Home‐range size in large‐bodied carnivores as a model for predicting neandertal territory size

Abstract

Adult human foragers expend roughly 30-60 kcal per km in unburdened walking at optimal speeds.(1,2) In the context of foraging rounds and residential moves, they may routinely travel distances of 50-70 km per week, often while carrying loads.(3) Movement on the landscape, then, is arguably the single most expensive item in the activity budgets of hunter-gatherers. Mobility costs may have been greater still for Neandertals. They had stocky, short-limbed physiques that were energetically costly to move(4) and lived in relatively unproductive Pleistocene environments(5) that may have required greater movement to deal with problems of biodepletion and resource patchiness.(6) But just how mobile were the Neandertals?

The navigational nose: a new hypothesis for the function of the human external pyramid

“…Another major behavioral shift in Homo at this time was an increase in carnivory, a shift that brought the genus into direct competition with other mammalian carnivores (Churchill et al, 2016). Given this interspecific competition between humans and other African carnivores, it may be most fruitful to ask not what species humans are most closely related to but to which species they are most ecologically similar (Schaller and Lowther, 1969).…”

Une anthropologie biologique de la disparition de l’homme de Néandertal : données récentes

“…Il faut aussi préciser que le territoire (européen, asiatique, etc.) était grand, et les ressources a priori généreuses[9]. On savait l'espèce de Néandertal morphologiquement différente sur le plan osseux, mais l'exploitation des échantillons génétiques propres à ces individus a montré qu'ils étaient également éloignés des hommes modernes sur le plan physiologique, avec des conséquences directes sur une incapacité à s'adapter aux modifications climatiques, environnementales et même culturelles, autour de 32 000 BP[10].…”