Prehistoric occupation of deserts - Climatic Change in Deserts - page 302

17
Prehistoric occupation of deserts
Ancient life in deserts was in some ways distinctively different from
that observed in historic adaptation to arid lands, reinforcing at a global
level the inference that historically observed desert societies and
adaptations are relatively recent consequences of evolving systems.
Peter Veth, Mike Smith & Peter Hiscock
Desert Peoples: Archaeological Perspectives (2005, pp. 79-80)
Entrer dans l'ere neolithique, c'est penetrer dans un monde en mutation
capitale, sans jamais voir disparaıtre un certain savoir-faire parfois
rattache a un certain savoir-vivre.
To enter the Neolithic era is to penetrate a world undergoing major
change while retaining a certain element of acquired know-how linked
on occasion to an enhanced appreciation of ways of living.
Lionel Balout & Colette Roubet
The Sahara and the Nile (1980, p. 169)
17.1 Introduction
In Chapter 16 we considered howplant and animal fossils have been used to reconstruct
past changes in climate in deserts and desert margins. In this chapter, we focus on a
very particular set of fossils - those of our prehistoric ancestors ( Figure 17.1 ). This
record is unique for two main reasons: we cannot only analyse the fossil evidence
to see what it can tell us about past human behaviour such as gait and diet, but we
can also examine the stone tools and other remains of prehistoric human activity
to bolster the often sparse evidence that can be derived from the fossil bones. In
addition, we can use the insights gained from recent advances in molecular biology to
help reconstruct the pattern and timing of prehistoric human migrations (Cooper and
Stringer, 2013 ). We therefore need to study both stone tools and hominid fossils, as
well as any other associated material. Following Brunet et al. ( 2005 , p. 753), the term
hominid is used here to refer to 'all taxa that are closer to humans than chimpanzees'
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