The Emergence Of Modern Human Behavior

Humanity has been associated with high levels of extinctions among competing species, not only in the modern world of industrialized agriculture but even from the first appearance of our species, Homo sapiens, during the Pleistocene Epoch. In fact, one of the fundamental questions in human evolution is, what was the nature of the interaction between the earliest modern humans from Africa and their Eurasian competitors, the Neanderthals, that resulted in the latter's extinction 30,000 years ago? Physical anthropology shows that the modern human advantage was not physical prowess. Current archaeological research thus focuses on the modern human landscape adaptation, i.e., how they strategized use of resources in time and space (how they hunted animals, foraged for plants, and relied on other humans for security), as potentially distinct from their evolutionary cousins. Testing competing hypotheses of the contrast between Neanderthal and modern human landscape adaptations requires high-resolution archaeological data from the excavation of sites with the potential to discriminate what activities the occupants were pursuing in that given site.

The multidisciplinary team created by Dr. Gilbert Tostevin & Dr. Gilliane Monnier, both of the University of Minnesota, along with colleagues in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Israel, will investigate one such site, Tvaro ná-Za kolou in the Czech Republic, that contains artifacts of the archaeological culture most likely representing the earliest modern human penetration into Neanderthal-occupied Europe. This culture, the Bohunician, appears to have spread into Central Europe from the Near East but did not penetrate further west than Bohemia, nor further east than western Ukraine. The limited success of the Bohunician adaptation over the Neanderthals stands in contrast to the Aurignacian, the modern human culture that spread 5,000 years later across all of Europe and is associated with the extinction of the Neanderthals. The project at Tvaro ná-Za kolou is designed to produce the highest resolution of data on the Bohunician landscape adaptation to date, thereby advancing archaeologists' ability to contrast the Bohunician, Aurignacian, and Neanderthal landscape adaptations. Not only will the project help discriminate what made modern humans' Ice Age ancestors so successful, it will also provide field and laboratory training for US, Czech, and other nations' graduate students in the teams innovative microarchaeological and 3D artifact modeling techniques, the latter providing the first publicly-accessible digital collection of artifacts from the entirety of a site of this age.

The aim of this project is the high-resolution excavation, analysis, and dating of the Tvaro ná-Za kolou site. By reconstructing stone tool production at the site in relation to the use of organic artifacts that did not preserve (but that can be detected chemically in the site's sediment), the team will establish a new method for determining how a site's function within the population's landscape adaptation affects the artifactual content of the site. When applied to other sites in the region, this approach will transform archaeologists' ability to understand adaptive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals in this, and other, regions.