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Science Journals Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa Item Type Article; text Authors Thompson, J.C.; Wright, D.K.; Ivory, S.J.; Choi, J.-H.; Nightingale, S.; Mackay, A.; Schilt, F.; Otárola-Castillo, E.; Mercader, J.; Forman, S.L.; Pietsch, T.; Cohen, A.S.; Arrowsmith, J.R.; Welling, M.; Davis, J.; Schiery, B.; Kaliba, P.; Malijani, O.; Blome, M.W.; O'Driscoll, C.A.; Mentzer, S.M.; Miller, C.; Heo, S.; Choi, J.; Tembo, J.; Mapemba, F.; Simengwa, D.; Gomani-Chindebvu, E. Citation Thompson, J. C., Wright, D. K., Ivory, S. J., Choi, J.-H., Nightingale, S., Mackay, A., Schilt, F., Otárola-Castillo, E., Mercader, J., Forman, S. L., Pietsch, T., Cohen, A. S., Arrowsmith, J. R., Welling, M., Davis, J., Schiery, B., Kaliba, P., Malijani, O., Blome, M. W., … Gomani-Chindebvu, E. (2021). Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization in southern-central Africa. Science Advances, 7(19). DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abf9776 Publisher American Association for the Advancement of Science Journal Science Advances Rights Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S.Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). Download date 01/10/2021 20:13:45 Item License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Version Final published version Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/660624 SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE ANTHROPOLOGY Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; Early human impacts and ecosystem reorganization exclusive licensee American Association in southern-central Africa for the Advancement Jessica C. Thompson1,2*†, David K. Wright3,4*†, Sarah J. Ivory5*†, Jeong-Heon Choi6, Sheila Nightingale7, of Science. No claim to 8 9,10 11 12,13,14 15 original U.S. Government Alex Mackay , Flora Schilt , Erik Otárola-Castillo , Julio Mercader , Steven L. Forman , Works. Distributed 16 17 18 19,20 21 Timothy Pietsch , Andrew S. Cohen , J. Ramón Arrowsmith , Menno Welling , Jacob Davis , under a Creative 22 23 23 24 8 Benjamin Schiery , Potiphar Kaliba , Oris Malijani , Margaret W. Blome , Corey A. O’Driscoll , Commons Attribution Susan M. Mentzer9,25, Christopher Miller9,26, Seoyoung Heo6, Jungyu Choi27, Joseph Tembo23, NonCommercial Fredrick Mapemba23, Davie Simengwa28, Elizabeth Gomani-Chindebvu29 License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). Modern Homo sapiens engage in substantial ecosystem modification, but it is difficult to detect the origins or early consequences of these behaviors. Archaeological, geochronological, geomorphological, and paleoenviron- mental data from northern Malawi document a changing relationship between forager presence, ecosystem organization, and alluvial fan formation in the Late Pleistocene. Dense concentrations of Middle Stone Age artifacts and alluvial fan systems formed after ca. 92 thousand years ago, within a paleoecological context with no analog Downloaded from in the preceding half-million-year record. Archaeological data and principal coordinates analysis indicate that early anthropogenic fire relaxed seasonal constraints on ignitions, influencing vegetation composition and erosion. This operated in tandem with climate-driven changes in precipitation to culminate in an ecological transition to an early, pre-agricultural anthropogenic landscape. http://advances.sciencemag.org/ INTRODUCTION interactions between foragers and their environments that suggest Modern humans act as powerful agents of ecosystem transformation. that these behaviors were fundamental to the evolution of our spe- They have extensively and intentionally modified their environments cies (2–4). Fossil and genetic data indicate that Homo sapiens were for tens of millennia, leading to much debate about when and how the present in Africa by ~315 thousand years (ka) ago, and archaeolog- first human-dominated ecosystems arose (1). A growing body of ar- ical data show notable increases in the complexity of behavior that chaeological and ethnographic evidence shows substantial, recursive took place across the continent within the past ~300- to 200-ka span at the end of the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) (5). Since our emer- gence as a species, humans have come to rely on technological in- 1 2 Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. Institute of Hu- novation, seasonal scheduling, and complex social cooperation to man Origins, P.O. Box 874101, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA. 3Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. 4State Key Laboratory of thrive. These attributes have enabled us to exploit previously un- on July 16, 2021 Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of inhabited or extreme environments and resources, so that today hu- Sciences, Xian, China. 5Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Sys- mans are the only pan-global animal species (6). Fire has played a key tems Institute, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA. 6Depart- ment of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Korea Basic Science Institute, Ochang, role in this transformation (7). Republic of Korea. 7Department of Anthropology, City University of New York, Biological models suggest that adaptations for cooked food Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA. 8Centre for Archaeological Science, School of extend back at least 2 million years, but regular archaeological evi- Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, dence for controlled use of fire does not appear until the end of the Australia. 9Institute for Archaeological Sciences and Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany. Middle Pleistocene (8). A marine core with a dust record drawn 10Universidade do Algarve, Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of from a wide swath of the African continent shows that over the past Human Behavior (ICArEHB), FCHS, Campus Gambelas, J27, Faro 8005-139, Portugal. million years, peaks in elemental carbon occurred after ~400 ka, 11Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. 12Depart- ment of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada. predominately during shifts from interglacial to glacial conditions, 13Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany. 14Institut but also during the Holocene (9). This suggests that fire was less Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Zona Educacional, 4– common in sub-Saharan Africa before ~400 ka and that by the Campus Sescelades URV (Edifici W3), 43007 Tarragona, Spain. 15Department of 16 Holocene, there was a substantial anthropogenic contribution (9). Geosciences, Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA. Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia. 17Department of Geosciences, University of Fire is a tool that has been used by pastoralists to open and maintain Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. 18School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State grasslands throughout the Holocene (10). However, detecting the 19 University, Tempe, AZ, USA. Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts, contexts and ecological impacts of fire use by Pleistocene early Amsterdam, Netherlands. 20African Heritage Ltd., Box 622, Zomba, Malawi. 21Inde- pendent Researcher, New Haven, CT, USA. 22Biostatistics Department, Medpace hunter-gatherers is more complex (11). Inc., Cincinnati, OH, USA. 23Malawi Department of Museums and Monuments, Lilongwe, Fire is known both ethnographically and archaeologically as an Malawi. 24Department of Geological Sciences, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, engineering tool for resource manipulation, including improvement USA. 25School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. 26SFF Cen- tre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE), University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway. of subsistence returns or modification of raw materials, with these 27Gyeongju National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Gyeongju, Republic of activities often associated with communal planning and requiring sub- Korea. 28Lanujos Social Research and Consultancy, Blantyre, Malawi. 29Ministry of stantial ecological knowledge (2, 12, 13). Landscape-scale fires allow Civic Education and National Unity, Lilongwe, Malawi. hunter-gatherers to drive game, control pests, and enhance produc- *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] (J.C.T); david.wright@ iakh.uio.no (D.K.W.); [email protected] (S.J.I.) tivity of habitat (2). On-site fire facilitates cooking, warmth, preda- †These authors contributed equally to this work. tor defense, and social cohesion (14). However, there is substantial Thompson et al., Sci. Adv. 2021; 7 : eabf9776 5 May 2021 1 of 13 SCIENCE ADVANCES | RESEARCH ARTICLE ambiguity regarding the extent to which fires by hunter-gatherers can regional relief and piedmont slopes over an extended time, fault reconfigure components of a landscape, such as ecological commu- activity in this region likely slowed since the Middle Pleistocene nity structure and geomorphology (15, 16). (20). After ~800 ka until shortly after 100 ka, the hydrology of Understanding the development of human-induced ecological Lake Malawi became primarily climate driven (21). Therefore, change is problematic without well-dated archaeological and geo- neither is likely the sole explanation for Late Pleistocene alluvial fan morphic data from multiple
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