Seminar with James Clark and Gonzalo Linares-Matas

The diet and technology of early hominins has shaped conversations about human evolution, but these have often been framed in terms of hundreds of thousands of years. We still know little about the behavioural choices that hominins made to ensure their day-to-day survival in the face of seasonal fluctuations. Recent observations demonstrate that extant primates and modern human hunter-gatherer populations exhibit seasonal adaptations in the way they move across the landscape, as well as in the acquisition and consumption of plant and animal resources. Here, we first present some of our research into detecting these seasonal patterns in the Oldowan archaeological record, and examine the wider implications for hominin behaviour. We argue the ways in which hominins adapted to such seasonal changes are represented by changes in subsistence strategy, mobility, and lithic investment. The second part will be an open Q&A session, where we look forward to discussing the wider importance of seasonality in human evolution.

The recording of this seminar can be found on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_djhfD3aeQw