Doctoral Dissertation Research: Movement Ecology and Hominin Behavioral Evolution

George Washington University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Humans have shown an extraordinary ability to live and thrive in almost every environment on the planet. Investigating past strategies that humans used to negotiate their surroundings is critical to further understanding the origins of this amazing adaptability. This dissertation project combines computer modeling and stone tool analysis to understand how our hominin ancestors interacted with their surrounding environments, providing new insights into the evolutionary significance of human-environment interactions. The co-PI will conduct K-12 and public science education outreach activities, and aspects of this project will be carried out in conjunction with a long-standing field research and training program, contributing to the training of American students from diverse backgrounds in archaeology, geology, and ecology. Archaeology has developed a variety of analytical frameworks for documenting human-environment interactions. However, one of the main issues that researchers face is that the archaeological record is time-averaged, meaning that archaeological sites do not represent individual activities but rather an aggregation of them over long time-frames. Thus, in order to understand how past humans interacted with their environments, new methods are needed to document meaningful patterns from aggregated traces of human behavior. This project builds an analytical framework by which hypotheses regarding time-averaged patterns of past human behaviors can be generated and tested. The project combines agent-based modeling with measures of stone tool utilization and transport to characterize hominin land use through the lens of movement. This framework is then applied to time-averaged lithic assemblages to characterize human land use patterns in landscapes. These data are mapped onto raw material source and paleogeographic data to test whether documented differences in land use patterns are the result paleoenvironmental variation. Preliminary results of this work indicate that this project has great potential to provide new insights into hominin ecology and evolution.