Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Human Adaptations to Arid Climates

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

While there is clear evidence of human occupation of the hyper-arid Namib Desert of western Namibia stretching back more than a hundred thousand years ago to the Middle Pleistocene epoch, very little is known about how early people were able to adapt to the harsh climatic conditions there. The newly discovered site of Erb Tanks Rockshelter, the only known archaeological site from the Central Namib region with dated layers from both the Middle and Later Stone Ages of the Pleistocene, offers the opportunity to provide insight about how human groups adapted to life in the desert through their patterns of land use and resource acquisition strategies. Since, primarily for historical reasons, most paleoanthropological research in southern Africa has focused on regions with much milder environmental conditions, new research in the extreme conditions of the Namib will greatly enhance understanding of the full range of adaptive capabilities possessed by early modern human groups. This, in turn, will contribute to answering fundamental anthropological questions of how, why, and when humans gained the abilities to successfully adapt to nearly any environment on Earth and survive through major climatic shifts. In the Fall of 2013, advised by Dr. James Enloe and with the collaboration of colleagues and students from the University of Namibia and the Swakopmund Municipal Museum, Theodore Marks will undertake a field survey to identify and locate the sources of raw materials that people at Erb Tanks used for manufacturing stone tools. In the field and with samples in the laboratory, Mr. Marks will employ cutting-edge geochemical analyses, including portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF), Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS), and Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), to identify the chemical "fingerprints" of the individual sources of stone that people exploited in the past for making tools. By comparing the chemical fingerprints of source samples with the chemical fingerprints of stone raw materials in the archaeological collection at Erb Tanks, the research team led by Dr. Enloe and Mr. Marks will be able to identify where particular rocks in the prehistoric toolkit were sourced and begin to re-trace the movements of ancient populations across the desert landscape. These data will enable the team to learn a great deal about where human hunter-gatherers focused their activities on the landscape, how they went about acquiring vital resources, and how these patterns changed through time, possibly in response to long-term climatic changes. Apart from addressing basic regional and global research questions, this project will have broader impacts for both American and Namibian scientists. For Mr. Marks, the project will serve as his doctoral dissertation research and form the culmination of his graduate training. The project will also involve side-by-side collaboration with senior Namibian colleagues and training of undergraduate students from the University of Namibia. This partnership will enhance international scientific relationships as well as help develop independent research capacity and familiarity with modern analytical methods for the next generation of Namibian archaeologists.