| Description | The session is aimed to investigate the multifaceted relationships among fauna, vegetation, and humans during the latest Cenozoic. Our purpose is to emphasize the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to the topic, which remains in fact rather obscure in many respects.
The session is especially devoted to analyse the Eurasian ecological scenario during the Quaternary, when different species/demes/populations of the genus Homo dispersed through distinct waves, as well as to investigate the reliability of hypotheses on the relationships between human dispersals and ecosystem dynamics and constraints.
Although some archaeologists continue to reject environmental determinism regarding human evolution, climate shifts and correlated environmental changes would probably have affected hominin dispersal and evolution, despite the precise relationships may remain unaddressed. The cause-and-effect relationship between climate oscillations and faunal/vegetation changes could result cumulatively from the responses of individual species, affecting the internal dynamics of communities, in turn influencing time, extent, and mode of human dispersals. For instance, chronology and causes behind the original diffusion of hominins “out of Africa” and other more hypothetical dispersals toward and/or within Eurasia is at present one of the most hot topics in palaeoanthropology. Whatever the earliest diffusion of hominin groups across Europe was part of the progressive Early Pleistocene faunal renewal, a more consistent presence of humans in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene was probably related with the main faunal and vegetation renewal at the time of the so-called “mid-Pleistocene revolution” (MPR), representing a fundamental change in the Earth’s climate system. In this context, the pattern of human evolution at the MPR – a rather obscure matter since a recent past – appears now a reasonable frontier for the potential of current research in palaeoanthropology, while growing knowledge on this subject drives to focus on regional and local patterns.
Similar questions may be extended to much more recent time-periods, including the last glacial and even the Neolithic time. |
