Chapter 9 Late Quaternary Environmental Change and Human Occupation of the Southern African Interior Sallie L. Burrough Abstract The interior southern African basin (Kalahari) is a remarkable region, with a complex and dynamic environ- mental history and a long record of utilization by human populations during the late Quaternary. Paleoenvironmental reconstructions are beginning to provide a spatially detailed record of landscape and hydrological dynamics in the Kalahari, with a strong chronometric underpinning for records of environmental extremes. Theories concerning the distribution of early people in the landscape place great importance on the temporal dynamics of water availability, and may be particularly relevant in the Kalahari where there is significant evidence of hydrologic/climatic-driven land- scape change. High amplitude environmental variability during MIS 6-2 is evidenced by periods of dune building within currently stabilized dunefields and the intermittent existence of large lacustrine systems such as Megalake Makgadikgadi that remain all but ephemerally dry under present-day conditions. That the wider Kalahari was, at times, a key resource for Stone Age populations is evident from the extensive occurrence of stone tools, most notably in association with the fluvial networks and lake basins of the Okavango-Chobe-Zambezi system. Today, these riparian corridors link the semiarid desert region to the southern subtropics and, in the past, drove environmental change in the Kalahari, potentially impacting the occupation and dispersal of hominins within the interior southern African basin. Keywords Kalahari Á Paleohydrology Á Paleoenviron- mental change Á Dunes Á Lakes Á Stone Age archaeology Introduction Attempts to draw correlations between climatic events and trends and the African Stone Age archeological record are increasingly prevalent within the Quaternary literature (e.g., Scholz et al. 2007; Jacobs and Roberts 2009; Stager et al. 2011). These attempt to establish the causes of both behav- ioral changes by, and the geographical distribution of, early modern humans. Environmental contributions to hominin dispersal out of Africa are a particular point of interest (Maslin and Christiensen 2007). The influence of aridity on human resource use and mobility is often emphasized, though the spatial complexities of both landscape and climate dynamics are frequently overlooked (Thomas and Burrough 2012). Within southern Africa, such human environment asso- ciations have been strongly focused on Middle Stone Age (MSA) technological change within coastal sites (e.g., Jacobs et al. 2008). Significantly less is known about early people in the southern African interior, despite the genetic and archeological evidence for sustained periods of regional occupation during the late Quaternary. The deficit of research is largely a consequence of the nature of the envi- ronment of the interior, which, by consequence of its geo- logical history, offers few closed sites and, due to relatively arid conditions, preserves little organic material. Until recently, dif ficulties of paleoenvironmental reconstruction in present-day deserts have hindered our understanding of their long-term landscape evolution and environmental change. Technological and methodological advances, however, are now facilitating the development of robust records of Qua- ternary landscape dynamics: in the Kalahari, these records reveal environmental changes of significant amplitude and frequency during MIS 6-2. This chapter examines the potential consequences of this dynamic environmental his- tory for early humans, the evidence for which is abundant but remains poorly investigated. Critically, however, no consideration of the dynamics of past climatic systems can be effectively conducted without assessing the nature and S.L. Burrough (&) School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK e-mail: sallie.burrough@ouce.ox.ac.uk © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Sacha C. Jones and Brian A. Stewart (eds.), Africa from MIS 6-2: Population Dynamics and Paleoenvironments, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology, DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-7520-5_9 161