d'Errico Francesco, Banks William E, Warren Dan L, Sgubin Giovanni, van Niekerk Karen, Henshilwood Christopher, Daniau Anne-Laure, Sánchez Goñi María Fernanda
CNRS, UMR 5199-De la Préhistoire à l'Actuel: Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie, Université de Bordeaux, 33615 Pessac Cedex, France;
Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Witwatersrand 2050, South Africa.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7869-7876. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1620752114. Epub 2017 Jul 24.
The archaeological record shows that typically human cultural traits emerged at different times, in different parts of the world, and among different hominin taxa. This pattern suggests that their emergence is the outcome of complex and nonlinear evolutionary trajectories, influenced by environmental, demographic, and social factors, that need to be understood and traced at regional scales. The application of predictive algorithms using archaeological and paleoenvironmental data allows one to estimate the ecological niches occupied by past human populations and identify niche changes through time, thus providing the possibility of investigating relationships between cultural innovations and possible niche shifts. By using such methods to examine two key southern Africa archaeological cultures, the Still Bay [76-71 thousand years before present (ka)] and the Howiesons Poort (HP; 66-59 ka), we identify a niche shift characterized by a significant expansion in the breadth of the HP ecological niche. This expansion is coincident with aridification occurring across Marine Isotope Stage 4 ( 72-60 ka) and especially pronounced at 60 ka. We argue that this niche shift was made possible by the development of a flexible technological system, reliant on composite tools and cultural transmission strategies based more on "product copying" rather than "process copying." These results counter the one niche/one human taxon equation. They indicate that what makes our cultures, and probably the cultures of other members of our lineage, unique is their flexibility and ability to produce innovations that allow a population to shift its ecological niche.
考古记录表明，人类文化特征通常在不同时间、世界不同地区以及不同的古人类类群中出现。这种模式表明，它们的出现是复杂且非线性进化轨迹的结果，受到环境、人口和社会因素的影响，需要在区域尺度上进行理解和追踪。利用考古和古环境数据应用预测算法，可以估计过去人类群体所占据的生态位，并识别随时间的生态位变化，从而为研究文化创新与可能的生态位转移之间的关系提供了可能性。通过使用这些方法来研究南非的两种关键考古文化，即斯蒂尔湾文化（距今7.6万至7.1万年）和豪伊森斯·波特文化（HP；距今6.6万至5.9万年），我们识别出了一种生态位转移，其特征是HP生态位的广度显著扩大。这种扩张与海洋同位素阶段4（距今7.2万至6万年）期间发生的干旱化同时出现，在距今6万年时尤为明显。我们认为，这种生态位转移是由一种灵活的技术系统的发展促成的，该系统依赖于复合工具以及更多基于“产品复制”而非“过程复制”的文化传播策略。这些结果与一个生态位对应一个人类类群的等式相悖。它们表明，使我们的文化以及可能我们谱系中其他成员的文化独特的是其灵活性以及产生使群体能够改变其生态位的创新的能力。
