Continuous vegetation record of the Greater Cape Floristic Region (South Africa) covering the past 300 000 years (IODP U1479)

The Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) of South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot of global significance, and its archeological record has substantially contributed to the understanding of modern human origins. For both reasons, the climate and vegetation history of southwestern South Africa is of interest to numerous fields. Currently known paleoenvironmental records cover the Holocene, the last glacial–interglacial transition and parts of the last glaciation but do not encompass a full glacial–interglacial cycle. To obtain a continuous vegetation record of the last Pleistocene glacial–interglacial cycles, we studied pollen, spores and micro-charcoal of deep-sea sediments from IODP Site U1479 retrieved from SW of Cape Town. We compare our palynological results of the Pleistocene with previously published results of Pliocene material from the same site. We find that the vegetation of the GCFR, in particular fynbos and afrotemperate forest, responds to precessional forcing of climate. The micro-charcoal record confirms the importance of fires in the fynbos vegetation. Ericaceae-rich and Asteraceae-rich types of fynbos could extend on the western part of the Paleo-Agulhas Plain (PAP), which emerged during periods of low sea level of the Pleistocene.

Musicality and gene-culture coevolution: ten concepts to guide productive exploration

A growing number of researchers across the sciences and humanities theorize that human musicality arose via an interplay of cultural invention and biological evolution, or “gene-culture coevolution.” This chapter offers ten concepts to help guide productive cross-disciplinary discussions on this topic. Such interactions across traditional disciplinary boundaries are needed to propel deep explorations of human musicality. These explorations are important for the study of human origins because musicality may prove to be a model system for exploring cognitive gene-culture coevolution, a process increasingly thought to be central to the evolution of the human mind.

Ancient uniparental DNAs in distinguishing the competing theories of molecular evolution and modern human origins

Analyses of extant people have resulted in two models for the uniparental DNA phylogenetic trees of modern humans rooted in either Africa or East Asia. The Africa model is based on the neutral theory. The Asia model is reached from the maximum genetic diversity (MGD) theory. To test the two competing theories, we examined published data of ancient uniparental DNAs. Many ancient samples belonging to a terminal haplogroup were found to have mutated only in some, but not all, of the sites that define a more basal haplogroup. This pattern was found for the non-controversial haplogroups shared by the two competing models, and also for the haplogroups specific to the Asia model. Furthermore, many ancient samples that do not belong to some of the haplogroups of the Africa model nonetheless had mutations in them, which makes it impossible to unambiguously assign them to a haplogroup within the Africa model. Finally, uniparental DNAs of archaic humans were found to carry some modern alleles present in the first uniparental DNAs in the Asia model, indicating convergent evolution. Therefore, the data from ancient DNAs have verified the MGD theory and the actual existence of the haplogroups specific to the Asia model.

The Technological Condition of Human Evolution: Lithic Studies as Basic Science

The recent elaboration and rapid expansion of aDNA, paleoproteomics, and related fields have propelled a profound “biomolecular turn” in archaeology and fundamentally changed the topology of archaeological knowledge production. Such a transformation of the archaeological research landscape is not without consequence for long-standing research practices in the field, such as lithic analysis. This special issue derives from the session Old Stones, New Eyes? organized by the authors at the UISPP World Congress in Paris in 2018, which aimed to explore the future of lithic studies. An underlying theme of our session was the felt need to respond to the increasing marginalization of lithic research in terms of its capacity to (1) contribute to the grand narratives of early human evolution and (2) better articulate the role and significance of lithic studies in interdisciplinary human origins research. In this editorial, we briefly outline some of the questions and challenges raised by the biomolecular turn and advocate for a more self-conscious and reflexive stance among lithic experts. We argue that lithic studies fulfill all necessary requirements to act as a basic science for human origins research and that its role and status depends less on technological advances, such as, e.g., improved computing facilities, novel analytical software, or automated shape capture technologies, than on continuous work on the conceptual and methodological foundations of inquiry. We finally draw attention to the unique capability of lithic studies to shed light on the human technological condition and illustrate this potential by introducing and briefly discussing the papers included in this issue.

The World City

In this chapter, we begin to reconstruct Nemesius’ anthropology, beginning with On Human Nature 1. And what we are meant to take from Nemesius’ prologue is something he calls a ‘familiar’ idea: that the world is a divine polity. The Platonic commentator Calcidius seems to have been a rough contemporary of Nemesius’ (and may have been a Syrian). In the first pages of his monumental Timaeus commentary, Calcidius refers to the ‘city or republic of this sensible world’. Nemesius never uses such precise terminology, but there is much to suggest that he structures his treatise with an eye to this archaic, yet philosophically sophisticated world-picture. It is in his prologue, too, that Nemesius sketches his theory of human origins—featuring a bold interpretation of the Fall which seems to turn upon his use of Galen’s medical vocabulary.