Doctoral Dissertation Research: Species Continuity/Discontinuity Behavior over Time

This doctoral dissertation project investigates the distribution of early human activities and how it may have changed through time at the site of Olduvai Gorge. This site is of key significance as it samples a time period that contains important evolutionary transitions in the human lineage, including more complex stone tool technology, increased meat consumption, and the appearance of a new human species, Homo erectus.

Olduvai is also of particular importance because its massive size and the long history of research conducted at the site allows researchers to examine how and why early human activities changed through time at a larger landscape scale. Using geographic mapping methods, this project pulls together multiple lines of archaeological evidence that have previously only painted a partial picture of ancient landscape use.

The data generated by this study has value for education, outreach, and conservation at the site in the future, allowing both other researchers and the public to use digital maps and models to explore the landscape. The project builds methods and models that can be applied to other large paleoanthropological sites, furthering researchers' understanding of early human landscape use and evolution.

This project also provides important contributions to understanding the evolution of early human behavior and how human ancestors adapted to significant changes in their environment and their place within it. Building off prior paleoanthropological research, this project is rooted in a landscape archaeological approach, focused not only on singular dense concentrations of artifacts, but on the entire network of locations that early humans were frequenting through time.

Through this approach, researchers can develop a fuller understanding of where human ancestors were concentrating their activities, and the possible underlying ecological and/or behavioral drivers of the archaeological pattern left behind. The multiple objectives of this project are pursued with a combination of aerial drone survey, geologic mapping, and the compilation and analysis of over 70-years of paleoanthropological data.

Broadly, this project investigates how early humans at negotiated their immediate environment, where on the landscape they spent their time, and how researchers can interpret the spatial distribution of the archaeological evidence. One objective is to determine how the surface geology can impact researchers' analysis of where one finds archaeological traces on the landscape.

The remaining objectives of the project are to examine different aspects of how the landscape pattern of early human activities changed through time, including how the presence of large carnivores influenced this pattern. A key focus is the impact of the appearance of Homo erectus, a larger brained and bodied human ancestor with more complex stone tools and possibly increased hunting ability, who potentially had a more established presence on the landscape.

The adaptive flexibility that is the hallmark of our species has its roots during this time, and as such, the questions investigated by this project have relevance to understanding our evolutionary success.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.