Matzig David N, Marwick Ben, Riede Felix, Warnock Rachel C M
Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Højbjerg, Denmark.
Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2024 Aug 14;11(8):240321. doi: 10.1098/rsos.240321. eCollection 2024 Aug.
Phylogenetic models are commonly used in palaeobiology to study the patterns and processes of organismal evolution. In the human sciences, phylogenetic methods have been deployed for reconstructing ancestor-descendant relationships using linguistic and material culture data. Within evolutionary archaeology specifically, phylogenetic analyses based on maximum parsimony and discrete traits dominate, which sets limitations for the downstream role cultural phylogenies, once derived, can play in more elaborate analytical pipelines. Recent methodological advances in Bayesian phylogenetics, however, now allow us to infer evolutionary dynamics using continuous characters. Capitalizing on these developments, we here present an exploratory analysis of cultural macroevolution of projectile point shape evolution in the European Final Palaeolithic and earliest Mesolithic (approx. 15 000-11 000 BP) using a Bayesian phylodynamic approach and the fossilized birth-death process model. This model-based approach leaps far beyond the application of parsimony, in that it not only produces a tree, but also divergence times, and diversification rates while incorporating uncertainties. This allows us to compare rates to the pronounced climatic changes that occurred during our time frame. While common in cultural evolutionary analyses of language, the extension of Bayesian phylodynamic models to archaeology arguably represents a major methodological breakthrough.
系统发育模型在古生物学中常用于研究生物进化的模式和过程。在人文科学中，系统发育方法已被用于利用语言和物质文化数据重建祖先与后代的关系。特别是在进化考古学领域，基于最大简约法和离散性状的系统发育分析占据主导地位，这限制了文化系统发育一旦得出后在更精细分析流程中所能发挥的下游作用。然而，贝叶斯系统发育学最近的方法进展，现在使我们能够使用连续性状推断进化动态。利用这些进展，我们在此使用贝叶斯系统发育动力学方法和化石出生-死亡过程模型，对欧洲旧石器时代晚期和中石器时代早期（约公元前15000 - 11000年）投射点形状演变的文化宏观进化进行探索性分析。这种基于模型的方法远远超越了简约法的应用，因为它不仅生成一棵树，还能得出分歧时间和多样化率，同时纳入不确定性。这使我们能够将速率与我们研究时间段内发生的显著气候变化进行比较。虽然贝叶斯系统发育动力学模型在语言文化进化分析中很常见，但将其扩展到考古学领域可以说是一项重大的方法突破。
