Climate frameworks for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in Northwest Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines climate conditions in Northwest Africa for Marine Isotope Stage 4, 3, and 2 (71,000–11,000 years ago) and their impact on the distribution of potential suitable areas on a regional scale. The analysis uses climate simulations to model: 1) the geographical extent and variability of macro-refugia based on ethnographic data; and 2) the frequency of suitable areas based on climate ranges obtained at dated archaeological occupations. The results include the production of maps of MSA and LSA site distribution, and annual precipitation and temperature values for each dated human occupation. The macro-refugia models confirm the persistence and low variability of ecological macro-refugia along the Mediterranean coast but reveal limitations in Central Sahara. Macro-refugia models aligned closely with climate-archaeological models, except for Marine Isotope Stage 4. Despite the general spatio-temporal limitations of climate simulations, our study offers valuable data to be integrated with local environmental proxies. These climate frameworks and insights can contribute to the exploration of past human demography, connectivity and human-environment interactions across different scales of analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".