Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Human Ecological Integration In Beringia

博士亚利桑那大学的候选人弗朗索瓦·拉诺埃将研究狩猎采集社会与大型陆生哺乳动物种群之间的长期生态相互作用。人类物种与其环境相互作用的方式狩猎和采集的生活方式超过99%的历史。以前的学者已经描述了其中一些相互作用的后果，包括过度捕捞可能导致的资源灭绝。考古学和古生物学记录特别适合描述和解释这些生态动态，因为它们通常持续很长一段时间。 然而，这些问题往往是由考古学家和古生态学家分开研究，而没有真实的整合各自的研究问题;因此，人类生态学特有的观点迄今为止一直被低估。在这一更广泛的背景下，该项目将侧重于狩猎采集者的营养生态学，他们如何融入其他大型捕食者的营养网络（“食物网”），以及他们对整个生态系统的作用和影响。该项目的创新之处在于，它将实施一个跨学科的方法和理论框架，以解决狩猎采集社会长期可持续融入生态系统的新问题。它将允许各种专业人士（考古学家，古生态学家，理论生态学家）建立其结果。该项目将重点放在模拟人类和其他大型捕食者之间的资源分配模式，以及它们各自对大型哺乳动物群落的影响。它将在阿拉斯加和育空地区进行，在14,000年至8,000年前的冰河时代末期，狩猎采集社会首次进入北美。这一地区的殖民化相当于北极最早的定居点之一，通常与植被和哺乳动物物种的重大更替相吻合，包括巨型动物的灭绝。该项目将通过对选定的考古遗址进行挖掘和动物群分析，增进对阿拉斯加中部人类住区和生存状况的了解。此外，这项研究将结合古生物学和化学方法，记录冰河时代结束时大型哺乳动物之间的进食相互作用。然后，这个跨学科的数据集将用于建模和了解人类定居者如何开发资源，以及他们的经济选择如何影响整个生态系统。

Ph.D. candidate François Lanoë, of the University of Arizona, will study the long-term ecological interactions between societies of hunter-gatherers and populations of large terrestrial mammals. The human species has interacted with its environment by means of hunting and gathering life-ways for over 99% of its history. Previous scholarship has described the consequences of some of these interactions, including possible resource extinction caused by overharvesting. The archaeological and paleontological records are particularly well placed to describe and provide interpretations for these ecological dynamics because they generally extend over very long periods of time. Often, however, these issues are studied separately by archaeologists and paleoecologists without real integration of their respective research questions; as a result, perspectives specific to human ecology have so far been under-emphasized. Within this broader context this project will focus on the trophic ecology of hunter-gatherers, how they fit in the trophic networks ("food webs") among other large predators and what their role and impact on the whole ecosystem is. This project is innovative in that it will implement an interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical framework in order to address novel aspects of the sustainable integration of hunter-gatherer societies in ecosystems over the long-term. It will allow a variety of professionals (archaeologists, paleoecologists, theoretical ecologists) to build upon its results.This project will focus on modeling the modes of resource partitioning between humans and other large predators, and their respective impacts on communities of large mammals. It will be conducted in Alaska and Yukon, where societies of hunter-gatherers entered North America for the first time at the end of the Ice Age, between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago. The colonization of this region corresponded to one of the first settlements of the arctic and generally coincided with major turnover in both vegetation and mammalian species, including megafauna extinction. This project will contribute to the knowledge of human settlement and subsistence of central Alaska through the excavation and faunal analysis of selected archaeological sites. In addition, using a combination of paleontological and chemical methods, this research will document feeding interactions among large mammals at the end of the Ice Age. This interdisciplinary dataset will then be used to model and understand how human settlers exploited resources, and how their economical choices impacted the ecosystem as a whole.