Long Lost
Cross-cultural forager myth transmission rules: Implications for the emergence of cumulative culture
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama & Kieran Reilly
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
For most of human evolution, accumulated cultural knowledge has been stored in memory and transmitted orally. This presents a daunting information management problem: how to store and transmit this knowledge in a portable format that resists corruption. One solution -- widespread among foragers -- is to encode knowledge in narrative. However, this strategy depends on accurate performance of the story. Significantly, some forager cultures have rules regulating myth performance, although the extent of this phenomenon is unknown. We hypothesize that these rules subserve high-fidelity transmission across generations. Accordingly, we predicted that, across forager cultures, myth-telling rules will mandate: (P1) transmission by the most proficient storytellers (P2) under low-distraction conditions with (P3) multiple individuals and (P4) multiple generations present, and the application of measures that (P5) prevent, identify, and/or correct errors, (P6) maintain audience attention, (P7) discourage rule violations and/or (P8) incentivize rule compliance. To test these predictions, we searched the forager ethnographic record for descriptions of myth performance, and coded them for prescriptions/proscriptions regarding narrator age, performance context, audience composition, narrative delivery, and audience comportment, as well as sanctions associated with rule transgression or compliance. Results indicate that rules regulating myth performance are widespread across forager cultures, and are characterized by features that reduce the likelihood of copy errors. These findings help elucidate the role that anthropogenic ratchets played in the emergence of cumulative culture.
Severe multi-year drought coincident with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC
Sturt Manning et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
The potential of climate change to substantially alter human history is a pressing concern, but the specific effects of different types of climate change remain unknown. This question can be addressed using palaeoclimatic and archaeological data. For instance, a 300-year, low-frequency shift to drier, cooler climate conditions around 1200 BC is frequently associated with the collapse of several ancient civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East. However, the precise details of synchronized climate and human-history-scale associations are lacking. The archaeological–historical record contains multiple instances of human societies successfully adapting to low-frequency climate change. It is likely that consecutive multi-year occurrences of rare, unexpected extreme climatic events may push a population beyond adaptation and centuries-old resilience practices. Here we examine the collapse of the Hittite Empire around 1200 BC. The Hittites were one of the great powers in the ancient world across five centuries, with an empire centred in a semi-arid region in Anatolia with political and socioeconomic interconnections throughout the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, which for a long time proved resilient despite facing regular and intersecting sociopolitical, economic and environmental challenges. Examination of ring width and stable isotope records obtained from contemporary juniper trees in central Anatolia provides a high-resolution dryness record. This analysis identifies an unusually severe continuous dry period from around 1198 to 1196 (±3) BC, potentially indicating a tipping point, and signals the type of episode that can overwhelm contemporary risk-buffering practices.
Ice and ocean constraints on early human migrations into North America along the Pacific coast
Summer Praetorius et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 14 February 2023
Abstract:
Founding populations of the first Americans likely occupied parts of Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The timing, pathways, and modes of their southward transit remain unknown, but blockage of the interior route by North American ice sheets between ~26 and 14 cal kyr BP (ka) favors a coastal route during this period. Using models and paleoceanographic data from the North Pacific, we identify climatically favorable intervals when humans could have plausibly traversed the Cordilleran coastal corridor during the terminal Pleistocene. Model simulations suggest that northward coastal currents strengthened during the LGM and at times of enhanced freshwater input, making southward transit by boat more difficult. Repeated Cordilleran glacial-calving events would have further challenged coastal transit on land and at sea. Following these events, ice-free coastal areas opened and seasonal sea ice was present along the Alaskan margin until at least 15 ka. Given evidence for humans south of the ice sheets by 16 ka and possibly earlier, we posit that early people may have taken advantage of winter sea ice that connected islands and coastal refugia. Marine ice-edge habitats offer a rich food supply and traversing coastal sea ice could have mitigated the difficulty of traveling southward in watercraft or on land over glaciers. We identify 24.5 to 22 ka and 16.4 to 14.8 ka as environmentally favorable time periods for coastal migration, when climate conditions provided both winter sea ice and ice-free summer conditions that facilitated year-round marine resource diversity and multiple modes of mobility along the North Pacific coast.
Historical and hunter-gatherer perspectives on fast-slow life history strategies
Anthony Volk
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
While there are many possible applications of psychology to human life history strategies, a common hypothesis is the adoption of “fast” life history strategies in response to psychosocial cues of harsh and/or unpredictable environments. This hypothesis has relied almost entirely upon data from industrialized and developed (i.e., modernized) societies. To further explore the evolutionary validity of this hypothesis, I examine data from historical and hunter-gatherer sources. These data show that past incidents and cues of mortality were highly prevalent, direct, and often interrelated, and that caloric limitations and inter-intrasexual competition placed constraints on the use of fast life strategies in response to challenging environments. In both hunter-gatherer and historic populations, harsher and more unpredictable conditions led to a “slow” life history strategy where: a) growth and menarche/spermarche were delayed, b) reproduction was delayed due to energetic constraints and behavioral choices; c) overall fertility was reduced due to energetic constraints and behavioral choices; d) direct parental invest was as high as local energetics would permit. The reverse was found for wealthy/high status individuals who translated their more benign living conditions into earlier sexual maturity and growth, earlier reproduction, greater total reproduction, and the co-opting of paid or slave labor to provide alloparental care for their larger pool of offspring. Thus, past data support the opposite pattern of fast-slow life history strategies as what is seen in modernized environments.
Expanded geographic distribution and dietary strategies of the earliest Oldowan hominins and Paranthropus
Thomas Plummer et al.
Science, 10 February 2023, Pages 561-566
Abstract:
The oldest Oldowan tool sites, from around 2.6 million years ago, have previously been confined to Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle. We describe sites at Nyayanga, Kenya, dated to 3.032 to 2.581 million years ago and expand this distribution by over 1300 kilometers. Furthermore, we found two hippopotamid butchery sites associated with mosaic vegetation and a C4 grazer–dominated fauna. Tool flaking proficiency was comparable with that of younger Oldowan assemblages, but pounding activities were more common. Tool use-wear and bone damage indicate plant and animal tissue processing. Paranthropus sp. teeth, the first from southwestern Kenya, possessed carbon isotopic values indicative of a diet rich in C4 foods. We argue that the earliest Oldowan was more widespread than previously known, used to process diverse foods including megafauna, and associated with Paranthropus from its onset.
Expedient and efficient: An Early Mesolithic composite implement from Krzyż Wielkopolski
Jacek Kabaciński et al.
Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
The Northern European Mesolithic is well known for the manufacture of composite tools and weapons for specialised purposes. A composite implement recovered from the Early Holocene site of Krzyż Wielkopolski 7 in Poland, dated to the Preboreal/Boreal transition, raises questions about expediency versus efficiency in the fabrication of these artefacts. Here, the authors characterise its materials and production: a bone splinter mounted on a shaft of pine wood, secured with bast ligatures coated in birch bark tar. While the manufacture of the implement's individual components can be characterised as ‘expedient’, the finished implement is, however, complex, efficient and durable.