Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus
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Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus Dylan Gaffney1
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings. Keywords Pleistocene seafaring · Island colonization · Maritime technology · Migration · Hominin behavior · Adaptive flexibility
Introduction Crossing substantial bodies of water—lakes, straits, seas, and oceans—to arrive at new landmasses has previously been seen as a unique innovation within our species, Homo sapiens. These adaptive capacities were thought to be first acquired as Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1081 4-020-09149-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Dylan Gaffney [email protected] 1
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, UK
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Archaeological Research
a population of anatomically and behaviorally “modern” H. sapiens moved out of Africa and skirted the coast of southern Eurasia before entering Wallacea (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), sometime after 60,000 years ago. Over a quarter century ago, Davidson and Noble (1992) described this maritime colonization as the earliest global evidence for modern human behavior, because the deliberate water crossings through island Wallacea to continental Sahul were associated with systems of symbolic communication and shared meaning (i.e., language) to produce effective seagoing vessels. It also required forward planning and technological provisioning to envisage potential futures, to predict currents and weather conditions, and to arrange regular return trips to recruit new individuals for establishing a viable founder population. More recently, several crucial (and controversial) sites around the world have sparked debate and have been cited as evidence that the first water crossings were made by earlier hominin lineages, potenti
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