Palaeodemographic modelling supports a population bottleneck during the Pleistocene- Holocene transition in Iberia (original) (raw)
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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Successive generations of hunter–gatherers of the Late Glacial and Early Holocene in Iberia had to contend with rapidly changing environments and climatic conditions. This constrained their economic resources and capacity for demographic growth. The Atlantic façade of Iberia was occupied throughout these times and witnessed very significant environmental transformations. Archaeology offers a perspective on how past human population ecologies changed in response to this scenario. Archaeological radiocarbon data are used here to reconstruct demographics of the region over the long term. We introduce various quantitative methods that allow us to develop palaeodemographic and spatio-temporal models of population growth and density, and compare our results to independent records of palaeoenvironmental and palaeodietary change, and growth rates derived from skeletal data. Our results demonstrate that late glacial population growth was stifled by the Younger Dryas stadial, but populations ...
Mid-late Holocene climate, demography, and cultural dynamics in Iberia: A multi-proxy approach
Keywords: Holocene Iberia 13C (D 13 C) values Palynology Demographic proxies Culture change Climate change 4.2 ky cal. BP a b s t r a c t Despite increasing interest in the relationship between culture transformation and abrupt climate change, their complexities are poorly understood. The local impact of global environmental fluctuations depends on multiple factors, and their effects on societal collapse are often assumed rather than demonstrated. One of the major changes in west European later prehistory was the Copper to Bronze Age transition, contemporaneous with the 4.2 ky cal. BP event. This article offers a multi-dimensional insight into this historical process in the Iberian Peninsula from a multi-proxy and comparative perspective. Three study areas, representative of diverse ecological settings and historical trajectories, are compared. Using radiocarbon dates, 13 C discrimination (D 13 C) values on C 3 plants, and high-resolution palynological records as palaeoclimatic and palaeodemographic proxies, this study tracks the uneven signals of Ho-locene climate. The wettest Northwest region features the most stable trend lines, whereas the Southwest exhibits an abrupt decrease in its demographic signals c. 4500 cal. BP, which is then followed by a subsequent rise in the neighbouring Southeast. These lines of evidence suggest the possibility, never previously noted, of demic migration from the Southwest to the Southeast in the Early Bronze Age as a contributing factor to the cultural dynamics of southern Iberia.
Archaeofaunal evidence of human adaptation to climate change in Upper Paleolithic Iberia
The rich archaeofaunal record of Upper Paleolithic Iberia has long been a productive source of information about human response to climate change in the latest Pleistocene and earliest Holocene. In this article, I use the archaeozoological record from late Pleistocene Iberia to show that humans responded to late glacial climate extremes in ways specific to the macro-bioclimatic regions in which they lived. Nestedness, cluster (unweighted pair-group method using arithmetic averages [UPGMA]), and non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analyses suggest that in Mediterranean bioclimates, which were less impacted by glacial extremes, people implemented a general broad-spectrum hunting strategy. In the colder, more climatically extreme “Euro-Siberian” region, the data suggest a diversity of hunting adaptations, likely shaped by specifics of local environments. While technological change and increasing global connectivity since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) have moderated the direct impact of climate change on humans, these analyses – and others – suggest that local management rather than global decision-making will be key to human adaptations in environments most strongly affected by modern climate change.
Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-1 Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula 2 3 4
2019
3 4 Vanessa Villalba-Mouco1,2, Marieke S. van de Loosdrecht1, Cosimo Posth1, Rafael Mora3, Jorge 5 Martínez-Moreno3, Manuel Rojo-Guerra4, Domingo C. Salazar-García5, José I. Royo-Guillén6, Michael 6 Kunst7, Hélène Rougier8, Isabelle Crevecoeur9, Héctor Arcusa-Magallón10, Cristina Tejedor7 Rodríguez11, Iñigo García-Martínez de Lagran12, Rafael Garrido-Pena13, Kurt W. Alt14, 15, Choongwon 8 Jeong1, Stephan Schiffels1, Pilar Utrilla2, Johannes Krause1, Wolfgang Haak1,16 9 10 11 1 Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Kahlaische 12 Straße 10, 07745 Jena, Germany. 13 2 Departamento de Ciencias de la Antigüedad, Grupo Primeros Pobladores del Valle del Ebro (PPVE), 14 Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Ambientales (IUCA), Universidad de Zaragoza, Pedro Cerbuna, 15 50009, Zaragoza, Spain. 16 3 Centre d'Estudis del Patrimoni Arqueològic de la Prehistòria (CEPAP), Facultat de Lletres, 17 Universitat Autònoma Barcelona, 08190 Bellaterra, ...