Doctoral Dissertation Research: Movement Ecology and Hominin Behavioral Evolution

人类已经显示出在地球上几乎每一个环境中生存和繁荣的非凡能力。研究人类过去用来应对环境的策略，对于进一步了解这种惊人的适应性的起源至关重要。本论文项目结合了计算机建模和石器分析，以了解我们的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了新的见解。联合PI将开展K-12和公共科学教育外展活动，该项目的各个方面将与长期的实地研究和培训计划一起进行，为来自考古学，地质学和生态学不同背景的美国学生的培训做出贡献。考古学已经开发了各种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个别活动，而是它们在很长一段时间内的集合。因此，为了了解过去的人类如何与他们的环境相互作用，需要新的方法来记录人类行为的聚合痕迹中有意义的模式。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利用和运输的措施相结合，通过运动的透镜来表征人类的土地使用。这个框架，然后应用到时间平均的岩屑组合，以表征人类土地利用模式的景观。这些数据映射到原材料来源和古地理数据，以测试是否记录的土地利用模式的差异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，提供新的见解人类生态学和进化。

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.