Collaborative Research: Drivers and proxies of behavioral diversity in Late Pleistocene and Holocene hunter-gatherers

这个项目的目的是研究人们建立和维持文化边界的条件。种族和语言认同是人类社会组织的核心，使人们能够在不亲自认识每个人的情况下认同其他群体成员。这种“民族语言认同”鼓励了一定规模的合作，使人类能够解决少数人无法解决的问题，但也可能阻碍群体之间的合作。由于合作是当今人类智慧和冲突的持续来源，因此了解合作最初出现并由我们的觅食祖先维持的条件是至关重要的。种群是否因为遵循不同的资源使用模式而分离？文化障碍的发展是否阻碍了互动？古代人类群体在多大程度上共享信息和/或资源，同时保持生物和文化界限？考古学家现在可以将古代DNA、计算机模拟和古代环境重建的进展与文化遗迹的分析结合起来，了解早期人类群体中民族语言身份的形成和后果。本研究增加了博士后、研究生和本科生的就业机会和培训。通过将工作嵌入当地社区，科学培训将在多元文化的研究环境中进行，从而培养最大限度地发挥多样化STEM劳动力利益所需的基本技能。研究小组将在两个地区进行研究，在那里，古代DNA分析显示，在上一个冰河时代周期结束时，觅食人群开始保持独立的生物群体。调查人员将从周围的遗址，包括发现古代DNA的地方，开发出年代久远的文化和环境记录。该团队将进行新的高分辨率挖掘，并分析他们在20世纪70年代使用低分辨率方法挖掘的现有材料中发现的遗骸。这种增加的细节将使两个数据集能够保持一致，并最大限度地发挥其信息价值，以显示石器文物、颜料、骨工具和珠子等文化遗迹是否显示出从古代DNA中已知的几乎没有生物相互作用的群体之间出现文化差异的证据。利用环境数据，该团队将建立觅食资源使用的模拟模型，以了解人们彼此相遇的频率。他们将使用这些模型来测试是否相互作用率或文化障碍能更好地解释基因交换的缺乏。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The goal of this project is to study the conditions under which people establish and maintain cultural boundaries. Ethnic and linguistic identity are central to human social organization and enable people to identify with other group members without personally knowing each of them. This "ethnolinguistic identity" encourages cooperation at a scale that allows humans to solve problems that could not be tackled with a smaller number of people but may also discourage cooperation between groups. Because cooperation is an ongoing source of human ingenuity and conflict today, it is essential to understand the conditions under which it first emerged and was maintained by our forager ancestors. Did populations become separate because they followed different patterns of resource use across the landscape? Was interaction then discouraged because of the development of cultural barriers? To what extent did ancient human groups share information and/or resources while maintaining biological and cultural boundaries? Archaeologists can now combine advances in ancient DNA, computational simulations, and ancient environmental reconstruction with analysis of cultural remains to understand the formation and consequences of ethnolinguistic identities in early human populations. This study enhances career opportunities and provide training for a postdoctoral researcher, graduate students, and undergraduates. By embedding the work in local communities, scientific training will occur within a multicultural research environment that builds essential skills needed for maximizing the benefits of a diverse STEM workforce. The research team will conduct research in two regions, where ancient DNA analysis has revealed that forager populations began to maintain separate biological groupings near the end of the last Ice Age cycle. The investigators will develop well-dated cultural and environmental records from sites around and including where ancient DNA has been discovered. The team will conduct new, high-resolution excavations and analyze the remains they recover alongside existing materials excavated using lower resolution methods in the 1970s. This increased detail will enable both datasets to be brought into alignment and maximize their information value to show if cultural remains such as stone artifacts, pigments, bone tools, and beads show evidence of emerging cultural differences between groups known from ancient DNA to have had little biological interaction. Using environmental data, the team will build simulation models of forager resource use to understand how often people would have encountered one another. They will use these models to test if interaction rates or cultural barriers better explain the lack of genetic exchange.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.