Final Report Summary - TRANS-NAP (Cultural transformations and environmental transitions in North African prehistory)
The TRANS-NAP project addressed a fundamental question in human evolution: to what extent was adaptability to climate change a key factor in the long-term success of our species compared with other hominin species like Neanderthals? The specific focus was three areas of current debate in North African prehistory: (1) when did Homo sapiens (‘Modern Humans’) first colonise the region? (It is widely suggested that they probably first arrived around 120,000 years ago, crossing the Sahara at a time of global climatic warming and increased rainfall.) (2) how did North African Homo sapiens cope with the profound global climate fluctuations of the Pleistocene (the ‘Ice Ages’)? (3) when, how and why in the Holocene (the modern climatic era that began c.11,500 years ago) did hunting and gathering lifestyles give way to crop cultivation and animal husbandry (the ‘Neolithic’)?
The study area was the Gebel Akhdar or ‘Green Mountain’ in Cyrenaica, northeast Libya, a kind of Mediterranean island on the northeast corner of Africa lying between the sea and the Sahara to the east of Benghazi. The project had three main components: (1) the re-excavation of the Haua Fteah cave, where excavations in the 1950s by Dr Charles McBurney (University of Cambridge) revealed a 14-m deep sequence of human occupation estimated by him to span from around 80,000 years ago to recent millennia; (2) new fieldwork across the Gebel Akhdar to investigate climate, environment, and human activity in the landscape to compare with the Haua Fteah data; (3) new studies of McBurney’s archive of finds held in Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. Our key findings in relation to the three research questions above are as follows:
(1) Our main evidence for Modern Human presence in the cave supports the 120,000 date, but there are hints that they were in fact first visiting the cave as early as 150,000 years ago.
(2) Modern Humans coped variably with climate change, but more effectively over time. We show that the Gebel Akhdar was, compared with the rest of North Africa, a relatively stable environment through the major fluctuations in temperature and humidity that have characterized the world’s climate over the past 150,000 years. Even so, Modern Humans with Middle Stone Age stone flake technologies between 120,000 and 40,000 years ago, and their successors with Late Stone Age blade technologies, mainly used the Haua Fteah in warmer and more humid episodes. In periods of aridity the degraded landscapes of the Gebel Akhdar may only have sustained very small populations of humans, sometimes none at all. Nevertheless, around 25,000 years ago people developed a range of behaviours including more effective hunting technologies, plant gathering and storage, and all-year-round landsnail and marine shellfish gathering, that allowed them to thrive despite the development of very arid climates (the global ‘Last Glacial Maximum’).
(3) People maintained the same foraging way of life (hunting, plant and mollusc gathering, fishing) through the opening and more benign millennia of the Holocene, numbers increasing so much that there are indications of resource pressure. A sharp global return to aridity 8200 years ago was the context in which people in the Gebel Akhdar encorporated sheep and goat herding into their foraging lifestyles, probably obtaining these animals from the Nile Valley. There is no evidence for domestic crop cultivation though, and the formation of the modern Mediterranean-style landscape of cereals, olives, vines etc, until the classical era.
The resourcefulness and adaptability shown by Homo sapiens in North Africa in response to climate change over the past 150,000 years were clearly a key factor in this species’ success, but in documenting a variable history of failed and successful responses TRANS-NAP also emphasises the complexity of that relationship and our need to maximise our understanding of it if the past is to inform the present and future.
The study area was the Gebel Akhdar or ‘Green Mountain’ in Cyrenaica, northeast Libya, a kind of Mediterranean island on the northeast corner of Africa lying between the sea and the Sahara to the east of Benghazi. The project had three main components: (1) the re-excavation of the Haua Fteah cave, where excavations in the 1950s by Dr Charles McBurney (University of Cambridge) revealed a 14-m deep sequence of human occupation estimated by him to span from around 80,000 years ago to recent millennia; (2) new fieldwork across the Gebel Akhdar to investigate climate, environment, and human activity in the landscape to compare with the Haua Fteah data; (3) new studies of McBurney’s archive of finds held in Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. Our key findings in relation to the three research questions above are as follows:
(1) Our main evidence for Modern Human presence in the cave supports the 120,000 date, but there are hints that they were in fact first visiting the cave as early as 150,000 years ago.
(2) Modern Humans coped variably with climate change, but more effectively over time. We show that the Gebel Akhdar was, compared with the rest of North Africa, a relatively stable environment through the major fluctuations in temperature and humidity that have characterized the world’s climate over the past 150,000 years. Even so, Modern Humans with Middle Stone Age stone flake technologies between 120,000 and 40,000 years ago, and their successors with Late Stone Age blade technologies, mainly used the Haua Fteah in warmer and more humid episodes. In periods of aridity the degraded landscapes of the Gebel Akhdar may only have sustained very small populations of humans, sometimes none at all. Nevertheless, around 25,000 years ago people developed a range of behaviours including more effective hunting technologies, plant gathering and storage, and all-year-round landsnail and marine shellfish gathering, that allowed them to thrive despite the development of very arid climates (the global ‘Last Glacial Maximum’).
(3) People maintained the same foraging way of life (hunting, plant and mollusc gathering, fishing) through the opening and more benign millennia of the Holocene, numbers increasing so much that there are indications of resource pressure. A sharp global return to aridity 8200 years ago was the context in which people in the Gebel Akhdar encorporated sheep and goat herding into their foraging lifestyles, probably obtaining these animals from the Nile Valley. There is no evidence for domestic crop cultivation though, and the formation of the modern Mediterranean-style landscape of cereals, olives, vines etc, until the classical era.
The resourcefulness and adaptability shown by Homo sapiens in North Africa in response to climate change over the past 150,000 years were clearly a key factor in this species’ success, but in documenting a variable history of failed and successful responses TRANS-NAP also emphasises the complexity of that relationship and our need to maximise our understanding of it if the past is to inform the present and future.