The human niche space of Late Upper Paleolithic Europe and the effects of climate and population growth

S3: Practical Applications | Standard presentation
  • Peter M. Yaworsky
    Aarhus University
  • Shumon T. Hussain
    Aarhus University
  • Felix Riede
    Aarhus University

Over the past decade, with the advent of affordable and powerful personal computers, a plethora of high resolution remotely sensed data, and significant advancements in data storage, archaeology has moved into a digital age, with many key insights gleamed from the use of these new technologies and big data. With this advancement many questions have arisen pertaining to making these analyses reproducible, how to make these data available for other researchers, and data standards. Here, we discuss our study built upon archaeological data, paleoclimate reconstructions, and remotely sensed data, to illustrate the current state of archaeological data analysis with these type of data, and one method for making complex archaeological data analysis methods accessible using R and R Markdown. The study focuses on past climate change and how it affected human population distributions, thereby structuring human diets, demography, and cultural evolution. A general warming trend throughout the Terminal Pleistocene resulted in the opening of previously uninhabitable land and an increase in human population. These general trends were periodically interrupted by climatic downturns, in which temperatures drastically dropped and returned to glacial conditions. Along with the climatic changes of the period, we see changes in the archaeological record with a number of tool traditions appearing and disappearing across Europe, as well as changes in population that roughly correlate with changes in temperature. Here, we test how changes in climate affected the size and extent of the human niche space throughout Pleistocene Europe and the effect this had on regional human population sizes. Then, using these data we test whether human populations had any effect in pushing people into otherwise unoccupied habitats. We find that a) changes in climate correlate strongly with the size and extent of the human niche space, b) that increases in the human niche space correlate with increases in human population, c) that human populations were not large enough to induce regional pressure on dispersal patterns, and d) variation in archaeological material overlap in many ways, but appear to occur in different habitats, but teasing apart what is local adaptation and what is unique cultural lineage remains difficult. The study has important implications for understanding how past climate change impacted and structured the human dispersal and human population size and can serve as a baseline for mindsets of resilience and adaptation in the present, as well as highlight ongoing issues in archaeology pertaining to archaeological data availability and reproducibility.