The Emergence Of Modern Human Behavior

现代人类行为的出现

• 批准号: 1354095
• 负责人: Gilbert Tostevin
• 金额: $ 16.24万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1354095&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Emergence; Modern; Human; Behavior

Humanity has been associated with high levels of extinctions among competing species, not only in the modern world of industrialized agriculture but even from the first appearance of our species, Homo sapiens, during the Pleistocene Epoch. In fact, one of the fundamental questions in human evolution is, what was the nature of the interaction between the earliest modern humans from Africa and their Eurasian competitors, the Neanderthals, that resulted in the latter's extinction 30,000 years ago? Physical anthropology shows that the modern human advantage was not physical prowess. Current archaeological research thus focuses on the modern human landscape adaptation, i.e., how they strategized use of resources in time and space (how they hunted animals, foraged for plants, and relied on other humans for security), as potentially distinct from their evolutionary cousins. Testing competing hypotheses of the contrast between Neanderthal and modern human landscape adaptations requires high-resolution archaeological data from the excavation of sites with the potential to discriminate what activities the occupants were pursuing in that given site. The multidisciplinary team created by Dr. Gilbert Tostevin & Dr. Gilliane Monnier, both of the University of Minnesota, along with colleagues in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Israel, will investigate one such site, Tvaro ná-Za kolou in the Czech Republic, that contains artifacts of the archaeological culture most likely representing the earliest modern human penetration into Neanderthal-occupied Europe. This culture, the Bohunician, appears to have spread into Central Europe from the Near East but did not penetrate further west than Bohemia, nor further east than western Ukraine. The limited success of the Bohunician adaptation over the Neanderthals stands in contrast to the Aurignacian, the modern human culture that spread 5,000 years later across all of Europe and is associated with the extinction of the Neanderthals. The project at Tvaro ná-Za kolou is designed to produce the highest resolution of data on the Bohunician landscape adaptation to date, thereby advancing archaeologists' ability to contrast the Bohunician, Aurignacian, and Neanderthal landscape adaptations. Not only will the project help discriminate what made modern humans' Ice Age ancestors so successful, it will also provide field and laboratory training for US, Czech, and other nations' graduate students in the teams innovative microarchaeological and 3D artifact modeling techniques, the latter providing the first publicly-accessible digital collection of artifacts from the entirety of a site of this age.The aim of this project is the high-resolution excavation, analysis, and dating of the Tvaro ná-Za kolou site. By reconstructing stone tool production at the site in relation to the use of organic artifacts that did not preserve (but that can be detected chemically in the site's sediment), the team will establish a new method for determining how a site's function within the population's landscape adaptation affects the artifactual content of the site. When applied to other sites in the region, this approach will transform archaeologists' ability to understand adaptive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals in this, and other, regions.

人类一直与竞争物种之间的高水平竞争有关，不仅在现代工业化农业世界中，甚至从更新世时期人类的第一次出现开始。 事实上，人类进化中的一个基本问题是，来自非洲的最早的现代人和他们的欧亚竞争对手尼安德特人之间的相互作用的性质是什么，导致后者在3万年前灭绝？ 体质人类学表明，现代人类的优势不是身体的力量。因此，目前的考古学研究集中在现代人类对景观的适应上，即，他们如何在时间和空间上制定资源使用策略（他们如何狩猎动物，觅食植物，并依赖其他人类获得安全），这可能与他们的进化堂兄弟不同。 测试尼安德特人和现代人类景观适应之间的对比的竞争性假设需要从挖掘遗址中获得高分辨率的考古数据，这些数据有可能区分居住者在该特定遗址中进行的活动。 由明尼苏达大学的吉尔伯特·托斯特温博士和吉利安·莫尼耶博士创建的多学科团队，沿着捷克共和国、德国和以色列的同事，将调查这样一个遗址，捷克共和国的Tvaro ná-Za kolou，它包含考古文化的文物，最有可能代表最早的现代人类渗透到尼安德特人占领的欧洲。 这种文化，即波胡尼西亚文化，似乎是从近东传播到中欧的，但并没有比波希米亚更向西渗透，也没有比乌克兰西部更向东渗透。 博胡尼人对尼安德特人的适应取得了有限的成功，这与奥里尼亚克人形成了鲜明的对比，奥里尼亚克人是5,000年后传播到整个欧洲的现代人类文化，与尼安德特人的灭绝有关。 Tvaro ná-Za kolou的项目旨在产生迄今为止关于Bohunician景观适应的最高分辨率数据，从而提高考古学家对比Bohunician，Aurignacian和尼安德特人景观适应的能力。 该项目不仅将帮助区分是什么使现代人类的冰河时代祖先如此成功，它还将为美国，捷克和其他国家的研究生提供现场和实验室培训，以创新的微考古和3D人工制品建模技术，后者提供了第一个公开访问的数字收集的文物从整个网站的这个时代。这个项目的目的是高-Tvaro ná-Za kolou遗址的分辨率挖掘、分析和测年。通过重建现场的石器生产与使用没有保存的有机文物（但可以在现场的沉积物中检测到化学物质），该团队将建立一种新的方法来确定一个地点在人口景观适应中的功能如何影响该地点的人工制品内容。 当应用于该地区的其他遗址时，这种方法将改变考古学家理解现代人和尼安德特人在这个地区和其他地区之间适应性差异的能力。