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The Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa, and in particular its Still Bay and Howiesons Poort lithic traditions, represents a period of dramatic subsistence, cultural, and technological innovation by our species, Homo sapiens. Climate change has frequently been postulated as a primary driver of the appearance of these innovative behaviours, with researchers invoking either climate instability as a reason for the development of buffering mechanisms, or environmentally stable refugia as providing a stable setting for experimentation. Testing these alternative models has proved intractable, however, as existing regional palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental records remain spatially, stratigraphically, and chronologically disconnected from the archaeological record. Here we report high-resolution records of environmental shifts based on stable carbon and oxygen isotopes in ostrich eggshell (OES) fragments, faunal remains, and shellfish assemblages excavated from two key MSA archaeological sequences, Blombos Cave and Klipdrift Shelter. We compare these records with archaeological material remains in the same strata. The results from both sites, spanning the periods 98–73 ka and 72–59 ka, respectively, show significant changes in vegetation, aridity, rainfall seasonality, and sea temperature in the vicinity of the sites during periods of human occupation. While these changes clearly influenced human subsistence strategies, we find that the remarkable cultural and technological innovations seen in the sites cannot be linked directly to climate shifts. Our results demonstrate the need for scale-appropriate, on-site testing of behavioural-environmental links, rather than broader, regional comparisons.

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Ethnographies from southern Africa indicate that patrilineal descent dominates Bantu-language speakers. With great differences in material culture suggesting sociopolitical and economical changes between the earliest farmers that settled in the region in the first millennium AD and those described from ethnographies, it is very likely that descent patterns did not remain static over the course of nearly 2000 years. With major sociopolitical and economical changes, it is not surprising to suggest that other forms of descent also existed amongst farmers of southern Africa in the past. Although it remains ambiguous to establish descent patterns from archaeological remains in the absence of human burials, in this paper I investigate herding practices and the nature of farming as ways to infer descent. The results indicate that at least matrilineal descent was common in southern Africa before the arrival of ancestral Nguni and Sotho-Tswana speakers in the region during the Late Iron Age in the second millennium AD. Other forms of descent were likely present alongside matrilineal descent during the Early and Middle Iron Ages, when widespread evidence for patrilineal descent is absent.Résumé Les tout premiers fermiers du premier millénaire et début du deuxième millénaire A.D. (Âge du Fer Ancien et Moyen) en Afrique australe étaient probablement des communautés matrilinéaires. Cette proposition se base sur une considération des pratiques d'élevage, sur la nature des systèmes agricoles, et la distribution des groupes matrilinéaires contemporains. Cela étant dit, les études ethnographiques indiquent que les groupes de langues bantoues vivant dans la région se distinguent par un mode de filiation patrilinéaire. Je suggère que ce système de descendance est un trait qui s'est développé lors du deuxième millénnaire A.D. (Âge du Fer Récent) en Afrique australe, une période marquée par l'arrivée des groupes ancestraux Nguni et Tswana dans la région. Cette interprétation diffère de celle articulée par Thomas Huffman dans son modèle du 'Central Cattle Pattern', qui avance qu'un mode dominant de filiation patrilinéaire existait déjà en Afrique australe durant le premier millénaire A.D., quand les premières communautés d'agriculteurs ont commencé à occuper la région.

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