Human responses to environmental change on the southern coastal plain of the Caspian Sea during the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods

Abstract

This paper presents results of a multidisciplinary research initiative examining human responses to environmental change at the intersection of the southern coastal plain of the Caspian Sea and the foothills of the Alborz Mountains during the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene. Our palaeoenvironmental analysis of two sedimentary cores obtained from a lagoon in close proximity to four caves, occupied by human groups during the transition from hunting and gathering to food-producing ways of life in this region, confirms Charles McBurney's 1968 hypothesis that when Caspian Sea levels were high, Mesolithic hunters were reliant on seal and deer, but as water levels receded and a wide coastal plain emerged, hunters consumed a different range of herbivorous mammalian species. Palynological evidence obtained from these two cores also demonstrates that the cool and dry climatic conditions often associated with the Younger Dryas stadial do not appear to have been extreme in this region. Thus, increasingly sedentary hunting and gathering groups could have drawn 19/07/2019 2 on plant and animal resources from multiple ecological niches without suffering significant resource stress or reduced population levels that may have been encountered in neighbouring regions. Our analyses of botanical, faunal and archaeological remains from a recently-discovered open-air Mesolithic and aceramic Neolithic site also shows an early process of Neolithization in the southern Caspian basin, which was a very gradual, lowcost adaptation to new ways of life, with neither the abandonment of hunting and gathering, nor a climatic trigger event for the emergence of a low-level, food-producing society.

Four millennia of vegetation and environmental history above the Hyrcanian forest, northern Iran

“…So far in these available studies, only Leroy et al (2011) and Haghani et al (2015) have investigated Communicated by T. Litt. the palynological aspects of the southwestern part of the CS; while the other studies have mostly focused on the central and eastern part (e.g. Djamali et al 2009a;Leroy et al 2013a, b;Ramezani et al 2008Ramezani et al , 2013Ramezani et al , 2016Shumilovskikh et al 2016;Leroy et al 2019).…”

“…The multidisciplinary study of Leroy et al (2019) in the south-east of the CS investigated the human responses to environmental alterations during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. According to their palynological evidence, the cool and dry climatic conditions of the Younger Dryas period did not affect this area greatly.…”

The human cultures in South-Eastern Caspian region in final Pleistocene – Holocene period

“…This industry can be compared to those of the hunter-fishers complexes of the Lower Uzboy and Oyuklin, dated 9-7 kaBP (Korobkova, 1996) and to the Neolithic assemblage from Koshimian cave (Vahdati Nasab et al, 2020). Thus, the use of soft hammer knapping technique during the Mesolithic and the pressure technique during the Neolithic (Leroy et al, 2019) appears to be a common trend The earliest evidence of pressure based lithic technology in Central Asia dates back to 13 kaBP (Motuzaite et al, 2017) and during the Early Holocene we see a broad spread of this technology in the region (Brunеt, 2002;Brunet, 2012).…”

“…The burials suggest that the region was occupied in later periods. Recent palynological and sedimentary data from two lagoon cores obtained from southern coastal plain of the Caspian Sea in Iran (Leroy et al, 2019) demonstrates that the cool and dry climatic conditions often associated with the Younger Dryas stadial do not appear to have been extreme in this region. Thus, increasingly sedentary hunting and gathering groups could have drawn on plant and animal resources from multiple ecological niches without suffering significant resource stress or reduced population levels that may have been encountered in neighboring regions.…”

New radiocarbon dating and archaeological evidence reveal the westward migration of prehistoric humans in the drylands of the Asian interior

“…Although the regions acted more as “barriers” due to the harsh environment, they could act periodically as corridors and routeways for human migration (Li et al, 2019a; Tan et al, 2020). However, details of the occupation of and adaptation to these inhospitable lands by prehistoric tribes, and the specific migration routes, are still unclear, and they have become an important interdisciplinary issue (Leroy et al, 2019; Weiss, 2016; Yang et al, 2019).…”