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Interannual variability of African rainfall impacts local and global communities, but its past behavior and response in future climate projections are poorly understood. This is primarily due to short instrumental records and a lack of long high-resolution palaeoclimate proxy records. Here we present an annually resolved 91,000 year Early Pleistocene record of hydroclimate from the early homininbearing Makapansgat Valley, South Africa. Changes in speleothem annual band thickness are dominated by precession over four consecutive orbital cycles with strong millennial-scale periodicity. The frequency of interannual variability (2.0–6.5 yr oscillations) does not change systematically, yet its amplitude is modulated by the orbital forcing. These long-term characteristics of interannual variability are reproduced with transient climate model simulations of water balance for South Africa from the Late Pleistocene to Recent. Based on these results, we suggest that the frequency of interannual variations in southern African rainfall is likely to be stable under anthropogenic warming, but that the size of year-to-year variations may increase. We see an orbitally forced increase in the amplitude of interannual climate variability between 1.8 Ma and 1.7 Ma coincident with the first evidence for the Acheulean stone tool technology.

Using a conventional, off-the-shelf digital single lens reflex camera and flashes, we were able to create high-resolution panoramas of stratigraphic profiles ranging from a single meter to over 5 m in both height and width at the Middle Stone Age site of PP5-6 at Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, South Africa. The final photomosaics are isoluminant, rectilinear, and have a pixel spatial resolution of 1 mm. Furthermore, we systematically color-corrected the raw imagery. This process standardized the colors seen across the photomosaics while also creating reproducible and meaningful colors for relative colorimetric analysis between photomosiacs. Here, we provide a detailed discussion about the creation and application of our photomosaics. In the first part of the paper, we examine the specific characteristics of modern digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras and lenses that were important to us in developing our methodology. We also provide a detailed discussion about how to reproduce the methodology in the field and to post-process the imagery. In the final section of the paper, we give several examples to show how we apply our photomosaics within an empirical 3D GIS database. These examples are provided to show how photographic data can be integrated with other digitally-captured data and used to study the relationships between the stratigraphic features seen in the photomosaics and the 3D distribution of excavated archaeological piece-plots, geochronological samples, and other kinds of geological samples.

We report the first uranium-series age estimates for rock art in China. Calcite bracketing a paint layer was used to constrain the age of a naturalistic outline hunter-gatherer painting in the Jinsha River area of northwest Yunnan Province (southwest China). The rock paintings in this region are unique in style and content compared with other bodies of rock art in China, which are dominated by Neolithic subject matter. The minimum and maximum ages were determined using isochron techniques on multiple samples of calcite from above and beneath the paint layer. A large painted deer head was dated to between 5738 and 2050 years. This painting and underlying flowstone are superimposed on older paintings that suggest the older paintings are at least 3400 years old, if not older than 5738 years. The results indicate for the first time that Jinsha River rock art is older than other forms of rock art in the region and show that rock art likely extends back to at least the transition from the Palaeolithic to Neolithic in this part of China.

Pinnacle Point Cave 13B (PP13B) has provided the earliest archaeological evidence for the exploitation of marine shellfish, along with very early evidence for use and modification of pigments and the production of bladelets, all dated to approximately 164 ka (Marean et al., 2007). This makes PP13B a key site in studies of the origins of modern humans, one of a handful of sites in Africa dating to Marine Isotope Stage 6 (MIS 6), and the only site on the coast of South Africa with human occupation confidently dated to MIS 6. Along with this MIS 6 occupation there are rich archaeological sediments dated to MIS 5, and together these sediments are differentially preserved in three different areas of the cave. The sediments represent a complex palimpsest of geogenic, biogenic, and anthropogenic input and alteration that are described and interpreted through the use of a variety of macrostratigraphic, micromorphologic, and geochemical techniques. Three independent dating techniques allow us to constrain the age range of these sediments and together provide the stratigraphic context for the analyses of the material that follow in this special issue.