Doctoral Dissertation Research: Movement Ecology and Hominin Behavioral Evolution

人类已经显示出一种非凡的能力，可以在地球上几乎所有的环境中生存和繁衍。研究人类过去用来与周围环境谈判的策略，对于进一步理解这种惊人适应性的起源至关重要。本论文项目结合计算机建模和石器分析来了解我们的古人类祖先如何与周围环境相互作用，为人类与环境相互作用的进化意义提供新的见解。该联合项目将开展K-12和公共科学教育推广活动，该项目的某些方面将与一项长期的实地研究和培训计划结合起来，为培养来自考古学、地质学和生态学不同背景的美国学生做出贡献。考古学已经开发了各种各样的分析框架来记录人类与环境的相互作用。然而，研究人员面临的一个主要问题是，考古记录是时间平均的，这意味着考古遗址并不代表单个的活动，而是它们在很长一段时间内的集合。因此，为了理解过去的人类是如何与他们的环境相互作用的，需要新的方法从人类行为的聚集痕迹中记录有意义的模式。该项目建立了一个分析框架，通过该框架可以生成和测试关于过去人类行为的时间平均模式的假设。该项目将基于主体的建模与石器工具使用和运输的测量相结合，通过运动的视角来描述人类的土地使用。然后将该框架应用于时间平均的岩屑组合，以表征景观中人类土地利用模式。这些数据被映射到原始资料来源和古地理数据，以检验记录的土地利用模式差异是否是古环境变化的结果。这项工作的初步结果表明，该项目具有很大的潜力，为人类生态学和进化提供新的见解。

Humans have shown an extraordinary ability to live and thrive in almost every environment on the planet. Investigating past strategies that humans used to negotiate their surroundings is critical to further understanding the origins of this amazing adaptability. This dissertation project combines computer modeling and stone tool analysis to understand how our hominin ancestors interacted with their surrounding environments, providing new insights into the evolutionary significance of human-environment interactions. The co-PI will conduct K-12 and public science education outreach activities, and aspects of this project will be carried out in conjunction with a long-standing field research and training program, contributing to the training of American students from diverse backgrounds in archaeology, geology, and ecology.Archaeology has developed a variety of analytical frameworks for documenting human-environment interactions. However, one of the main issues that researchers face is that the archaeological record is time-averaged, meaning that archaeological sites do not represent individual activities but rather an aggregation of them over long time-frames. Thus, in order to understand how past humans interacted with their environments, new methods are needed to document meaningful patterns from aggregated traces of human behavior. This project builds an analytical framework by which hypotheses regarding time-averaged patterns of past human behaviors can be generated and tested. The project combines agent-based modeling with measures of stone tool utilization and transport to characterize hominin land use through the lens of movement. This framework is then applied to time-averaged lithic assemblages to characterize human land use patterns in landscapes. These data are mapped onto raw material source and paleogeographic data to test whether documented differences in land use patterns are the result paleoenvironmental variation. Preliminary results of this work indicate that this project has great potential to provide new insights into hominin ecology and evolution.