Lucy Jasmine Timbrell

LUCY TIMBRELL, then a graduate student at University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom, was awarded a grant in April 2021 to aid research on “Structured African Metapopulations: Building a Climatically-driven Model of Early Human Interaction Using a Multiproxy Approach,” supervised by Dr. Matt Grove. The emergence of our species, Homo sapien s, has been increasingly associated with the Middle Stone Age (MSA), which appears around 300,000 years ago across Africa. Coalescence and fragmentation of populations across Africa, mediated by asynchronous climatic changes through time and space, was argued to have generated some of the complex patterns of diversity observed in MSA archaeology. Lithic points have been suggested to be the single artefact class most likely to be a vector for social information during the MSA, and thus understanding their variability both within and between regions is imperative for understanding the extent and structure of MSA population networks. This project uses specialist shape analysis techniques to establish how point typologies varied through space, time, and in relation to environments, using a large sample of MSA points from across Africa. Despite the clear potential for MSA points as a proxy for social interactions, few studies have attempted to conduct inter-regional analyses to test population structure during the African MSA.