Paleolithic’s men colonized new areas and adopted new techniques to deal with great climate changes.
This has been revealed by an international team of archaeologists, led by Aitor Ruiz-Round, researcher Juan de la Cierva at the University Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences of the University of Zaragoza, after analyzing the human settlement in the Adriatic basin during the last
Maximum glacial and the tardiglaciar (c. 35,000-12,000 years before the present).
As reported on Monday, the University of Zaragoza, the results of the research reveal the strategies adopted by the Human Groups of the Paleolithic to deal with environmental changes.
Among them, the migration towards the new coastal areas and the colonization of the subalpine mountain spaces.
According to the authors of research, the Adriatic basin results “a privileged environment” to observe the adaptations of human groups to climate changes due to their particular geography.
On the one hand, all the northern half of what is now the Adriatic Sea is very shallow, so during the moments of maximum glaciation it was an emerged plain.
On the other hand, the relative closeness of the Alps, Apennines and Dinaric Alps causes that during some periods a significant percentage of the surface of the Adriatic basin was occupied by glaciers.
Thus, throughout the analyzed period, the territory available in the large central plain was reducing due to the increase in the marine level, while the habitable area in the piedmonds went expanding as the glaciers retreated.
In the study, published in Quavernary Science Reviews, all the radiocarbonate dating are analyzed for the period, a total of 278 from 66 archaeological sites from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and Greece.
The results show an exponential increase of the population from the last glacial maximum in the currently emerged areas, possibly from the increasingly reduced Adriatic plain.
Also a rapid colonization of the mountain spaces released by the recession of the glaciers.
Likewise, the adoption periods of certain technical innovations coincide with those of other European zones, so the existence of networks of contacts and exchanges with these, well of ideas and knowledge or directly population can be deduced.
According to the aforementioned sources, this type of archaeological investigations may not be only useful for the study of the past, but also of “example of how human beings adapt to drastic climate and environmental changes, such as that which is currently presented”
.
In the studio researchers have participated in the Universities of Southampton (United Kingdom), Bournemouth (United Kingdom), Zagreb (Croatia), Ferrara (Italy), the Austria Institute of Archaeological and the Archeology Service of the Department of Var (France)
.
