Influence of Climate variability on the Gravettian cultural Diversity and Evolution

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Currently facing major environmental changes due to global warming, a growing concern of modern societies is related to how we will be able to cope with these rapid changes to survive. This kind of preoccupation is probably not new: over the course of its history, the human species has been able to adapt to very different environmental conditions thanks to diversified cultural adaptations. The objective of the project “ClimDivE” is to understand the role of environmental change in the diversity and evolution of cultural adaptations at large geographic and chronological scales, using the archaeological record of the Gravettian (32-26 000 years before present) as an example framework. At this period, archaeologists have shown that two neighboring regions, Western and Central Europe, exhibit very different cultural trajectories, without being able to understand the large-scale mechanism that influenced this pattern. The ClimDivE project aims to explore the factors composing this mechanism by integrating archaeological data and paleoclimate simulations into a unified approach: “Eco-cultural niche modeling”. This approach derived from the field of distributional ecology allows one to identify the environmental conditions associated with specific cultural traits. To do so, Dr. Vignoles will gather pertinent archaeological occurrences and environmental variables for the Central European Gravettian. These data will feed a mathematical model that represents the niche. These results will be compared with her previous work on the Western European Gravettian. Based at Liège with shorter stays in Kansas University and Paris-Saclay, the research will be supervised by three internationally recognized researchers specialized in the Gravettian, ecology and paleoclimatology. The proposal will result in a model underlining different types of factors – environmental, cultural, demographical – probably implicated in the separate evolution of neighboring regions during the Gravettian.