Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sawchuk, Elizabeth Anne

Titel

Social Change and Human Population Movements: Dental Morphology in Holocene Eastern Africa

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Millions of Eastern Africans are pastoralists, yet the origins of mobile herding in this region are unclear. Global climate change at the end of the African Humid Period pushed humans and their livestock out of desiccating areas of the Sahara, Sahel, and/or Ethiopian Rift. Herding subsequently entered Eastern Africa through the Turkana Basin, where the earliest domesticated animals coincide with the construction of megalithic “pillar sites” between 5200-4200 BP. The appearance of monumentality, along with new ceramic and lithic technologies, is used to argue that the first herders were migrants. Other lines of evidence support diffusion and local adoption. Excavations at three pillar sites have revealed dense cemeteries with zoomorphic artifacts and goat remains, suggesting those interred engaged in herding. This new skeletal sample can be compared to earlier foragers and later pastoralists to determine whether the arrival of herding technologies is associated with a population shift. Tooth size and morphology are often used to study population relationships in the past because they are highly heritable, minimally impacted by natural selection, and preserve well in archaeological contexts. To test the migration hypothesis, dental metric and non-metric traits are compared between the pillar sites (n=25 dentitions) and archaeological skeletons from Holocene Later Stone Age (n=40), early herder (n=53), and Pastoral Neolithic (n=91) sites from Kenya and Tanzania. The results suggest that the transition to food production in Eastern Africa did not involve population replacement. Biological affinity among these archaeological samples indicates that herding likely spread through small-scale population movements with gene flow between herders and foragers. However, there are significant differences between these pre-Iron Age Eastern Africans and contemporary North, sub-Saharan, and Southern Africans, suggesting diachronic changes in African dental complexes. Recent Africans may therefore be poor proxies for genetic relationships in antiquity, particularly in high contact zones like Eastern Africa.