One of the great debates about extinction is whether humans or climatic change caused the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna. Evidence from paleontology, climatology, archaeology, and ecology now supports the idea that humans contributed to extinction on some continents, but human hunting was not solely responsible for the pattern of extinction everywhere. Instead, evidence suggests that the intersection of human impacts with pronounced climatic change drove the precise timing and geography of extinction in the Northern Hemisphere. The story from the Southern Hemisphere is still unfolding. New evidence from Australia supports the view that humans helped cause extinctions there, but the correlation with climate is weak or contested. Firmer chronologies, more realistic ecological models, and regional paleoecological insights still are needed to understand details of the worldwide extinction pattern and the population dynamics of the species involved.

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Assessing the Causes of Late Pleistocene Extinctions on the Continents

Between fifty and ten thousand years ago, most large mammals became extinct everywhere except Africa. Slow-breeding animals also were hard hit, regardless of size. This unusual extinction of large and slow-breeding animals provides some of the strongest support for a human contribution to their extinction and is consistent with various human hunting models, but it is difficult to explain by models relying solely on environmental change. It is an oversimplification, however, to say that a wave of hunting-induced extinctions swept continents immediately after first human contact. Results from recent studies suggest that humans precipitated extinction in many parts of the globe through combined direct (hunting) and perhaps indirect (competition, habitat alteration) impacts, but that the timing and geography of extinction might have been different and the worldwide magnitude less, had not climatic change coincided with human impacts in many places.

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Late Quaternary Extinctions: State of the Debate

Archaeology’s main contribution to the debate over the origins of modern humans has been investigating where and when modern human behavior is first recognized in the archaeological record. Most of this debate has been over the empirical record for the appearance and distribution of a set of traits that have come to be accepted as indicators of behavioral modernity. This debate has resulted in a series of competing models that we explicate here, and the traits are typically used as the test implications for these models. However, adequate tests of hypotheses and models rest on robust test implications, and we argue here that the current set of test implications suffers from three main problems: (1) Many are empirically derived from and context‐specific to the richer European record, rendering them problematic for use in the primarily tropical and subtropical African continent. (2) They are ambiguous because other processes can be invoked, often with greater parsimony, to explain their character. (3) Many ...

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The origin of modern human behavior.

This study illustrates the potential of small-game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food-producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major population growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean probably occurred before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and (3) subsequent demographic pulses in the Upper and Epi-Paleolithic greatly reshaped the conditions of selection that operated on human subsistence ecology, technology, and society. The findings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's broad-spectrum-revolution hypothesis. However, ranking small prey in terms of work of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proved far more effective in this investigation of human diet breadth than have the taxonomic-diversity analyses published previously.

The Tortoise and the Hare. Small-Game Use, the Broad-Spectrum Revolution, and Paleolithic Demography.

Although aquatic resources are often seen as central to the development of post-Pleistocene cultural complexity, most models of human evolution have all but ignored the role of aquatic or maritime adaptations during the earlier stages of human history. When did aquatic resources, maritime adaptations, and seafaring first play a significant role in human evolution? I explore this fundamental question by (1) reviewing various theories on the subject; (2) discussing a variety of problems that prevent archaeologists from providing a clear answer; and (3) examining the archaeological record for evidence of early aquatic resource use or seafaring. I conclude that aquatic resources, wherever they were both abundant and relatively accessible, have probably always been used opportunistically by our ancestors. Evidence suggests, however, that aquatic and maritime adaptations (including seafaring) played a significantly greater role in the demographic and geographic expansion of anatomically modern humans after about 150,000 years ago. Another significant expansion occurred somewhat later in time, with the development of more sophisticated seafaring, fishing, and marine hunting technologies.

The Archaeology of Aquatic Adaptations: Paradigms for a New Millennium

An understanding of the mechanics involved in flake formation provides an opportunity for deriving more behavioral information from flake and flake scar morphology. The mechanics of flake formation are directly relevant to the identification of prehistoric flaking techniques and stone tool use. In this paper we provide a model of flake formation that accounts for much of the variation in flake morphology. Flakes can form in a number of ways and despite popular belief they are not all of the conchoidal variety. The bending flake is common in use wear though it is often misidentified as a conchoidal flake. A third major type of flake, the compression flake, is a common product of bipolar impact. To account for the wide variation in flake morphology we follow a tripartite scheme of flake formation comprising initiation, propagation, and termination phases, within which different mechanisms can operate.

The formation of flakes

Preface..1 The past uncovered and its ownership..2 The diversity of surviving traces..3 Dating the past..4 Changing landscapes..5 People, language and society..6 Subsistence and reciprocity..7 Seafarers to Sahul..8 Sahul: a Pleistocene continent..9 The initial colonisation..10 The original Australians..11 Pleistocene settlement..12 Conquest of the deserts..13 Pleistocene artefacts..14 Holocene stone tool innovations..15 Theories and models..16 People of the coast..17 Regional challenges and responses..18 Island settlement..19 Tasmania..20 Art on rock..21 Rock art of temperate Australia..22 Rock art of trpoical Australia..23 Asian and European newcomers..Glossary..Endnotes..References..Index

Prehistory of Australia

The transition from Pleistocene to Archaic/Mesolithic is analyzed in broad ecological terms. The trend throughout most of the Pleistocene toward increasing technological diversity is linked to the expectable ecological tendency to increase resource reliability. The advent of culture enabled man to increase resource reliability by diversifying his resource base. Resources were largely of the K-selected type, economical to procure with simple technology but generally subject to overexploitation. By the end of the Pleistocene the diversification of the resource base had reached a maximum in a number of areas, and increased diversity could only be achieved by devising efficient means to exploit r-selected types of resources. It is this shiff in emphasis that characterizes the Archaic/Mesolithic. This change resulted in increases in sedentism, population density, and competition; occupation of new habitats; diversification of resource use in low-resource-density areas and specialization of resource use in area...

Johan Kamminga

Papers

The formation of flakes

Prehistory of Australia

Research and Development in the Stone Age: Technological Transitions among Hunter-Gatherers [and Comments and Reply]

Over the edge : functional analysis of Australian stone tools

Mechanics of pre-industrial technology