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Although climate change is considered to have been a large-scale driver of African human evolution, landscape-scale shifts in ecological resources that may have shaped novel hominin adaptations are rarely investigated. We use well-dated, high-resolution, drill-core datasets to understand ecological dynamics associated with a major adaptive transition in the archeological record ~24 km from the coring site. Outcrops preserve evidence of the replacement of Acheulean by Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological, cognitive, and social innovations between 500 and 300 thousand years (ka) ago, contemporaneous with large-scale taxonomic and adaptive turnover in mammal herbivores. Beginning ~400 ka ago, tectonic, hydrological, and ecological changes combined to disrupt a relatively stable resource base, prompting fluctuations of increasing magnitude in freshwater availability, grassland communities, and woody plant cover. Interaction of these factors offers a resource-oriented hypothesis for the evolutionary success of MSA adaptations, which likely contributed to the ecological flexibility typical of Homo sapiens foragers.

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Actualistic studies of the distribution, formation, and taphonomy of vertebrate and invertebrate traces at saline (60-100 g l -1 TDS), alkaline (pH: 10.5) Lake Bogoria in the Kenya Rift Valley have revealed a diverse trace assemblage in the lake-margin sediments. Although hypersaline lakes like Lake Bogoria restrict lacustrine faunal diversity, local marginal subenvironments, including hot springs and ephemeral streams, provide favorable areas for the activities of many species of insects, mammals, birds, and reptiles. Several factors, including sediment texture and moisture content, substrate cohesion, substrate consolidation, and the presence of a food source (i.e., vegetation, microbes, animal waste, flamingo carcasses), control the distribution of traces at Lake Bogoria by influencing the behavior of vertebrates (e.g., "dirt bathing" and nest building) and invertebrates (mainly feeding and locomotion). The distribution of vertebrate traces is also controlled by the proximity to fresh water, but the relationship between invertebrate trace formation and porewater salinity is less clear.Many characteristic features of closed-basin lakes, including frequent changes in lake level and shoreline position, the presence of thermal springs, and evolved fluid compositions resulting from evaporation, can have direct impacts on trace taphonomy. Notable taphonomic factors include efflorescent salt crystallization, which may temporarily cement substrates or destroy traces during crystal growth in the capillary fringe; substrate wetting and drying, which can induce soil crusting and the shrinking and swelling of smectitic clays, which in turn can modify trace morphology; and the presence of benthic microbial mats and biofilms, which can temporarily stabilize substrates or contribute to their early cementation by mediating carbonate precipitation. Semiarid environments, such as the Kenya Rift, are favorable settings for the early cementation of substrates by carbonates (e.g., calcite), and, during prolonged, stable dry phases, the preservation of trace fossils and their substrates by zeolites and other minerals (Mn-and Fe-oxyhydroxides).