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- All Subjects: Human Behavioral Ecology
- All Subjects: Indians of South America
- Creators: Boyd, Robert
- Creators: Popescu, Gabriel Marius
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
Description
For most of human history hunting has been the primary economic activity of men. Hunted animals are valued for their food energy and nutrients, however, hunting is associated with a high risk of failure. Additionally, large animals cannot be consumed entirely by the nuclear family, so much of the harvest may be shared to others. This has led some researchers to ask why men hunt large and difficult game. The “costly signaling” and “show-off” hypotheses propose that large prey are hunted because the difficulty of finding and killing them is a reliable costly signal of the phenotypic quality of the hunter.
These hypotheses were tested using original interview data from Aché (hunter gatherer; n=52, age range 50-76, 46% female) and Tsimané (horticulturalist; n=40, age range 15-77, 45% female) informants. Ranking tasks and paired comparison tasks were used to determine the association between the costs of killing an animal and its value as a signal of hunter phenotypic quality for attracting mates and allies. Additional tasks compared individual large animals to groups of smaller animals to determine whether assessments of hunters’ phenotypes and preferred status were more impacted by the signal value of the species or by the weight and number of animals killed.
Aché informants perceived hunters who killed larger or harder to kill animals as having greater provisioning ability, strength, fighting ability, and disease susceptibility, and preferred them as mates and allies. Tsimané informants held a similar preference for hunters who killed large game, but not for hunters targeting hard to kill species. When total biomass harvested was controlled, both populations considered harvesting more animals in a given time period to be a better signal of preferred phenotypes than killing a single large and impressive species. Male and female informants both preferred hunters who consistently brought back small game over hunters who sometimes killed large animals and sometimes killed nothing. No evidence was found that hunters should forgo overall food return rates in order to signal phenotypic qualities by specializing on large game. Nutrient provisioning rather than costly phenotypic signaling was the strategy preferred by potential mates and allies.
These hypotheses were tested using original interview data from Aché (hunter gatherer; n=52, age range 50-76, 46% female) and Tsimané (horticulturalist; n=40, age range 15-77, 45% female) informants. Ranking tasks and paired comparison tasks were used to determine the association between the costs of killing an animal and its value as a signal of hunter phenotypic quality for attracting mates and allies. Additional tasks compared individual large animals to groups of smaller animals to determine whether assessments of hunters’ phenotypes and preferred status were more impacted by the signal value of the species or by the weight and number of animals killed.
Aché informants perceived hunters who killed larger or harder to kill animals as having greater provisioning ability, strength, fighting ability, and disease susceptibility, and preferred them as mates and allies. Tsimané informants held a similar preference for hunters who killed large game, but not for hunters targeting hard to kill species. When total biomass harvested was controlled, both populations considered harvesting more animals in a given time period to be a better signal of preferred phenotypes than killing a single large and impressive species. Male and female informants both preferred hunters who consistently brought back small game over hunters who sometimes killed large animals and sometimes killed nothing. No evidence was found that hunters should forgo overall food return rates in order to signal phenotypic qualities by specializing on large game. Nutrient provisioning rather than costly phenotypic signaling was the strategy preferred by potential mates and allies.
ContributorsBishop, Andrew Phillip Carson (Author) / Hill, Kim (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Robert (Committee member) / Trumble, Benjamin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019