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Abstract. The Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR) ofSouth Africa is a biodiversity hotspot of global significance, and itsarcheological record has substantially contributed to the understanding ofmodern human origins. For both reasons, the climate and vegetation historyof southwestern South Africa is of interest to numerous fields. Currentlyknown paleoenvironmental records cover the Holocene, the lastglacial–interglacial transition and parts of the last glaciation but do notencompass a full glacial–interglacial cycle. To obtain a continuousvegetation record of the last Pleistocene glacial–interglacial cycles, westudied pollen, spores and micro-charcoal of deep-sea sediments from IODPSite U1479 retrieved from SW of Cape Town. We compare our palynologicalresults of the Pleistocene with previously published results of Pliocenematerial from the same site. We find that the vegetation of the GCFR, inparticular fynbos and afrotemperate forest, responds to precessional forcingof climate. The micro-charcoal record confirms the importance of fires inthe fynbos vegetation. Ericaceae-rich and Asteraceae-rich types of fynboscould extend on the western part of the Paleo-Agulhas Plain (PAP), whichemerged during periods of low sea level of the Pleistocene. 

Despite advances in our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the Paleolithic record, we know remarkably little about the evolutionary and ecological consequences of changes in human behavior. Recent inquiries suggest that human evolution reflects a long history of interconnections between the behavior of humans and their surrounding ecosystems (e.g., niche construction). Developing expectations to identify such phenomena is remarkably difficult because it requires understanding the multi‐generational impacts of changes in behavior. These long‐term dynamics require insights into the emergent phenomena that alter selective pressures over longer time periods which are not possible to observe, and are also not intuitive based on observations derived from ethnographic time scales. Generative models show promise for probing these potentially unexpected consequences of human‐environment interaction. Changes in the uses of landscapes may have long term implications for the environments that hominins occupied. We explore other potential proxies of behavior and examine how modeling may provide expectations for a variety of phenomena.