Jonathan S Reeves

JONATHAN S. REEVES, then a graduate student at George Washington University, Washington, DC, was awarded funding in April 2018 to aid research on ‘A Novel Framework for Documenting Time-averaged Patterns of Hominin Land Use in the Early Pleistocene,’ supervised by Dr. David R. Braun. The funds were used to support both the field and museum work components of this project. This funding facilitated collection and analysis of over 10,000 stone artifacts from 13 different localities in the Koobi Fora formation. This provided a sizeable dataset, through which it was possible to understand time-averaged Early Pleistocene hominin behavior through the lens of stone tool transport. By combining computational and analytical methods designed to characterize stone tool transport within the broader structure of the paleolandscape at Koobi Fora, this project was able to establish relationships between stone tool transport and the environment that were maintained for thousands of years. Specifically, this project was able to identify interesting relationships between stone tool transport patterns and raw material access. Based on the nature of this relationship, this work was able to conclude that Early Pleistocene hominin movement at Koobi Fora may have been substantially influenced by the location of a large river system situated in the center of the Turkana basin during Okote Member times. The project endeavors to refine these conclusions through the on-going analysis of geochemical data that were also collected with Wenner-Gren support.