Investigating Human Origins in the Kalahari Basin: New Results from Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Investigations of the southern African Middle Stone Age archaeological record are transforming our understanding of Homo sapiens origins and evolution, however, the intensity of research on coastal and near-coastal Middle Stone Age (MSA) records has outweighed that on the deep interior record. The North of Kuruman Palaeoarchaeology Project was initiated to help correct for this bias. Here, we report new results from excavations at the Middle Stone Age site of Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter (GHN), near Kuruman, South Africa in the southern Kalahari Basin. We show that the deposits are in good context with minimal disturbance based on stratigraphy, artifact density distribution, and fabric analyses. Optically stimulated luminescence analysis is providing high-resolution age estimates for the archaeological deposits. Uranium-series dating of extensive carbonate deposits in the area is producing a record of palaeohydrological dynamics and past environments. Ongoing excavations at GHN are generating a diachronic record of MSA human-environment interaction in the Kalahari Basin that will allow us to assess the competing hypotheses about the origins and evolution of H. sapiens.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Recent Advances and Debates in the Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23638