Matching Items (2)
Description
This study focuses on two broad questions concerning how variability in lithic technology relates to the biological and cultural evolution of humans. First, when did cumulative culture evolve? To address this question, the complexity of lithic technologies spanning hominin evolution was compared to the complexity of non-human primate technologies, and complexity achievable through randomized flaking behaviors in order to identify when lithic technologies developed that were more complex than technologies that may not require cumulative culture. The results suggest that a modern-human like capacity for cumulative culture was likely shared with the last common ancestor between modern humans and Neanderthals, and likely was developing prior to 2 mya. The second question focuses on whether one can reliably detect migrations and population expansions in the Pleistocene through lithic technology alone. To address this question, spatio-temporal variability in technology was compared to variability across cultural traits that do retain evidence of history: phonemes in human languages. Then, variability across technologies was measured in regions where population and migration histories are known a priori: these data include carefully selected assemblages relating to the migrations of Ancestral Puebloan people from Northern Arizona into the river valleys of Central and Southern Arizona, as well as assemblages relating to the expansion of Austronesian speakers into Near, and Remote Oceania. While lithic technologies show similar spatio-temporal patterning to phonemes in languages, suggesting potential for strong historical signal in lithic technology, within Oceania and Arizona technologies either weakly, or do not reflect population history. This is likely in part because prehistoric people tended to rapidly change their technologies to suit new circumstances. The above studies highlight the usefulness of broad, comparative studies of technological variation in addressing questions about the causes of variability in lithic technology and how lithic technology relates to the evolution of the genus homo.
Contributorspaige, jonathan (Author) / Perreault, Charles (Thesis advisor) / Barton, Michael (Committee member) / Peeples, Matthew A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Despite nearly five decades of archaeological research in the Romanian Carpathian basin and adjacent areas, how human foragers organized their stone artifact technologies under varying environmental conditions remains poorly understood.
Some broad generalizations have been made; most work in the region is concerned primarily with descriptive and definitional issues rather than efforts to explain past human behavior or human-environmental interactions. Modern research directed towards understanding human adaptation to different environments remains in its infancy. Grounded in the powerful conceptual framework of evolutionary ecology and utilizing recent methodological advances, this work has shown that shifts in land-use strategies changes the opportunities for social and biological interaction among Late Pleistocene hominins in western Eurasia, bringing with it a plethora of important consequences for cultural and biological evolution.
I employ, in my Dissertation, theoretical and methodological advances derived from human behavioral ecology (HBE) and lithic technology organization to show how variability in lithic technology can explain differences in technoeconomic choices and land-use strategies of Late Pleistocene foragers in Romanian Carpathians Basin and adjacent areas. Set against the backdrop of paleoenvironmental change, the principal questions I addressed are whether or not technological variation at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic can account for fundamental changes at its end.
The analysis of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic strata, from six archaeological sites, shows that the lithic industries were different not because of biocultural differences in technological organization, landuse strategies, and organizational flexibility. Instead the evidence suggests that technoeconomic strategies, the intensity of artifact curation and how foragers used the land appear to have been more closely related to changing environmental conditions, task-specific activities, and duration of occupation. This agrees well with the results of studies conducted in other areas and with those predicted from theoretically-derived models based on evolutionary ecology. My results lead to the conclusion that human landuse effectively changes the environment of selection for hominins and their lithic technologies, an important component of the interface between humans and the natural world. Foragers move across the landscape in comparable ways in very different ecological settings, cross-cutting both biological morphotypes and prehistorian-defined analytical units.
Some broad generalizations have been made; most work in the region is concerned primarily with descriptive and definitional issues rather than efforts to explain past human behavior or human-environmental interactions. Modern research directed towards understanding human adaptation to different environments remains in its infancy. Grounded in the powerful conceptual framework of evolutionary ecology and utilizing recent methodological advances, this work has shown that shifts in land-use strategies changes the opportunities for social and biological interaction among Late Pleistocene hominins in western Eurasia, bringing with it a plethora of important consequences for cultural and biological evolution.
I employ, in my Dissertation, theoretical and methodological advances derived from human behavioral ecology (HBE) and lithic technology organization to show how variability in lithic technology can explain differences in technoeconomic choices and land-use strategies of Late Pleistocene foragers in Romanian Carpathians Basin and adjacent areas. Set against the backdrop of paleoenvironmental change, the principal questions I addressed are whether or not technological variation at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic can account for fundamental changes at its end.
The analysis of the Middle and Upper Paleolithic strata, from six archaeological sites, shows that the lithic industries were different not because of biocultural differences in technological organization, landuse strategies, and organizational flexibility. Instead the evidence suggests that technoeconomic strategies, the intensity of artifact curation and how foragers used the land appear to have been more closely related to changing environmental conditions, task-specific activities, and duration of occupation. This agrees well with the results of studies conducted in other areas and with those predicted from theoretically-derived models based on evolutionary ecology. My results lead to the conclusion that human landuse effectively changes the environment of selection for hominins and their lithic technologies, an important component of the interface between humans and the natural world. Foragers move across the landscape in comparable ways in very different ecological settings, cross-cutting both biological morphotypes and prehistorian-defined analytical units.
ContributorsPopescu, Gabriel Marius (Author) / Barton, Charles Michael (Thesis advisor) / Clark, Geoffrey A. (Thesis advisor) / Marean, Curtis W (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015