The Middle Stone Age (MSA) archaeology of eastern corresponds to the emergence and expansion of Homo sapiens populations within and out of Africa.
Despite its long research history, some points such as population dynamics and interactions, the role of different environments in the developments of regional identities and the mode and tempo of technological variability of the archaeological record is still a matter of debate. This is due, in part, to the lack of well-dated sites.
Here we present a proposal on a new MSA site in southern Ethiopia, named GOT-10, an open-air stratified sequence preliminary dated to MIS3, that we discovered in the Gotera area we are exploring since 2016. The site has yielded lithic artifacts and faunal remains in situ. These fresh data have the potential to contribute to the broader debate about occupation and behavioural dynamics of our species, in an area of East Africa still virtually unknown and out of the Rift and to gather new human fossils in this key period.
The Grandi Scavi Program will allow us to finalise the study of the archaeological materials, to continue the investigation of the area, and, above all, to prosecute the excavation and sampling of the GOT-10 site.
This multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research project will contribute to the knowledge of modern human behaviour and dispersal dynamics in East Africa. Furthermore, by combining data from archaeology, geology and paleoclimate with modelling and statistics, it will be possible to hypothesize the structure of Homo sapiens populations that settled the region. Comparison with other MSA sequences inside and outside Ethiopia will give an insight about the continental variability of the MSA. Comparison with non-human primates will help to elucidate cognitive and evolutionary aspect in stone tool evolution.
The archaeology of East Africa plays an essential role in understanding the behavioural and evolutionary dynamics linked to the emergence of our species.
This proposal focuses on Ethiopia because this is one of the regions where Homo sapiens first appeared and where some of the oldest MSA sites occur: however this proposal it is inlaid in a wider project on Human evolution in Africa and beyond, including cognitive as well as evolutive aspects in three continents (Africa, Europe and South America).
Within the existing multiple Out of Africa models [46;47], Ethiopia is one of the starting points for waves of human migration [48;22;49]. Although recent publications raised new questions about the origin and expansion of Homo sapiens, and new models have been proposed, postulating its occurrence not as a single population geographically constrained [20;39;50;51;52] at the time being, East Africa is still the region where most of the fossil and genetic evidence of first Homo sapiens comes from [5;2].
Nonetheless, the archaeological evidence linked with the Pleistocene occurrences of Homo sapiens in East Africa is still not well understood.
In particular, our knowledge of the related MSA industry and its behavioural, cognitive, and cultural component is poor, also due to the scarcity of archaeological and sedimentary sequences. Moreover, the current understanding of the East African paleoenvironment emphasizes the presence of extreme dynamism that contributed to the development of different ecosystems. The variability of the ecosystems was an important factor for shaping the human evolutionary scenario and therefore these two aspects are inexorably linked.
The discovery of a new stratified open-air site in southern Ethiopia, rich in lithics and fauna, can contribute to the understanding of the region's human occupation dynamics by providing new cultural, biological, behavioural, and environmental data from a well-controlled stratigraphic sequence.
The site is exceptionally well preserved, with lithics, bones and fireplaces, whose ashes have been sampled to obtain AMS dates.
In fact, the presence of fauna in open air sites in tropical Africa is exceptional and this will give us the opportunity to a) apply some cutting edges analyses (e.g. Zooms, see below) to new context and b) to improve the chances to find new hominis fossils that will help to solve some of the major questions about the early stage of Homo sapiens in Africa, and particularly the presence of derived traits possibly linked to subdivided populations.
Our project is scheduled for the next three years and here we request funding for the next season. Our immediate aim is to complete the analyses of the lithics and faunas, in order to finish the sampling of the deposit, and the excavation of the GOT-10 Mound1. The exploration of the surrounding areas will allow to identify other archaeological sites, potentially bearing more exceptional archaeological and paleontological record.
Furthermore, the application of new models of paleo-geographical dynamics and their associated ecosystems should substantially contribute to the general understanding of these, to date, still insufficiently understood phenomena. In fact, together with the archaeological investigation of the area, we aim to reconstruct the palaeoenvironment and plaeoclimate of the area by proceeding with geomorphological and archaeobotanical analyses, coupled with the stable isotopic analyses of selected fauna samples (under a Phd, Seminew Asrat).
Samples for ancient proteomics analysis and Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) will be collected (Dr Katerina Douka and Caterina Aureli). This cutting edge methodology is used to identify specific taxa from archaeological remains using bone collagen. Typically, this analysis is applied to fragmented, morphologically undiagnostic bone fragments, to identify the species, and hopefully human remains. These methodologies have not been widely used yet to analyse faunal remains from East African Pleistocene contexts, but they have the potential to refine our understanding of faunal exploitation in association with human occupation [54] and to gather new human specimens.
References
[47] Groucutt et al 2015
[48] Bons et al 2019
[49] Lamb et al 2018
[50] Beyin et al 2019
[51] Vicente and Schlebush 2020
[52] Chan et al 2019
[53] Schlebusch et al 2020
[54] Sinet-Mathiot et al 2019