Collaborative Research: Long Term Accommodation to Climate Change

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Neanderthals continue to spark the imagination of scientists and the general public, as they have since their discovery over 150 years ago. Researchers from across the natural and social sciences have made great progress in understanding their life ways, how they successfully adapted to the extreme climates of the last ice age, and why they ultimately disappeared millenia ago. Archaeologists and geoscientists, with their common interests in deep time and human-environment interactions, are particularly well equipped to contribute to the study of Neanderthals. Within this broad context, researchers will lead a three-year study of Neanderthal adaptation to extreme climate variation during the last ice age. The project will contribute to theories about human evolution and the fate of Neanderthal populations, informing on the roles that environmental change, technology, and diet choice played in human evolution. Additional benefits include field and laboratory training, scientific engagement, and cultural enrichment for student participants who will join an interdisciplinary research team in an international setting. Many of the students involved in this project will be first-generation college students from under-represented, working poor, and rural demographic groups in Kentucky and eastern North Carolina who may not otherwise have opportunities for international travel. This project is designed to address the fundamental question: do temporal variations in Neanderthal land use, demography, technology, and diet represent responses to extreme climate shifts during the last ice age? The project team will address this question by developing complementary archaeological, chronological, and paleoenvironmental datasets from the ongoing excavation at a Neanderthal archaeological site) and integrating them with local and regional climate records. Previous work at the site has established that the cave preserves rich cultural deposits and non-cultural faunal remains, including biomolecular compounds such as ancient DNA. Lithic artifact and animal bone assemblages will provide a robust record of changes in Neanderthal technology and raw material selection that can be directly synchronized with paleoclimate records, and with seasonality indicators from stable isotope analyses of associated faunal remains from the same stratigraphic position. The proposed methodology uses radiocarbon and uranium-series dating to establish age control, stone tool analyses to understand the decision-making of Paleolithic humans, animal bone assemblages to reconstruct paleoenvironments and understand Neanderthal diets, and sedimentological analyses to infer site formation processes and environmental context of human occupation. Taken together, the work will establish a complete paleoenvironmental and geoarchaeological chronology for Neanderthal site adaptations, providing critical context that is missing from many other sites in the region.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.