An unshakeable Middle Paleolithic? Trends versus conservatism in the predatory niche and their social ramifications. Current Anthropology (original) (raw)
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Current Anthropology, 2013
The great temporal and geographic span of the Middle Paleolithic (MP) raises many questions about behavioral variation within this period and its evolutionary significance. This paper focuses on MP predator economics and its social ramifications by examining the data for possible trends in the size of the hominin ecological footprint, hunting practices, trophic level, food sharing, and the intensity with which sites were occupied. Middle Paleolithic hominins were big game hunters, and they were rather specialized in their focus on ungulate prey. Low-cost gatherable small prey were a perennial if minor contribution to MP diets at lower latitudes, but the overall breadth of the meat diet remained narrow throughout the period. Discernible trends in the MP are few. Foraging innovations of the MP include marine shellfish exploitation by 120,000 years BP (possibly earlier), galvanization of the prime-age ungulate hunting niche, and hearth-centered domestic camps. The density of zooarchaeological material seems to increase during the last 30,000 years of MP existence, implying mild increases in human populations. Important aspects of carcass processing and meat sharing in the MP do not show much variation but do indicate close cooperation and habitual sharing among group members. Contrasts to late Lower Paleolithic butchery patterns may illuminate more formal patterns of meat sharing in the MP and after. The seeming rigidity of MP hunting economics could have been the secret to its widespread success for 200,000 years..
Ophiussa. Revista do Centro de Arqueologia da Universidade de Lisboa
In the course of a general review of zooarchaeological studies, particular attention is given to the development of the thinking process associated with hominin dietary strategies. Since the dawn of archaeological studies animal bones were noticed and recovered in association with man‑made tools. Since then, faunal remains have been discussed as the result of human dietary practices. However, the way such feeding activities were conducted has been the focus of an ongoing heated debate. Different subsistence strategies – i.e. Hunting vs Scavenging; Specialization vs Broad Spectrum; Inland vs Coastal Adaptation – have a strong impact on the image we create about our ancestors. Indeed, depending on the mode of acquisition and processing of faunal remains, hominins have been assessed on their cognitive abilities and, therefore, stamped as more, or less, evolved. More recently, new insights have been provided by the development of actualistic studies, highlighting the need to understand ...
Coward, F. and Grimshaw, L. Hunter-Gatherers in Early Prehistory
in 'Investigating prehistoric hunter-gatherer identities: case studies from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Europe, eds. Cobb, H., Coward, F., Grimshaw, L. and Price, S. Oxford: Archaeopress. BAR International Series 141. , 2005
The success of the post-processual critique of processual models of prehistory has led to the development of models of human behaviour that prioritise people and their activities in a social milieu. However, although some aspects of these approaches have crept in to the late Mesolithic, the vast majority of illustrations of such paradigms in archaeology have been post-Neolithic. Why is there no social archaeology of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic? Firstly, the nature of the data is argued to be insufficient both quantitatively and qualitatively to address the lifeways of people in the past. The questions considered appropriate for the study of the Palaeolithic have thus been largely restricted to those considering the economics of subsistence or raw material procurement and lithic manufacture. Secondly, the problem is one of identification; the attitudes of researchers towards post-Neolithic farmers and Mesolithic and Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer (and particularly pre-human hunter-gatherer) populations have meant that the two branches of research are considered fundamentally different. The effect of this process of estrangement of hunter-gatherer archaeology from the rest of the discipline is the establishment of an a-personal Palaeolithic. The pre-eminence of the evolutionary paradigm, which equates change and evolution, identifies the process of evolution as purely a factor of time; change is conditional only on time passing, and is thus virtually unrelated to humans and their activities. The focus of research into Pleistocene archaeology has been at continent-wide geographical scales and geological timescales, which have removed the possibility of accessing personal experiences and actions. In addition, the conception of a culture as a system seeking homeostasis means that change requires external causality – usually, in the Palaeolithic, the environment. This session would like to reintroduce the not-so-radical notion of ‘people’ to the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic, as creators of the archaeological record, and as inhabitants of the Pleistocene world. How can we access aspects of the prehistoric hunter-gatherer past that would have had meaning for its inhabitants/creators? How does the recognition of hunter-gatherer ‘persons’ in prehistory affect the generalizing, continent- and geological/climatic- scale models of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic which are current in the discipline? We invite papers that use new perspectives to ‘crack open’ the ‘black box’ of hunter-gatherer ‘persons’ of the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic to access new perspectives on and understandings of the period.
10th Annual Meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE), 2020
Archaic humans (early Homo) and carnivores inhabited the Early and Middle Pleistocene landscapes of Europe, and shared ecosystems for more than 1 million years. Indeed, many archaeo-palaeontological sites evidence the co-existence of humans and carnivores, and demonstrate a certain degree of human-carnivore competition for acquisition and exploitation of animal (meat/bone) resources. We investigate here the role of large carnivores in the evolution of hominin subsistence strategies during the Early and Middle Pleistocene of Europe, focusing on important renewals in the carnivore guilds, and their significance in terms of carrion availability for scavenging and human-carnivore competition for access to food resources. Based on a previous ecomorphological approach of carnivore guild analysis [1], a modified version was recently employed [2] and is presented herein, combining four ecomorphological/behavioral parameters of large carnivores (body mass-BM, diet, hunting strategy, sociality) that practice hunting and/or scavenging on large prey. 3D guild structure diagrams were constructed and analyzed aiming to: 1) examine the community structure and dynamics of the predatory guilds, 2) infer the possible role of carnivores in the changes of early Homo subsistence strategies (passive/active scavenging and hunting), and 3) assess the role of hominins within the guilds. The late Villafranchian–Epivillafranchian (Early Pleistocene) carnivore guild was dominated by large-sized, hypercarnivorous and ambush-hunting felids (e.g., the saber-toothed cats Megantereon and Homotherium), and by the large-sized, bone-cracking and scavenging hyaenid Pachycrocuta. Τhe latter in particular was the most direct competitor of Homo for scavenging food resources (leftovers) left behind mainly by the saber-toothed cats [3]. As a member of the predatory guild (evident from the presence of cut and percussion marks on mammal bones), Homo would occupy the ecological space that was “available” for a predator with a 30–100 kg BM and a (mostly?) scavenging behavior, perhaps with a hypocarnivorous/carnivorous diet according to ecological circumstances and geographic setting. Τhe disappearance of most of the Early Pleistocene carnivore components (including Pachycrocuta and Megantereon) towards the end of this period, and their replacement by the Galerian (Middle Pleistocene) to modern hyenas and felids, resulted in the change of the structure and dynamics of the guild. Most notably, this reorganization included the decrease of carrion providers (hunters), and the higher representation of species with scavenging, bone-cracking and pack-hunting behavior. In this Middle Pleistocene guild, Homo would occupy the niche that was previously held by Megantereon, in the group of predators with 30–100 kg BM. Similar to Megantereon, humans could have a carnivorous to hypercarnivorous diet, but unlike the solitary and “ambush-and-slash” felid, the biological, technological, cultural and social developments would have allowed humans to employ a modified hunting strategy: the cooperative “ambush-and-spear” strategy (in accordance with the use of hunting spears during this period). The incorporation of such hunting behavior made humans fairly independent of erratic food sources from scavenging carnivore kills and allowed the provisioning of animal resources on a more regular basis. Moreover, even though the carnivore diversity slightly increased during this period, carnivore representation in the archaeo-palaeontological localities is rather low in both species and specimens number. This is possibly an anthropogenic effect on the ecosystem due to: 1) the firmer establishment of the hominin niche, including anti-predator strategies and expulsion of large carnivores from the region of human influence; and 2) the reduction of food quantity through human confrontational scavenging or decrease in prey availability through human hunting (see also [4] and [5]).
This study illustrates the potential of small-game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food-producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major population growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean probably occurred before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and (3) subsequent demographic pulses in the Upper and Epi-Paleolithic greatly reshaped the conditions of selection that operated on human subsistence ecology, technology, and society. The findings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's broad-spectrum-revolution hypothesis. However, ranking small prey in terms of work of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proved far more effective in this investigation of human diet breadth than have the taxonomic-diversity analyses published previously. anonymous reviewers for many thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (to M.C.S., SBR-9511894) and the Levi Sala Care Foundation (to N.D.M.). key, and France and at sites of diverse ages in the United States. Her interests include coevolutionary processes involving humans, forager economics, the forager-producer transition, population and behavioral ecology, zooarchaeology, and taphonomy. n a t a l i e d . m u n ro is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her dissertation research focuses on the nature of Natufian subsistence at large and small sites in western Asia, testing hypotheses about the causes of economic and social changes immediately prior to the emergence of agriculture. She received her M.A. degree from Simon Fraser University in 1994, and she has done fieldwork in the southwestern United States, northern Europe, and western Asia. Her interests include Pleistocene and Holocene forager ecology, complex hunter-gatherers, early food production societies, zooarchaeology, and taphonomy. t o d d a . s u ro v e l l completed his M.A. degree in anthropology at the University of Arizona in 1998 on perfecting infrared spectrographic measures of bone diagenesis in archaeological sites. His dissertation research focuses on Paleoindian resource economics and land use in the Americas. He has done fieldwork in western North America, northern Europe, and western Asia. His interests include Paleoindians, colonization of the Americas, simulation modeling, hunter-gatherer ecology and technology, and geoarchaeology. The present paper was submitted 16 x 98 and accepted 10 iii 99; the final version reached the Editor's office 17 iii 99.