LAUSR

Subsistence and mobility shifts are the most well-known hunter-gatherer responses to climatic oscillations of the late Pleistocene and Holocene in northern and eastern Africa. Over the last 20,000 years, climatic fluctuations had profound environmental effects, transforming deserts of the hyper-arid Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ~26,000e15,000 BP) into well-watered grasslands during the African Humid Period (AHP; ~11,000 5,000 BP) (Haynes, 2001; Watrin et al., 2009). The reasons for changes in climate are better understood, however, than are the nature and scale of human responses. To date, forager approaches to climatic and environmental reorganization have been more intensively studied in the Sahara and better-watered grasslands to the south than in semi-arid regions of eastern Africa. During the hyper-arid period, much of the Sahara was abandoned as hunter-gatherers retreated to the Libyan coast, Nile, and Sahel where rivers and lakes offered key refuge areas from extreme aridity (Barich and Garcea, 2008; Garcea, 2013). Lowermobility and a focus on aquatic resources can be seen later among fisher-huntergatherers of the Sahara, Nile, and eastern Africa as rainfall increased in the humid early Holocene (Sutton, 1977; Gautier and Van Neer,