Contact details

Graham Avery, PhD
Curator:  Quaternary Palaeontology Collections

Natural History Department
Iziko South African Museum
Box 61, Cape Town 8000
South Africa

Phone: +27 (0)21 481 3894
Fax: +27 (0)21 481 3993
e-mail: gavery@iziko.org.za

Past people, animals and environments

South Africa has a wealth of archaeological and palaeoanthropological material, of regional, national and international importance.

My research: “understanding past animal and human life in their environmental contexts in the Western Cape” focuses on the past half million years. The aim is to create greater understanding of how Stone Age people interacted with the animals around them and how they adapted their behaviour to the changing environments and seasons in which they lived over the millennia. Results also provide information on the changing bio-diversity of the animals themselves.

Bird and mammal bones from archaeological and palaeontological sites provide the primary source of the information I seek. Interpreting the bones can be complex, however, since they may have been brought to a site by any one (or more) of a range of mammalian carnivores and scavengers and birds of prey. To help unravel such puzzles, the ancient material is compared with samples of bones I have collected from modern hyaenas, jackals and porcupines and the nests of eagles and hawks. This type of study, known as taphonomy, helps us to identify the accumulator of the ancient material and to gain a clearer picture, for instance, of whether the samples we are studying resulted from human behaviour or that of another accumulator or accumulators.

Another project, which has thrown light on the time of year when ancient people exploited different seabird species, is the monthly survey of beached seabirds and mammals I have conducted on a 15 km stretch of beach in the West Coast National Park for over  29 years. It is one of the most extensive long-term data sets for birds in South Africa and is one of the best designed surveys of its kind in the world. The surveys allow us to monitor mortality in response to biological and physical oceanic conditions and human interventions.

I currently work with colleagues from Stanford University, the University of California Davis and the University of Cape Town.