Teasing apart the mechanisms behind prehistoric cultural adaptions: an interdisciplinary approach combing paleoclimatology, ecology, and archaeology
Résumé
The use of culture as a means of adaptation allows human populations to adjust quickly to changes in the environmental frameworks within which they operate. Therefore, an important variable to take into account when examining past hunter‐gatherer cultural adaptations, especially across periods marked by pronounced climatic variability, is the ecological niche (i.e., the suite of environmental conditions) exploited by an archaeological population. Rarely have such methods been applied to the Neanderthal and earlier hominin archaeological records (Banks et al. 2021; Benito et al. 2017; Gibert et al. 2022), and the relationships between Neanderthal and earlier hominin cultural adaptive variability and ecological niche dynamics in the context of late Pleistocene climatic variability remains largely unexplored. We present the details of Western European Neanderthal niche dynamics between MIS 5a–4 and demonstrate that lithic technological changes during in MIS 4 were the result of territorially constrained populations using cultural innovations to respond to changing environments. We also present the ANR NEANDROOTS project, which employs this interdisciplinary approach in an effort to understand cultural adaptions during MIS 11 and the mechanisms that led to later Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal stone tool industries.
Domaines
Archéologie et PréhistoireOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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