Doctoral Dissertation Research: Movement Ecology and Hominin Behavioral Evolution

博士论文研究：运动生态学与人类行为进化

• 批准号: 1747943
• 负责人: David Braun
• 金额: $ 2.52万
• 依托单位: George Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-01-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1747943&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Movement; Ecology

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.

人类在地球上几乎所有环境中都表现出了非凡的生存和繁荣能力。研究人类过去用来应对周围环境的策略对于进一步了解这种惊人的适应性的起源至关重要。该论文项目结合了计算机建模和石器分析，以了解我们的古人类祖先如何与周围环境相互作用，为人类与环境相互作用的进化意义提供新的见解。联合首席研究员将开展 K-12 和公共科学教育推广活动，该项目的各个方面将与长期的实地研究和培训计划结合起来，为来自不同考古背景的美国学生的培训做出贡献、地质学和生态学。考古学已经开发了多种分析框架来记录人类与环境的相互作用。然而，研究人员面临的主要问题之一是考古记录是按时间平均的，这意味着考古遗址并不代表个体活动，而是代表长期活动的汇总。因此，为了了解过去的人类如何与环境互动，需要新的方法来记录人类行为汇总痕迹中有意义的模式。该项目构建了一个分析框架，通过该框架可以生成并测试有关过去人类行为的时间平均模式的假设。该项目将基于主体的建模与石器利用和运输的测量相结合，通过运动的视角来描述古人类的土地使用情况。然后将该框架应用于时间平均的石器组合，以表征景观中的人类土地利用模式。这些数据被映射到原材料来源和古地理数据上，以测试记录的土地利用模式差异是否是古环境变化的结果。这项工作的初步结果表明，该项目具有为古人类生态和进化提供新见解的巨大潜力。