (specifically availability of edible carbohydrates) among plant species from four different vegetation types along the Cape south coast (South Africa). The plant species, its carbohydrate type (Underground Storage Organ [USO] or aboveground...

Meta data. Meta data for raw data file.

Total species list per vegetation type. Species list of USOs and fruiting species (aboveground carbohydrate resources), and their acronyms, encountered in the phenology survey list of plots within four dominant vegetation types in the southern Cape lowlands to coastal margin. Acronyms relate to those used in Fig. S3.

Raw data collected six-weekly over two years in the four primary vegetation types, southern Cape, South Africa. The raw data are six-weekly counts, over two years, of edible plants with Underground Storage Organs and aboveground edibles. These surveys were performed in predesignated 3.6 hectare plots of the four primary vegetation types of the sout...

Phenology diagrams. Phenology diagrams for plant species with Underground Storage Organs (USOs) and for fruiting plant species (aboveground carbohydrate resources) of the four primary vegetation types of the south Cape lowlands to coastal margin.

Total species list. Total species list of USOs and fruiting species (aboveground carbohydrate resources) and their acronyms (used in Fig. S3) encountered in the phenology survey of plots within four vegetation types of the southern Cape lowlands to coastal margin.

There is evidence that hunter-gatherer societies of both the Middle and the Later Stone Ages in the Cape Floristic Region (CFR) used many plant species, particularly those with underground storage organs (USOs), as sources of carbohydrate. In the CFR, USOs - mostly monocotoledon geophytes - are particularly diverse and abundant. However, little is...

Underground storage organs (USOs) serve as a staple source of carbohydrates for many hunter-gatherer societies and they feature prominently in discussions of diets of early modern humans. While the way of life of hunter-gatherers in South Africa’s Cape is no longer in existence, there is extensive ethnographic, historical and archaeological evidenc...

The coastal environments of South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region (CFR) provide some of the earliest and most abundant evidence for the emergence of cognitively modern humans. In particular, the south coast of the CFR provided for hunter-gatherers a uniquely diverse resource base, namely marine shellfish, game, and carbohydrate-bearing plants, espec...

The coastal environments of South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region (CFR) provide some of the earliest and most abundant evidence for the emergence of cognitively modern humans. In particular, the south coast of the CFR provided for hunter-gatherers a uniquely diverse resource base, namely marine shellfish, game, and carbohydrate-bearing plants, espec...

Underground storage organs (USOs) serve as a staple source of carbohydrates for many hunter-gatherer societies and they feature prominently in discussions of diets of early modern humans. While the way of life of hunter-gatherers in South Africa’s Cape is no longer in existence, there is extensive ethnographic, historical and archaeological evidenc...