This volume provides an overview of paleoenvironmental reconstructions of hundreds of different sites, using dozens of different analytical methods. The intention of this chapter is to bring together some of those data relevant to the sites of southern Africa to highlight future research directions.

Early hominins were not limited to particular sites or localities in a paleontological or archeological sense, but lived and died in complex and dynamic landscapes and ecosystems of which we have partial, incomplete records. The fossil evidence of early hominin paleoenvironments is always limited, sometimes providing brief snapshots of small areas, other times affording very coarse chronological and spatial resolution over large distances. Taphonomic conditions typically vary within any one locality over time, and from one locality to another. And yet, it is these partial and biased records that we use to build an understanding of the forces that have shaped our evolution.

Sterkfontein, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site (Gauteng Province, South Africa), lies on a low hill overlooking the Blaaubank River, close to numerous other fossil-rich hominin-bearing sites (including Swartkrans, Kromdraai, Drimolen, Malapa, and Cooper’s Cave; Figure 10.1). Lying within the narrow pre-Cambrian Malmani dolomite formation, the caves contain deposits that record the paleoenvironmental context related to hominin evolution from roughly 3.7 million years until the Upper Pleistocene, as well as the hominins themselves (Broom, 1936; Brain, 1981; Kuman, 1994a; Reynolds and Kibii, 2011; Granger et al., 2015; Val and Stratford, 2015; Stratford, 2017).

In a book on African paleoecology and human evolution, it is important to define several key themes, including biomes, vegetation formations and associations, as well as plant physiognomy. We first define these terms, before examining the sources of data employed in paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Finally, we provide an overview of the approaches used to understand past habitats, which underpin the chapters on the specific sites which make use of these approaches to refine our understanding of African paleoenvironments and the place of hominins within them.

In this chapter we review the evidence for hominid paleoenvironments in tropical Africa from the late Miocene to the early Pleistocene (Figure 15.1). Here we use the term hominid to refer to the family of the great apes and humans (family Hominidae, superfamily Hominoidea), and hominin (tribe Hominini) for the clade on the human side of the divergence from our last common ancestor with the genus Pan (Figure 15.2). This review is intended to complement the other regional reviews (northern African and southern African sites, see Chapters 6 and 36, respectively) and the overviews of Miocene to Holocene faunas (late Miocene and early Pliocene by Doman and Goble Early, this volume and Middle Pleistocene to Holocene by Faith, Chapter 5). The methods used in the reconstruction of past environments, e.g., stable isotopes, ecomorphology, community paleoecology, are summarized in Andrews and colleagues (Chapter 2).