Guest Speaker to Explore Life in the Late Pleistocene

The IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling (IPEM) is pleased to host a guest presentation by Peter J. Richerson, distinguished professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. The talk, entitled "What Was Life in the Late Pleistocene Like?" will be held Monday, September 17, at 12:10 p.m. in the Heald Hall Auditorium (room G3). A reception will follow the lecture in the Museum of Anthropology (College Hall 110).

Richerson studies cultural evolution using basic concepts and methods borrowed from evolutionary biology. He is especially interested in the novel behavior made possible by cultural evolution, such as the complex technology and large scale–social organization of our species. He is also interested in nonhuman social learning and in tropical and applied limnology.

Richerson is coauthor of Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Richerson's talk and reception are cosponsored by IPEM, the College of Liberal Arts, and the School of Biological Sciences.

Abstract

Paleoclimatology has revealed that late Pleistocene environments were subject to very high amplitude variation on time scales of a millennium and less. Carbon dioxide concentrations were low and the world was, on average, dry. The sophisticated hunter-gatherers that evolved in Africa and spread ca. 50,000 ybp to the rest of the Old World lived in environments with no modern analogs. At least in western Eurasia, Upper Paleolithic peoples were big game specialists, but able to use small game, fish, and plant resources as well. In ethnographically known big game hunters, social systems managing meat sharing are used to mitigate the risks of big game subsistence. In the much more variable Late Pleistocene, risk management must have been a major component of human subsistence strategies. Upper Paleolithic cultural traditions in western Eurasia were dominated by the Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures, which were vast in geographical scale and very long-lived by comparison to Holocene cultures. Cave art suggests that warfare was uncommon and that supernatural ideas were undeveloped. One model for the social system of the Upper Paleolithic is a system of orderly anarchy in which simple but powerful social institutions permitted band scale social units to aggregate and disaggregate in a highly flexible manner to exploit resource booms and escape resource collapses. Late Pleistocene Africa seems to have fluctuated between more and less technically sophisticated adaptations, perhaps because aridity in Africa sometimes drove human populations to such low densities that they could not sustain complex technology. The relative simplicity of Neanderthal technology may also owe to low population density.

About IPEM

IPEM is a fellowship program that aims to bridge the gap between anthropology and biology and produce professionals versed in evolutionary approaches integrating the study of biology and culture. More information.