Abstract

Northwest Africa has emerged as a region essential to the investigation of human origins, with an accelerating rate of research over the past 20 years that continues to transform how we understand the evolution and identity of our species, Homo sapiens. Understanding the past environments of Northwest Africa (including climate, vegetation, and faunal communities) is a critical component of human origins research, as these data inform key questions such as 1) the degree to which the Sahara Desert acted as a barrier to hominin movements, and 2) the environmental context of innovative human behaviors in NW Africa such as the use of personal ornaments. This talk presents first results from an active paleoenvironmental research program that advances the state of knowledge on both of these topics through plant biomarker and stable isotope analyses, methods that have been rarely applied in the region to date. Using stratified archaeological cave deposits from Morocco as paleoenvironmental archives, this work offers a window into the local expression of “Green Sahara” intervals in Morocco and the conditions under which marine shell (Tritia sp.) ornaments first came into use.

Speaker Bio

Kayla Worthey is a Junior Fellow in the American School of Prehistoric Research (ASPR), Harvard University, who received her PhD from the University of Arizona in 2024. She is an archaeologist and biogeochemist studying the Late Pleistocene terrestrial environments of North Africa and their impacts on humans during the Middle and Later Stone Ages. In her research she principally uses stable isotope-based proxies from organic biomarkers and faunal remains sampled from archaeological sites, and conducts fieldwork in Morocco.