Congratulations to U-M alum Kyra Pazan, assistant professor of anthropology at California State University, Stanislaus, and her colleagues, including UMMAA curator Brian Stewart and U-M alum Kristin Cimmerer, PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga: the team found evidence that the rockshelter they excavated in Lesotho, Likonong, was occupied by humans about 242,000 years ago—the earliest sustained human occupation in the region.
In addition to the age of the site, what makes the finding significant is the setting: in the highlands, at a higher altitude, where people would have faced harsh winters. As Pazan explained in a Michigan News article: “[I]t takes a little extra adaptive ability to live in a place that gets so cold and has these really dramatic swings in resource availability.”
Read about the findings and the site in the Michigan News article by Morgan Sherburne, which was also included in this month’s “Inside LSA” U-M newsletter: To settle harsh environments, early humans needed friends.
Read the open access article, Evolving entanglements with highland southern Africa: Site formation, initial chronology, and occupational pulsing during the Middle Pleistocene at Likonong Shelter, Lesotho, by Pazan et al., in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, on the Springer Nature website.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-026-02459-9
Photo: Kristin Cimmerer of University of Toronto, Mississauga, and Kyra Pazan of California State University, Stanislaus, excavate Likonong Rock Shelter in the mountains of Lesotho. Here, an international team of archaeologists from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Lesotho have identified the earliest sustained human occupation in Highland Southern Africa. Image credit: Kyra Pazan, California State University, Stanislaus.
