The next steps in human evolutionary palaeoecology

Abstract

and how did hominins position themselves relative to it? Modern human hunter–gatherers always place their campsites near water – it structures much of their movement. What animals were the primary predators of hominins and how did hominins avoid them? The theory of landscape of fear shows us how important this question is. Do the faunal data show us what edible plants were available, and how these changed over time? We have become very good at assigning fossils to taxonomic groups and dating them, but we have yet to really make headway into understanding what these past ecologies were like. Second, the book shows us that we have reached a glass ceiling with our current approach. Our current approach finds fossils, describes them, dates them, and then uses specific animals or groups to infer what the environment was around the site. If there is a sequence, then we might describe how that changes over time, juxtapose it against a long climate and environmental archive record, and look for correlations. We are still very much in an inductive phase of science, and most sciences eventually mature into more deductive forms where the data are used to test hypotheses. We now have the ability to begin to do this. Advances in our ability to create climate models, and environmental models from those, has exploded in the last 10 years and will become increasingly powerful. My recommendation, which we have argued for elsewhere 3 , is that we start to nudge ourselves in that direction. In such a procedure, we would create formal models of climate and environment across regions, and then use our fragmented sequences to test and refine those models, thus creating palaeoscape models. Within those palaeoscapes, we can use computer simulations such as agent-based modelling to experiment with interactions between fauna and their environment, which of course moves us truly in the direction of palaeoecology.