The abundance of eland, buffalo, and wild pigs in Middle and Later Stone Age sites.

Klein (1979, 1994) reported a contrast in ungulate species frequencies between the Middle Stone Age (MSA) layers of Klasies River Main (KRM) and the Later Stone Age (LSA) layers of nearby Nelson Bay Cave (NBC), South Africa. Early European travelers noted that the distinctive subtropical broadleaf forest surrounding both coastal sites housed exceptional numbers of buffalo (Syncerus caffer) and bushpig (Potamochoerus larvatus; Skead, 1980). They failed to mention eland, suggesting that eland were locally absent or rare, in keeping with this species’ tendency to avoid forest (Skinner and Chimimba, 2005). At both KRM and NBC the deposits formed under similar climatic conditions (Last Interglacial and the Holocene Interglacial, respectively), yet only the NBC LSA fauna anticipated the historic forest fauna in the abundance of buffalo and bushpig and the rarity of eland. The unanticipated abundance of eland in the KRM MSA fauna led Klein to suggest that the KRM people were less competent hunters. Unlike buffalo and bushpig, which commonly counterattack predators, eland tend to flee, and associated artifacts suggest that only the NBC LSA hunters had projectile weapons that would have allowed them to hunt dangerous species from a relatively safe distance. The NBC LSA people could then have obtained buffalo and bushpig more in proportion to their live abundance. Lacking projectiles, the KRM MSA people would have tended to capture more of the less threatening eland, which they could have driven over nearby cliffs. Driving could explain why the KRM eland were mainly prime-age adults, whereas the KRM buffalo were mostly very young or old individuals, as would be expected if the hunters focused on the most vulnerable buffalo or acquired them by scavenging. Conceivably, culture was irrelevant, and topography or some other strictly local factor explains the abundance of eland at KRM. However, a test for this would require additional fossiliferous MSA sites in the same forest, and KRM remains the only one. The KRM/ NBC contrast is roughly replicated between Die Kelders Cave 1 (DK1) and nearby Byneskranskop 1 (BNK1), where eland dominate buffalo and bushpig in the DK1MSA layers and buffalo and bushpig dominate eland in the BNK1 LSA layers (Klein and Cruz-Uribe, 1996). However, DK1 and BNK1 are located 400e500 km east of KRM and NBC (Fig. 1) in a scrub/thicket mosaic where buffalo and bushpig may not have outnumbered eland historically. In addition, the DK1 and BNK1 faunas accumulated under differing climatic conditions (mainly glacial and interglacial, respectively), and a paleoenvironmental difference could thus explain the faunal contrast. The DK1/BNK1 contrast underscores the need to control for environment before invoking cultural or human behavioral explanations for differences between sites. With Klein’s interpretation of the KRM/NBC contrast in mind, Faith (2008) undertook log-transformed regressions of eland and buffaloþ pig abundance on the total number of ungulates in 95 LSA samples and 27 MSA samples from Lesotho and South Africa. He concluded that “eland, buffalo, andwild pig are equally abundant in the MSA and LSA” (p. 24) and therefore that MSA and LSA people were equally adept hunters. We show below that Faith’s results are based on inappropriate use of regression, but even if we were to accept them, they do not show that MSA and LSA people were behaving in the same way. Eland, buffalo, and wild pigs could be equally abundant, on average, in MSA and LSA sites only if their live proportions (relative numbers) were usually the same nearby, or if MSA and LSA people, faced with different proportions at different times and places, managed to equalize the proportions in their sites. Faith’s result could mean, for example, that buffalo and pigs were generally rarer near LSA sites but that more effective LSA hunting overcame the environmental difference. Our point here is not to argue that MSA people were inferior hunters. That issue remains debatable. Rather, we are concerned with how to appropriately use the zooarchaeological record to * Corresponding author. E-mail address: rklein@stanford.edu (R.G. Klein).