Late Holocene Climate Forcing and Cultural Change in the Tichitt Tradition of West Africa

Understanding past interactions between humans and the ecosystems in which they lived is vital to coping with the ongoing climate change. The integration of palaeoecological proxies with archaeological and archaeobotanical records to reconstruct the evolution of past civilisations in West Africa is not very common. This limits our understanding of how the Tichitt culture of West Africa, alongside ecologies, evolved through time. Here, we re-analysed six published pollen datasets from the Sahel region and compared the results with four independent palaeoenvironmental proxies, as well as archaeological and archaeobotanical records, to observe whether the social evolution of the Tichitt culture was influenced by past climate variability. Our results show that changes involved a complex socio-ecological system, not just climate or society. The migration and arrival of the Tichitt agro-pastoral system in the Aoukar basin of Mauritania were closely connected to the final phases of the African Humid Period. The shifts in cultural tool production from early to late Tichitt phases (4.2–2.5 ka BP) reflect changes in regional environmental conditions. The fact that the culture withstood the environmental shock that occurred between 3.4 and 3.0 ka BP reveals that the Tichitt culture was complex, sophisticated, and characterised by a durable, regionally integrated system of production, exchange, and settlement planning. Severe and prolonged aridification towards 2.5 ka BP weakened and led to the dispersal of populations across the subregion. Our results provide an understanding of how climate variability and the trajectory of human technological innovations are closely related: the former served as the dominant structural constraint, while the latter served as a necessary adaptive strategy that enabled societies to outlive sudden and brief environmental shocks.