Niche Construction and Theory of Agricultural Origins. Case studies in punctuated equilibrium

Abstract

IntroductionA central challenge to the theory of agricultural origins (TAO) concerns the integration and joint interpretation of the increasingly large amounts of numeric empirical data made available by participating scientific disciplines, for example, cultural studies, archaeobotany, archaeozoology, plant and animal genetics, radiometric dating, palaeogeography, palaeoclimatology, and others. In a recently published study, Kristen Gremillion et al. (2014) have argued that it may be possible to unify the scientific results pertaining to TAO under the umbrella of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. To the same topic, Kim Niche construction and theory of agricultural origins. Case studies in punctuated equilibrium 7 of plants and animals, both microscopic and macroscopic, including humans (Gould, Eldredge 1977;Gould 1989;Jones et al. 1994;Laland et al. 2016;Saltz et al. 2016;Zeder 2016). NCT is equally promising for applications in archaeology, for which purpose even the elementary (unpretentious) renaming of the Neolithic Package as a mobile eco-system that is capable of environmental or climatic habitattracking may help students and researchers alike to achieve a qualitatively better understanding of the complex processes underlying Neolithisation. In the long run, however, quantitative modelling of archaeological NCT appears to be necessary. Punctuated Equilibrium (PE)In the following, let us explore what might happen in archaeological NCT discourse if concepts derived from the neo-darwinian theory of punctuated equilibrium (Gould, Eldredge 1977;Gould 2007) are taken into consideration. In contrast to classical Darwinian forecasting, the geological record shows not a slow and continuous fossil development (graduation), but instead long periods of stasis with no observable change. Then follows an abrupt switch from one species to the next (punctuation), with no apparent transition. According to Darwin's (and others'), explanation, the geological observation of a seemingly abrupt and quasi-instantaneous origination of new palaeontological species is caused by the notoriously imperfect character of the fossil record due to stratigraphic disturbance, incomplete preservation, and fragmentary research (Gould, Eldredge 1993.223). For PE theory, in contrast, the abrupt origination of species is the result neither of noisy or missing data, nor of an unobserved geographic switch in habitat, but the expected and meaningful consequence of a rapid genetic switch from one species to the next, following the law of natural selection. In a nutshell, most species originate in such brief moments of time, that expected 'transitions' have no apparent manifestation in the geological stratigraphy (Gould 2007).But how does PE work? As indicated above, many PE related processes are (today) subsumed under what is more commonly called the Theory of Complex Systems (or similar), but I propose we continue to use the term PE. An example from physics would be coulomb excitation, whereby a subatomic particle passes so close to an atomic nuc...

A model for archaeologically relevant Holocene climate impacts in the Aegean-Levantine region (easternmost Mediterranean)

“…Some interpret this as a slow and gradual process based on cultural (millennial) timescales (e.g., Fuller et al, 2012;Asouti and Fuller, 2013), and others see it as a rapid process over much shorter biological (decadal) timescales (e.g., Hillman and Davies, 1990;Honne and Heun, 2009;Heun et al, 2012). A recent reanalysis (Weninger, 2017) of published archaeobotanical and archaeozoological data indicates that the wild-domesticate transition (WDT) occurred (1) abruptly at around 10.2±0.2 ka BP, (2) simultaneously (within given error limits) for plants and animals, and (3) synchronously with the abrupt onset of moist conditions in the Near East (Schmiedl et al, 2010;Sharifi et al 2015). It appears that, in terms of understanding the introduction of farming and stock-breeding, past research placed too much emphasis on the Younger Dryas (YD), given that the YD ended as much as 1500 years before the WDT.…”

Vegetation and climate dynamics at the dawn of human settlement: multiproxy palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Hashilan Wetland, western Iran

“…After the end of the YD, the potential impact of a series of rapid climate change (RCC) events through the Holocene caused by massive meltwater pulses into the North Atlantic (Mayewski et al, 2004) also needs to be considered. While a putative 10.2 ka RCC event appears to have adversely impacted human communities in the Western Fertile Crescent region of Jordan, Israel and western Syria (Weninger et al, 2009;Borrell et al, 2015;Weninger, 2017), our evidence from the Eastern Fertile Crescent is insufficient to address this issue. While we need to exercise extreme caution in attributing causality and the shortage of secure and refined dates is a major problem (Flohr et al, 2016), we note that the 9.2 ka RCC event coincides in broad chronological terms with a significant interruption in and relocation of human settlements across the Zagros Mountains.…”

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“…Both positions are supposedly supported by 14C-radiometric data, but which is of generally low quality. A recent chronological re-analysis [78] of the archeological, archeobotanical and archeozoological data confirmed that the wild-domestic-transition (WDT) was indeed initially slow (millennial scale), but terminated at 10.2 ± 0.2 ka calBP with an abrupt switch to herding and agriculture. Interestingly, the WDT is itself synchronous with an abrupt climatic switch to higher precipitation, as documented in marine and terrestrial climate records in the Mediterranean and adjacent regions (e.g., Levant, Iran).…”