The Middle Paleolithic of the Crimea

在国家科学基金会的支持下，安东尼·马克斯博士和他的同事们将继续在克里米亚进行考古工作。到目前为止，研究已经在几个地点产生了丰富的旧石器时代中期工业聚集。其中含有保存下来的动物遗骸，该团队现在将对这些进行详细研究。他们将对这些材料进行分析，以重建旧石器时代中期人们生活的环境，以及他们如何随着时间的推移而变化。动物群遗骸还提供了关于人们如何利用资源的信息，因此这项研究将提供对环境刺激和人类反应的洞察。旧石器时代中期的人类是大约4万年前出现在欧洲的解剖学上的现代人的前身。在试图理解这些后来的适应时，旧石器时代中期提供了一个基准，正是通过对“不完全是人类”行为的理解，我们才能最好地理解我们自己亚种特有的行为适应。到目前为止，马克斯博士的工作表明，这些早期的适应比考古学家预期的要复杂得多，这些群体在非常有限的地理距离内以不同和特定的方式适应。这项研究之所以重要，有几个原因。它将为史前人类如何适应他们的环境提供新的线索，并将提供许多考古学家感兴趣的数据。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Anthony Marks and his colleagues will continue archaeological work in the Crimea. Research to date has yielded rich assemblages of Middle Paleolithic industries at several sites. These contain with preserved faunal remains and the team will now conduct detailed studies of these. They will analyze these materials both to reconstruct the environments in which Middle Paleolithic peoples lived and how they changed over time. Faunal remains also provide information on how people utilize resources and thus the study will provide insight into environmental stimulus and human response. Middle Paleolithic peoples are the immediate predecessors of anatomically modern humans who appeared in Europe about 40,000 years ago. In the attempt to understand these later adaptations, the Middle Paleolithic provides a benchmark and it is through an understanding of `not quite fully human` behavior that the unique behavioral adaptations which characterize our own subspecies can best be understood. Dr. Marks work to date indicates that these earlier adaptations are more complex than archaeologists had expected and that groups adapted in distinct and specific ways over very limited geographic distances. This research is important for several reasons. It will shed new light on how prehistoric peoples adapted to their environments and will provide data of interest to many archaeologists.