Ecological Perspectives on Hominin Landscape Use during the Early Stone Age of Africa

It is increasingly clear that Africa's Early Stone Age (ESA) sites sample a diversity of behaviors and no one model is sufficient to explain every collection of archaeological debris. Behavioral flexibility was thus probably a key component of hominin adaptations, and the goal of this symposium is to identify the ecological parameters, or affordances (resources and hazards), that conditioned where, when, and how hominins chose to concentrate their archaeologically visible behaviors across Africa's ESA landscapes. Papers in this session have a strong ecological focus and will contribute to an integrated examination of ESA hominin landscape use in Africa from faunal, lithic, paleobotanical, isotopic, and/or geological perspectives.