Stable isotope evidence of late MIS 3 to middle Holocene palaeoenvironments from Sehonghong Rockshelter, eastern Lesotho
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Evidence for human occupation of southern Africa's high‐altitude Maloti–Drakensberg Mountains is surprisingly common in the last glacial, yet the attraction of this relatively severe, cold region for hunter‐foragers remains unclear. Sehonghong Rockshelter (1870 m asl), in the eastern Lesotho Highlands, provides evidence for human occupation spanning Marine Isotope Stage 3 through the late Holocene. Excellent organic preservation provides opportunities for establishing multiple palaeoenvironmental proxy records to address this conundrum. In high‐altitude zones, the proportions of C 3 and C 4 plants archived in soil organic matter and faunal enamel provide sensitive indicators of past temperature shifts. We first extended the radiocarbon chronology to ca. 35 ka using ABOx‐SC radiocarbon dates of charcoals. Next we analysed stable isotopes in soil organic matter from the sedimentary sequence, and in faunal tooth enamel from the newly dated lower strata. The results suggest, predictably, that C 3 vegetation and low temperatures prevailed until early warming at ca. 15 ka, with a series of sharp shifts thereafter. Low values for δ 13 C and δ 18 O in faunal enamel ca. 33 ka suggest a negative temperature excursion at this time, and potentially greater precipitation as snowfall in the highlands compared with lower altitudes.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it