Thursday 3 November, 4 PM CET
DR. SARAH PEDERZANI
ABSTRACT: The rapid and dramatic climatic oscillations of the Last Pleistocene strongly impacted the hunter-gatherer lifeways of Palaeolithic hominins and shaped the landscapes and ecosystems they inhabited. However, while we understand that climatic changes must have had far-reaching impacts, we still know very little about how human groups adapted to such changes or their climatic and ecological tolerances of adaptation. This knowledge gap is largely caused by a dearth of climatic data that is representative of terrestrial climatic conditions and can be related to archaeological evidence of human behaviours with sufficient resolution. Methods that can generate climatic and environmental information directly from archaeological sites of interest are key to closing this gap. Two such methods will be the topic of this presentation: stable isotope analysis of animal skeletal remains and analysis of lipid biomarkers from archaeological sediments. Using case studies from Late Neanderthals and the Initial Upper Palaeolithic I will illustrate how stable isotope analyses of animals butchered by humans can be used to provide climatic evidence for different site occupation phases and illuminate climatic patterns in site occupation and in range expansions of humans across Palaeolithic Eurasia. I will then discuss lipid biomarker analyses as a tool to obtain climatic sequences with microstratigraphic resolution and how such analyses can be combined with faunal stable isotope analyses to disentangle climatic choices in site occupation patterns from natural climatic fluctuations during site formation.