H4 abrupt event and late Neanderthal presence in Iberia

Sepulchre, Pierre; Ramstein, Gilles; Kageyama, Masa; Vanhaeren, Marian; Krinner, Gerhard; Sánchez-Goñi, María-Fernanda; d’Errico, Francesco

doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2007.03.041

Cited by 118 publications

(71 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The persistence of these mild climatic conditions in southern Iberia has been linked to the late survival of Neanderthals in this region Sepulchre et al, 2007;Finlayson, 2008). It is likely that the environment provided a patchwork of localities where rainfall and warm or mild conditions maintained resourcerich habitats (Jennings et al, 2011) where Neanderthals may have had access to foods that were unavailable in other areas of Europe, particularly during cold periods.…”

Section: Iberia As An Ecological Region Compared To Other Neanderthalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Salazar‐García

Power

Serra³

et al. 2013

Quaternary International

116

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a b s t r a c tDuring recent decades, Neanderthal diet has been a major research topic in palaeoanthropology. This has been accelerated by the maturation of different techniques, which have produced a plethora of new information. However, this proliferation of data has led to confusing and contradictory results. Furthermore, most of the ecological dietary studies have been carried out on specimens drawn from different time periods and regions, almost exclusively those characterized by cold, open environmental conditions. Subsistence models based on these fragmentary data have been applied to Neanderthals living in a variety of different regions and environments, even though their dietary strategies may have been as variable as regions they inhabited. In this paper we integrate different dietary approaches (studies of the zooarchaeology, stable isotopes and plant remains) from the central and southeastern Mediterranean coast of Iberia in order to develop a broader and more complex picture of Neanderthal diet in different Mediterranean environmental conditions. Our results suggest that there may have been some minor dietary variation due to climatic or environmental differences, but that Neanderthal diet focussed on large terrestrial game, supplemented by plant foods when these were available.Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Neanderthal dietary ecologyThe dietary behaviours of Neanderthals and the relationship between their diet and their social organization, technological abilities, and even their eventual disappearance, have been hotly debated in the anthropological literature. Examining the diets of Neanderthals requires the synthesis of data that have been collected by numerous researchers over the last 150 years. In many cases, the differences between Neanderthal and early modern human diets have been emphasized, at the expense of cogent discussion of the variation within each group. Early modern humans lived in a wide variety of environmental contexts and likely pursued a variety of behaviours throughout this range of environments. The exclusively Eurasian distribution of Neanderthals did not include as many environments, but neither was it the exclusively cold Arctic climate that many have supposed it to be. A more detailed examination of the Neanderthal range and the effects of shifting global climates reveals that this group would have been exposed to a diverse range of environments (Hoffecker, 2009;MacDonald et al., 2009). Just as modern human dietary behaviour likely varied with environments, so, too, can we predict that Neanderthals had different diets in different environments.Our understanding of the diets of Neanderthals comes from three main lines of evidence. The first is the study of the human remains themselves, including the isotope signal recorded in their bones, the microwear on their teeth, and how factors of their lifehistory are related to diet. The second line of evidence includes the study of the remains of their food, in the form of animal and plant remains preserved ...

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Section: Iberia As An Ecological Region Compared To Other Neanderthalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Salazar‐García

Power

Serra³

et al. 2013

Quaternary International

116

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“…These hiatuses strongly suggest discontinuous occupation of the cave sites, as documented for Cova Gran (Martínez-Moreno et al, 2010). This together with variations in settlement patterns of hunter-gatherer populations in the IP may have been related to rapid climate changes (D'Errico and Sánchez-Goñi, 2003;Sepulchre et al, 2007;Bradtmöller et al, 2010;Schmidt et al, 2012). In addition, Aubry et al (2011) assumed that climate change might have triggered partial erosion of archaeological sequences.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Evidence for defecation by humans and a distinction between anthropogenic and other zoogenic inputs may be gained from faecal biomarker analyses (e.g. Sistiaga et al, 2014).…”

Section: Major and Trace Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sediment sequence and site formation processes at the Arbreda Cave, NE Iberian Peninsula, and implications on human occupation and climate change during the Last Glacial

et al. 2014

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Abstract.The Arbreda Cave provides a detailed archaeological record of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic and is a key site for studying human occupation and cultural transitions in NE Iberia. Recently, studies of lake archives and archaeological sites presented new evidence on climate changes in NE Iberia correlating with Heinrich events. It, therefore, needs to be determined whether climate signals can be identified in the cave sequence of Arbreda, and if so, whether these signals can be correlated with stratigraphic indicators suggesting the continuity or discontinuity of human occupation.We conducted a high-resolution sedimentological and geochemical study, including micromorphological investigations, to shed light on stratigraphy, processes of sediment accumulation and post-depositional alteration in the cave.Seven major sediment units were distinguished which partly correlate with archaeological levels. The lower part of the sequence including Mousterian levels J and K consists of fluvial deposits truncated by a sharp erosional disconformity between Mousterian levels J and I. Strong enrichment with phosphorus and strontium reflect zoogenic inputs. The transition from Mousterian to Archaic Aurignacian in levels I and H, respectively, is reflected by more gradual changes in colour, grain size and geochemical composition. However, a peak in potentially wind-blown particles (40-125 µm in diameter) reflects higher aeolian input, and banded microstructure suggests reworking of sediments at the interface. Both properties correlate with low density of finds suggesting low intensity of human occupation related to a dry spell. More arid conditions than during the Holocene are indicated for the Gravettian to Solutrean levels. These findings are in agreement with previous palaeoclimatic interpretations as based on palaeontological proxies.The detailed multi-proxy analyses of the sequence adds to our understanding on sediment accumulation and alteration in the Arbreda Cave. The transition from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic probably includes a gap in human occupation. Assessing the significance and duration of this gap and correlating the climate signal requires three-dimensional reconstructions of find densities and more reliable geochronological control.

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“…These events may have acted as forcing mechanisms, affecting the demographic processes described above (e.g. Müller et al, 2011;Schmidt et al, 2012;Sepulchre et al, 2007;Jimenez-Espejo et al, 2007;Banks et al, 2013;d'Errico and Sánchez Goñi, 2003;Gamble et al, 2004;Shea, 2008). While the timing of climate events relative to large-scale patterns in the archaeological record is suggestive, the mechanisms by which climate forcing acted on human populations are still 15 imperfectly understood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is by gaining an understanding of these smaller-scale patterns, ultimately, that we will be able to understand how climate forcing affects the spatial and cultural dynamics of prehistoric human populations. Previous analyses of climate forcing have used a variety of data to reconstruct the paleoclimate, such as ice-core or marine records (e.g., Bradtmöller et al, 2012;JimenezEspejo et al, 2007;Schmidt et al, 2012), present-day climate data (e.g., Jennings et al, 2011), and climate model 25 simulations (e.g., Banks et al, 2008;Davies and Gollop, 2003;Sepulchre et al, 2007;Benito et al 2017;Hughes et al 2007;Tallavaara et al 2015). These analyses were conducted at varying spatial resolutions, typically on the order of ~50 km x 50 km (= 2500 km 2 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of spatial downscaling methods of general circulation models to study climate variability during the Last Glacial Maximum

Latombe¹,

Burke²,

Vrac³

et al. 2017

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Abstract. The extent to which climate conditions influenced the spatial distribution of hominin populations in the past is highly debated. General Circulation Models (GCMs) and archaeological data have been used to address this issue. Most 15GCMs are not currently capable of simulating past surface climate conditions with sufficiently detailed spatial resolution to distinguish areas of potential hominin habitat, however. In this paper we propose a Statistical Downscaling Methods (SDM) for increasing the resolution of climate model outputs in a computationally efficient way. Our method uses a generalized additive model (GAM), calibrated over present-day data, to statistically downscale temperature and precipitation from the outputs of a GCM simulating the climate of the Last Glacial Maximum (19-23,000 BP) over Western Europe. Once the 20 SDM is calibrated, we first interpolate the coarse-scale GCM outputs to the final resolution and then use the GAM to compute surface air temperature and precipitation levels using these interpolated GCM outputs and fine resolution geographical variables such as topography and distance from an ocean. The GAM acts as a transfer function, capturing nonlinear relationships between variables at different spatial scales. We tested three different techniques for the first interpolation of GCM output: bilinear, bicubic, and kriging. The results were evaluated by comparing downscaled 25 temperature and precipitation at local sites with paleoclimate reconstructions based on paleoclimate archives (archaeozoological and palynological data). Our results show that the simulated, downscaled temperature and precipitation values are in good agreement with paleoclimate reconstructions at local sites confirming that our method for producing finegrained paleoclimate simulations suitable for conducting paleo-anthropological research is sound. In addition, the bilinear and bicubic interpolation techniques were shown to distort either the temporal variability or the values of the response 30 variables, while the kriging method offers the best compromise. Since climate variability is an aspect of their environment to which human populations may have responded in the past this is an important distinction.Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., https://doi

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H4 abrupt event and late Neanderthal presence in Iberia

Cited by 118 publications

References 42 publications

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Neanderthal diets in central and southeastern Mediterranean Iberia

Sediment sequence and site formation processes at the Arbreda Cave, NE Iberian Peninsula, and implications on human occupation and climate change during the Last Glacial

Comparison of spatial downscaling methods of general circulation models to study climate variability during the Last Glacial Maximum

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