Résumés par session > Résumés Session 3

SESSION 3: Peopling the tropics: islands, forests and mangroves

Colonizing new territories beyond the seas at what costs?

Alban Lazar^a & Thomas Ingicco^b

^a Laboratoire d’Océanographie et Climat, Expérimentations et Approches Numériques (LOCEAN), Paris, France

^b UMR 7194, CNRS, Département Homme et Environnement, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris, France

The growing number of evidence of overseas dispersal during the Middle Pleistocene stage questions the capacity of Homo erectus and its kins to have been able to intentionally take the sea. Whether the colonization of new territories beyond the seas were passive/accidental or strategic/intentional remains debated. Between the two extreme opposite views that are sea gaps were impossible barriers and archipelagos were express highways, there is a large range of possible scenarios such as seagoing with no skills, seafaring with limited skills and planned voyaging with high skills.

Scholars have already proposed agent-based (Hölzchen et al., 2021), genetic (Ruxton and Wilkinson, 2012) or marine (Kaifu et al., 2020) models, and involved cognitive theories (Gaffney, 2021) and experimental archaeology (Bednarik, 1998) to question the capacity of fossil Hominins to reach distant islands. This presentation will not debate whether Middle Pleistocene Hominins intentionally or accidentally reached the oceanic islands of Southeast Asia. We will simply try to evaluate the role of climate, winds and sea surface currents as favourable or unfavourable conditions to reach distant islands during the Pleistocene.

L’appropriation de la mer par l’Homme 

Clara Boulanger

Department of Human and Civilization, Minpaku National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan 

UMR 7194, CNRS, Département Homme et Environnement, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris, France

Archaeology & Natural History, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Marine environments with their dense concentrations of fauna, rich in fatty acid nutrients, are thought to have been important to Anatomically Modern Human subsistence, dispersals and settlements in the Southeast Asian archipelagos. Here, we provide new data and discussion on this topic thanks to the analysis of fish remains and large-scale comparisons on a north-south gradient between three archaeological sites located in the Philippines and four archaeological sites located in the Lesser Sunda Islands. We estimate that humans mostly exploited near-shore environments, and that inter-site differences are directly related to local environmental disparities, and environmental changes due to climate change and sea level variations. We determine that the exploitation of local specific environments required the development of adapted fishing techniques.

Colonizing new worlds: how humans transformed islands and how islands transformed humans

José María Fernández-Palacios

University of La Laguna, Tenerife

Oceanic islands and archipelagos, such as Macaronesia, Polynesia, Lesser Antilles, or Mascarenes, have never been connected to the mainland, thus evolving in isolation. The mild climates of oceanic islands, as well as the lack of competition and predation due to the absence of large pollinators, herbivores and carnivores, have create biotas and ecosystems full of insular bizarreness (dwarfism, gigantism, secondary woodiness, loss of dispersability, loss of defences, diminution of clutch size, etc.), that albeit useful in pristine environs, make the species featuring them very vulnerable after human colonization.

On the other hand, at the initial settlement of oceanic archipelagos continental settlers faced many challenges as they encountered new and radically different environments. They loss important continental resources, such as flint, metals, big game or rivers, and encountered new volcanic features, such as lava tubes, caves, calderas, or lithics such as obsidian, basalt, etc., but especially new ecosystems with unknown endemic plant and animal species. Not only humans had to adapt to new environmental conditions, but their herds as well. That way, island and human societies have been forced to adapted each other, usually resulting much more detrimental for islands that for humans. Aborigines and their herds dramatically transformed the pristine insular landscapes, deforested accelerating erosion and interfered natural fire regimes, resulting in habitat destruction, alien species introduction and in the extinction of endemic species.

Initial human dispersal. Comparison of two South American cases.

José Luis Lanata^a & Karina V. Chichkoyan^b

^a Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de Cambio, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Argentina.

^b Grupo de Estudios sobre Sistemas de Información Geográfica en Arqueología, Paleontología e Historia, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad Nacional de Luján, Argentina.

During human dispersal in new environments, the evolutionary combination between cultural practices and the ecosystems characteristics played a fundamental role in the species new niche construction and its new development. The Americas seem to have been a continent where the human dispersal process, which occurred since the late Pleistocene, was faster than on other continents, due to the previous absence of other Homo spp. to H. sapiens. This gives us an analytical advantage to understand the dynamics of human dispersion in a broad sense, as well as its particularities in tempo, mode and variation. We present a brief comparison of the initial dispersal processes in two different South American ecosystems during the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene; Amazonia and Pampa-Patagonia. We discuss the different process of niche construction in each of these large ecosystems and explore environmental and anthropic drivers influencing the archaeological record of this period.

Homo erectus and the rain forest in the Indonesian archipelago

Anne-Marie Sémah

UMR 7194, CNRS, Département Homme et Environnement, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris, France

Relations between humans and the rain forest in Java Island started as early as the Lower Pleistocene, by the time archaic Homo erectus reached Java after crossing equatorial belts. On the Sangiran Dome, classic Homo erectus will face a continuous alternation between open landscape and forested environments under quite intense volcanic activity. Such environmental evolution would have had required some capacities of cultural adaptation by these Hominins. Anthropogenic impacts of Hominins on this Javanese environment will only appear by the Holocene with Homo sapiens living in the rain forest. This presentation will describe this long record on Java Island of both environmental changes and cultural adaptation by successive Hominin species.

Making a (good) living in the tropical rainforest: What does this stand for? Analyzing facts from contemporary hunter-gatherers

Edmond Dounias

Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, UMR 5175, Centre d’écologie fonctionnelle et évolutive

It is a truism to say that forest natural ecosystems provide plenty of food and medicines to forest dwellers. But more indirect important service consists of controlling the emergence and spread of infectious diseases by maintaining subtle balance among predators and prey, and among vectors and parasites in plants, animals, and humans. When looking at the forests from the perspective of westerner sedentarized standards of living, life in the forest sounds like a permanent struggle in an inhospitable environment. Tropical forest dwellers have a completely different view of their forest and constantly praise the generosity and plentifulness of these particular ecosystems. Nevertheless, taking advantage of all the resources and services provided by the forest requires conformity to a certain number of constraints and rules that are recurrently observed among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The goal of this presentation is to explore these features, as a means to open up discussion about whether early hominids could have fulfilled such prerequisites to possibly sustain their presence in humid forest environments.

Rivers, Plants and Landscape in the early peopling of eastern South America 

Lucas Bueno^a

Myrtle Shock^b

^a Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil

^b Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará, Brazil

Several papers have discussed the role of rivers in knowledge acquisition, occupation, and dispersal of human groups across unfamiliar or inhabited landscapes. Most of the time the rivers are seen as displacement axes, facilitating connections between distant points over short periods of time. However, while they join elements, rivers can equally serve as barriers, be they geographical or cultural. In recent years, plants have received more attention in discussions about early human occupation and dispersals. Evidence of ancient domestication and management process are indicating a complex set of relationships between people and environments, that must be included to model processes of early peopling. As rivers and plant species diversity and distribution could facilitate connections or represent barriers to early dispersals, both elements – rivers and plants – must be integrated to think about landscape perception and construction related to early human entry into new environments, especially tropical ones where both are abundant. In this presentation, we propose to explore the roles of rivers and plants to discuss early peopling of eastern South America.