Morphological, demographic and genetic traces of Upper Palaeolithic human impact on limpet assemblages in North Iberia

Abstract

Human activities have an impact on extant biotic communities, and may have had just as important an impact in the past. We assess human impact on limpet assemblages during the Upper Palaeolithic in Asturias (north‐west Spain). The intensely exploited genus Patella exhibited a marked size decrease and a change in species assemblage composition, substituting the larger species P. vulgata for the smaller P. depressa. The present Patella assemblages in the upper tidal level exhibit the same pattern as those of the Epipalaeolithic (approx. 12 000 to 6000 years before the present). Although climate change may have contributed to such species replacement, spatial differences between close areas with different densities of Palaeolithic human settlements indicate unequivocal human impact. Present Patella species sampled from the region exhibit genetic signatures of past bottlenecks in mitochondrial DNA, which also indicate recent demographic expansion, suggesting that old impacts have been sufficiently important to leave genetic traces in current populations. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evolution of limpet assemblages driven by environmental changes and harvesting in North Iberia

“…Aura et al 1998, Stiner 2001Richards et al 2005, Bicho & Haws 2008. In the past, their impact would have been more pronounced in the eastern part of Asturias, where human settlements were more dense and abundant (Turrero et al 2012). Traces of past exploitation may be reflected in smaller limpet sizes in eastern zones (Table 2) as a consequence of the selective harvesting of bigger specimens (e.g.…”

“…The 16S rDNA sequences are available in GenBank under accession numbers JF682557 to JF682592, JF682593 to JF682608 and JF758500 for Patella depressa, P. vulgata and P. rustica, respectively, and were already published by Turrero et al (2012). The COI sequences for P. depressa, P. vulgata and P. rus- tica are available in GenBank under accession numbers JF937113 to JF937160, JF937161 to JF937190 and JF937191, respectively.…”

“…3), wherein the abundance of P. vulgata decreased during the studied period in the 2 sites, even down to being absent from Cuevas del Mar today, with the corresponding increase of P. depressa. The average size of the archaeological limpets (Table 2) significantly decreased with time (p << 0.001 for all t-tests between consecutive time periods), and modern individuals of the 2 species were smaller in the east than in the west of the Asturian distribution (p < 0.05 for all t-tests) (for more details, see Turrero et al 2012).…”

“…Morales et al 1998), substitution of one species by another can occur if one is overexploited, leaving part of its niche free to be occupied by other species (Wing & Wing 2001, Tsahar et al 2009). An association between the density of Upper Palaeolithic human populations and current limpet size has been detected in North Iberia, together with genetic variation losses in heavily populated areas, which have been interpreted as a signal of old human effect on limpet assemblages (Turrero et al 2012). Today, limpets are exploited in this region not at a commercial scale but as a low-intensity (small scale) artisanal collection for domestic or local consumption.…”

Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions

“…1. Case studies in the application of archaeological science methods to understand past human-mediated biological translocations and transformations relating to the following: global colonization, origins and spread of food production, island colonization, and trade and urbanization (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18).…”