Projects per year
Abstract
Between 22ka and 9ka ago, after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and during the transition to the Holocene, mobile hunter-gatherer populations, differentiated by their stone tool assemblages, periodically dispersed and contracted across Europe. It is well understood that climate played an important role in human distributions and population sizes during the post-LGM Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, but the question remains as to whether increasing population sizes drove early human dispersal. Here, using a spatiotemporal species distribution model to infer the fundamental and potential human climatic niche space of Late Upper Paleolithic, Final Paleolithic and Early Mesolithic Europe, and hypotheses derived from the Ideal Distribution Model, we test i) how changes in climate affected the size and extent of the projected potential human niche space, ii) for effects of changes in size of projected potential niche on regional human population sizes, iii) whether increasing human population sizes drove human dispersal into less climatically suitable habitats, and iv) whether populations associated with different high-order material culture groupings (macro-level technocomplexes) occupied different climatic spaces. We find that changes in climate correlate strongly with the size and extent of the projected potential human niche space, that increases in the projected human niche space correlate with increases in human population, that human population size is just beginning to become large enough to influence land use and dispersal patterns at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, and that archaeological technocultural entities overlap in their fundamental climatic niche space. This overlap implies that changing tools forms cannot readily been seen as reflecting adaptations to changing climates.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 108956 |
Journal | Quaternary Science Reviews |
Volume | 344 |
ISSN | 0277-3791 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Nov 2024 |
Keywords
- Behavioral ecology
- Climate change
- Data analysis
- Data treatment
- Europe
- Hunter-gatherers
- Ideal distribution model
- Lithic technology
- Paleogeography
- Paleolithic
- Pleistocene
- Species distribution modeling
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CLIOARCH: CLIOdynamic ARCHaeology: Computational approaches to Final Palaeolithic/earliest Mesolithic archaeology and climate change
Riede, F. (PI)
01/09/2019 → 31/08/2025
Project: Research