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仪并居住在如此广泛的栖息地的物种，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、以文化为中介的生活和繁荣能力的过程。考古学非常适合探索这个问题，因为它允许人们在很长的时间内追踪创新和成功-当然也包括错误和失败-这构成了人类行为进化的适应过程。以前对山地适应性的研究主要集中在世界上为数不多的连续高海拔地形的永久殖民-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参与高海拔的长期过程仍然没有被探索。人类第一次追求令人眼花缭乱的新高度是在何时何地？是什么促使他们这样做的？非洲拥有一些世界上最早的人类存在于这种环境中的证据，但非洲大陆的高山系统却严重缺乏调查。该项目将通过调查早期人类何时，为什么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-莱索托高原的马洛蒂-德拉肯斯堡山脉来解决这一问题。通过绘制这一地区人类高原动态的深层次发展，该项目将深入了解我们人类行为灵活性的深刻能力，这种能力构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，并通过公众开放日、学校实地考察、与当地酋长和其他利益攸关方协商，提高遗产意识和增强能力，由密歇根大学的布莱恩·斯图尔特博士领导的该项目将重建人类扩散的模式，景观学习和生存战略的必要生活在莱索托高原在气候动荡的过去两个冰川周期。斯图尔特博士和一个多学科的研究小组将进行洞穴挖掘，景观调查和环境采样的综合计划，针对高地的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构建一个高地适应和定居动态的详细图片锚定到当地环境和水文变化的高分辨率记录。具体来说，他们将研究是否以及在多大程度上记录了最近的山地狩猎采集者的生存策略可以扩展到我们物种进化的早期阶段。区域人口的长期波动也将被探讨，以测试假设莱索托的可能作用，作为一个干燥阶段的人类避难所，与人口包装，文化创新率高，并查看非洲的山区作为人类行为和遗传变化的震中的相关影响。