Browsing by Author "Ryano, Kokeli P."

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    Coastal adaptation at Klasies River main site during MIS 5c-d (93,000–110,000 years ago) from a southern Cape perspective
    (Tylor & Francis, 2020) Brenne, Mareike J.; Ryano, Kokeli P.; Wurz, Sarah
    Coastal adaptation in the southern Cape can be seen around 100,000 years ago in sites such as Klasies River, Blombos Cave, and Pinnacle Point, representing the occupation of a new niche by early Homo sapiens in this region. However, there is relatively little information available on the details involved in fully entering this niche from a regional perspective. At Klasies River main site (KRM), evidence for coastal adaptation occurs in early MIS 5. Here we explore the variability in shellfish exploitation and how it links to lithic technology, in deposits dating to ca. 93,000–110,000 years ago. We compare this to broadly contemporaneous assemblages from Pinnacle Point 13B and Blombos Cave. The lithics in all the layers from KRM investigated here have been produced according to a unidirectional reduction system, but the lowermost assemblages contain more small debitage and bladelets, and no tools. These 110 ka layers are associated with a lower shellfish density and more diverse range of shellfish species and a higher lithic density. This points to a lesser dependency on shellfish coinciding with higher mobility in the lower layers. For the younger MIS 5c layers higher volumes of shellfish and the dominance of certain species is evident. The lithics show that all the stages of the reduction system are present and tools are produced and used on-site. This indicates a residential (provisioning of place) occupational strategy. Compared to other sites on the southern Cape coast, KRM shows exceptionally high densities in lithic artifacts while the shellfish densities are comparable to the Blombos M3 phase. The results of the analysis of the shellfish and lithic densities, technological patterns, and shellfish species exploited at Klasies River, Blombos Cave and Pinnacle Point, demonstrate a more diverse onset and expression of coastal adaptation during early MIS 5 than apparent from current literature.
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    Shellfish exploitation during the Oakhurst at Klipdrift Cave, southern Cape, South Africa
    (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2019) Ryano, Kokeli P.; Niekerk, Karen L. van; Wurz, Sarah; Henshilwood, Christopher S.
    Klipdrift Cave in the southern Cape, South Africa, provides new insights into shellfish harvesting during the Later Stone Age (14-9 ka) period associated with the Oakhurst techno-complex. Two shellfish species dominate: Turbo sarmaticus and Dinoplax gigas. An abrupt shift in the relative frequencies of these species occurs in the middle of the sequence with T. sarmaticus almost completely replacing D. gigas. The shift in dominant species is likely due to environmental change caused by fluctuating sea levels rather than change in sea surface temperatures. The shellfish assemblage shows that local coastal habitats at Klipdrift Cave were somewhat different from those of contemporaneous sites in the southern Cape. Although the shellfish specimens are smaller at Klipdrift Cave than those from Middle Stone Age localities such as Blombos Cave, there is no robust indication that larger human populations at Klipdrift Cave during the Oakhurst period might have caused this change in size. Environmental or ecological factors could have restricted shellfish growth rates as some experimental works have suggested, but this possibility also remains to be further explored.