Where We Became Human: Mapping the Middle Stone Age on the African South Coast

Professor Janet Franklin (Campanile Endowed Chair) and Dr M. Brooke Rose (postdoctoral scholar) visiting archaeological sites at Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, South Africa, July 14, 2025.

Research sponsored by the National Science Foundation is providing temporally detailed landscape context to Middle Stone Age human coastal occupations in South Africa by comparing the results of archaeological data to models of terrestrial and coastal habitat landscapes over the last 400,000 years. This remarkable work is revealing the physical geography of the resource landscape where our foraging ancestors became behaviorally modern humans with hyper-prosociality, advanced cognition and social learning. We have submitted a manuscript describing our model of the changes in the natural vegetation (in 1000-yr time intervals) as the climate shifted from glacial to interglacial conditions in the Pleistocene that will be published next year.  We conducted field work in July 2026 and the following presentations have featured this highly interdisciplinary work:

Franklin, J., Where We Became Human: Mapping the Middle Stone Age on the African South Coast, Distinguished Lecture, Endowed John Borchert Lecture and Geographies of Environmental Futures Series, 100^th anniversary celebration, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, Nov 20, 2025

M. B. Rose, R. M. Cowling, J. Franklin..., Mapping 424,000 years of vegetation change in the Cape south coast (South Africa) Implications for early modern humans Paleoanthropology Society Meeting, Denver, CO, 17-18 Mar 2026