Crossing the threshold: the evolution of place and landscape in earliest prehistory

在大众的想象中，“穴居人”坚持认为它是原始人类状况的典型代表。尽管经过150多年的不断发现和发展，我们对人类进化道路的复杂理解仍在继续。但事实证明，即使有了这些进步，也很难摆脱这样一种普遍存在的看法，即我们的祖先过着不稳定的生活，只有将洞穴作为原始家园才能忍受。我们的研究计划将仔细审查早期人类使用洞穴的证据。通过这样做，我们希望从根本上改变学术界和更广泛的公众对我们穴居祖先的看法。事实是，在人类进化的大部分时间里，我们很少或根本没有找到关于我们的祖先生活在哪里的明确证据。这导致了人们认为它们占据了与其他动物很相似的景观。也许这涉及到使用临时避难所，这在考古记录中没有留下任何痕迹。然而，在50万年前之后，这种情况似乎在世界各地发生了相当迅速的变化。从这一点上，我们开始看到，在非洲、亚洲和欧洲，早期人类人口现在长期居住在洞穴中。因此，洞穴的使用远不是代表原始的、原始的人类状况，而是人类行为的革命；空间、技术、景观和时间概念的使用革命；考古学家忽视的革命，但其影响是巨大的。我们的研究项目将从对一个关键地点的详细分析开始，该地点展示了这种新的行为。La Cotte de St Brelade是泽西岛南海岸的一个壮观的洞穴系统。它提供了尼安德特人猎人长期占据该遗址的证据，时间跨度近20万年。在一个多世纪的挖掘过程中，它产生了欧洲已知的最大的尼安德特人手工艺品和其他遗骸收藏之一。然而，档案在一代人的时间里一直无法进入，也从未受到过完整的分析。我们打算将现代的、科学的考古分析应用于La Cotte de St Brelade的独特材料收藏。我们将这样做，以便详细研究现场人类行为的变化性质。我们想知道这个遗址在多大程度上代表着尼安德特人的“家”；遗址上的尼安德特人是如何利用他们周围的风景的；他们是如何在社会上组织自己成为一个具有悠久而成功的定居历史的高效物种的。我们将以拉科特研究为跳板，对这种激进的生活方式产生新的理解。我们将通过将我们的发现与欧洲其他洞穴遗址进行比较来实现这一点，这些洞穴遗址有类似的证据表明存在长寿聚落遗址；这些遗址的时间首次呈现垂直维度，并且大量证据允许我们将其称为“超级遗址”。在我们项目的最后部分，我们的目标是将来自世界各地的研究人员聚集在一起，他们正在研究表现出类似革命行为的遗址。这将为洞穴使用的进化意义提供一个全球视角。我们的研究将提供机会来确定持续的洞穴占领对我们理解人类发展意味着什么。这也为探索一种令人兴奋的可能性打开了大门，即具有普遍想象力的洞穴人实际上代表了人类进化道路上的一个根本性变革阶段。

The 'Caveman' persists in the popular imagination as typifying the original human condition. This is despite over 150 years of continuous discovery and the development of our sophisticated understanding of the human evolutionary path. But even with these advances it has proved difficult to shake off the widely held perception that our ancestors led a precarious existence made only bearable by the use of caves as the original primitive home.Our research programme will scrutinise the evidence for the early human use of caves. By doing so we hope to shift fundamentally the perception of our cave dwelling ancestors for both academics and the wider public.The fact is that for the majority of human evolution we find little or no clear evidence as to where our ancestors were living. This has led to suggestions that they occupied landscapes rather like other animals. Perhaps this involved using impermanent shelters which left no trace in the archaeological record. However, this situation appears to change quite rapidly across the world after half a million years ago. From this point on we start to see, in Africa, Asia and Europe, early human populations who now occupied caves for extended periods of time. Therefore far from the use of caves representing an original, primitive, human condition, their use points instead to a revolution in human behaviour; A revolution in the use of space, technology, landscape and the conception of time; A revolution that has been overlooked by archaeologists but whose implications are immense.Our research project will begin with the detailed analysis of a key site which shows this new behaviour. La Cotte de St Brelade is a spectacular cave system on the south coast of the island of Jersey. It provides evidence for the long term occupation of the site by Neanderthals hunters spanning almost 200,000 years. During over a century of excavation it has produced one of the largest collections of Neanderthal artefacts and other remains known from Europe. And yet the archive has remained inaccessible for a generation and has never been subjected to a complete analysis.We intend to bring modern, scientific archaeological analysis to bear on the unique collections of material from la Cotte de St Brelade. We will do this in order to study in detail the changing nature of human behaviour at the site. We want to know to what extent the site represents a Neanderthal 'home'; how the Neanderthals at the site used the landscape around them; and how they organised themselves socially to become a highly effective species with a long and successful history of settlement in the region.We will use the la Cotte study as a springboard to develop a new understanding of this radical way of life. We will do this by comparing our findings to other cave sites in Europe which have similar evidence for the development of long-lived settlement sites; Sites where time takes on a vertical dimension for the first time and where the quantity of evidence allows us to call them 'super-sites'.In the final part of our project we aim to bring together researchers from around the globe who are researching sites showing similar revolutionary behaviour. This will provide a global perspective on the evolutionary significance of the use of caves. Our research will provide the opportunity to determine what sustained cave occupation means for our understanding of human development. It also opens the door to exploring the immensely exciting possibility that the cavemen of popular imagination actually represent a fundamentality transformative phase in the human evolutionary path.