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

在大众的想象中，“穴居人”一直是人类原始状态的典型。尽管150多年来我们对人类进化路径的不断发现和复杂理解的发展。但是，即使有了这些进步，也很难摆脱人们普遍持有的看法，即我们的祖先过着一种不稳定的生活，只有把洞穴作为最初的原始家园才能忍受。我们的研究计划将仔细研究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广大公众对我们穴居祖先的看法。事实是，在人类进化的大部分过程中，我们很少或根本没有找到明确的证据来证明我们的祖先生活在哪里。这就导致了它们像其他动物一样占据景观的说法。也许这涉及到使用在考古记录中没有留下任何痕迹的临时住所。然而，在50万年前之后，这种情况似乎在全球范围内发生了相当迅速的变化。从那时起，我们开始看到，在非洲、亚洲和欧洲，早期的人类在洞穴中生活了很长一段时间。因此，洞穴的使用远非代表原始的、原始的人类状态，而是指向人类行为的一场革命；一场空间、技术、景观和时间观念的革命；这是一场被考古学家忽视的革命，但其影响却是巨大的。我们的研究项目将从对一个显示这种新行为的关键地点的详细分析开始。La Cotte de St Brelade是泽西岛南海岸一个壮观的洞穴系统。它为尼安德特人猎人长期占领该遗址提供了近20万年的证据。在一个多世纪的挖掘中，它产生了尼安德特人文物和其他欧洲已知遗骸的最大收藏之一。然而，整整一代人都无法接触到这些档案，也从未对其进行过全面的分析。我们打算把现代的、科学的考古分析带到圣布雷拉德村独特的材料收藏上。我们这样做是为了详细研究该地区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了尼安德特人的“家”；尼安德特人如何利用他们周围的景观；以及它们如何组织自己成为一个高效的物种，并在该地区拥有悠久而成功的定居历史。我们将以la Cotte的研究为跳板，对这种激进的生活方式进行新的理解。为了做到这一点，我们将把我们的发现与欧洲其他洞穴遗址进行比较，这些洞穴遗址有类似的证据表明长期居住地点的发展；时间第一次呈现垂直维度的地点，证据的数量让我们称之为“超级地点”。在我们项目的最后一部分，我们的目标是汇集来自世界各地的研究人员，他们正在研究显示出类似的革命性行为的网站。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。它也为探索一种非常令人兴奋的可能性打开了大门，即大众想象中的穴居人实际上代表了人类进化道路上一个根本性的变革阶段。

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.