Human Adaptation to High Altitude Environments

人类对高海拔环境的适应

• 批准号: 1724435
• 负责人: Brian Stewart
• 金额: $ 19.29万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-09-01 至 2023-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1724435&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Human; Adaptation; Altitude; Environments

Humans are the only species to colonize the entire globe and inhabit such a vast array of habitats, including challenging environments like high mountain systems. Researchers strive to understand the process by which Homo sapiens developed the unique, culturally-mediated aptitude for living and thriving in arduous settings. Archaeology is ideally suited to exploring this issue because it allows one to trace over deep time the innovations and successes - but also, of course, the mistakes and failures - that constituted the adaptive process of human behavioral evolution. Previous scholarship into mountain adaptations has focused on the permanent colonization of the world's few expanses of contiguous high elevation terrain - the so-called high plateaus - which occurred late in human evolutionary history. In contrast, the longer-term processes by which people engaged with high altitudes before permanently mastering them remain unexplored. Where and when did humans first seek dizzying new heights and what encouraged them to do so? Africa contains some of the world's very earliest evidence for a human presence in such environments, yet the continent's high mountain systems are sorely under-investigated. This project will remedy this by investigating when, why and how early humans first inhabited and ultimately settled southern Africa's highest mountain system, the Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains of highland Lesotho. By charting the deep-time development of human-highland dynamics in this region, the project will yield insights into our species' profound capacity for behavioral flexibility that forms the core of who we are today. The project will produce a range of pedagogical and developmental outcomes, including training and research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, the further professionalization of Lesotho's first generation of archaeologists, and heritage awareness and empowerment through public open-days, school site-visits, consultations with local chiefs and other stakeholders, and extensive dissemination of findings.Led by Dr. Brian Stewart of the University of Michigan, the project will reconstruct patterns of human dispersal, landscape learning and survival strategies necessary for living in highland Lesotho during the climatically volatile past two glacial cycles. Dr. Stewart and a multidisciplinary research team will conduct an integrated program of cave excavation, landscape survey and environmental sampling targeting the highlands' unusually dense prehistoric archaeological record and ancient sedimentary exposures. These datasets will allow them to construct a detailed picture of highland adaptations and settlement dynamics anchored to high-resolution records of local environmental and hydrological change. Specifically, they will examine whether and to what extent survival strategies documented for recent montane hunter-gatherers can be extended into earlier stages of our species' evolution. Longer-term fluctuations in regional demography will also be explored to test hypotheses regarding Lesotho's possible role as a dry-phase human refugium, with related implications for population packing, high rates of cultural innovation, and viewing Africa's montane zones as epicenters of human behavioral and genetic change.

人类是唯一一个殖民整个地球并居住在如此广阔的栖息地的物种，包括像高山系统这样具有挑战性的环境。研究人员努力了解智人在艰苦环境中发展出独特的、文化介导的生存能力和发展能力的过程。考古学是探索这个问题的理想之选，因为它可以让人们追溯很久以来的创新和成功——当然，也包括错误和失败——这些都构成了人类行为进化的适应过程。先前关于山地适应的学术研究主要集中在世界上少数连续的高海拔地区的永久殖民，即所谓的高原，这发生在人类进化史的后期。相比之下，人们在永久掌握高海拔之前与高海拔接触的长期过程仍未被探索。人类在何时何地第一次寻求令人眩晕的新高度，又是什么鼓励他们这样做的？非洲有一些世界上最早的证据表明人类曾在这样的环境中存在过，然而非洲大陆的高山系统还没有得到充分的研究。该项目将通过调查早期人类何时、为何以及如何首次居住并最终定居在南部非洲最高的山脉系统——莱索托高地的马洛蒂-德拉肯斯堡山脉，来弥补这一缺陷。通过绘制这一地区人类高地动态的深度发展图表，该项目将深入了解我们物种的行为灵活性的深刻能力，这种能力形成了我们今天的核心。该项目将产生一系列教学和发展成果，包括为本科生和研究生提供培训和研究机会，使莱索托第一代考古学家进一步专业化，通过公众开放日、学校实地考察、与当地酋长和其他利益攸关方协商以及广泛传播研究结果，提高对遗产的认识和赋权。该项目由密歇根大学的布莱恩·斯图尔特博士领导，将重建莱索托高地在过去两个冰期气候不稳定期间人类迁徙、景观学习和生存策略的模式。斯图尔特博士和一个多学科研究小组将开展一个综合项目，包括洞穴挖掘、景观调查和环境采样，目标是高地异常密集的史前考古记录和古代沉积暴露。这些数据集将使他们能够以当地环境和水文变化的高分辨率记录为基础，构建高地适应和定居动态的详细图景。具体来说，他们将研究记录下来的山地狩猎采集者的生存策略是否以及在多大程度上可以延伸到我们物种进化的早期阶段。还将探讨区域人口的长期波动，以检验关于莱索托作为干旱期人类避难所的可能作用的假设，以及与人口聚集、文化创新率高和将非洲山区视为人类行为和遗传变化中心有关的影响。