Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus
Dylan Gaffney
Journal of Archaeological Research volume 29, pages255–326 (2021)

Abstract
Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.

Introduction
Crossing substantial bodies of water—lakes, straits, seas, and oceans—to arrive at new landmasses has previously been seen as a unique innovation within our species, Homo sapiens. These adaptive capacities were thought to be first acquired as a population of anatomically and behaviorally “modern” H. sapiens moved out of Africa and skirted the coast of southern Eurasia before entering Wallacea (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), sometime after 60,000 years ago. Over a quarter century ago, Davidson and Noble (1992) described this maritime colonization as the earliest global evidence for modern human behavior, because the deliberate water crossings through island Wallacea to continental Sahul were associated with systems of symbolic communication and shared meaning (i.e., language) to produce effective seagoing vessels. It also required forward planning and technological provisioning to envisage potential futures, to predict currents and weather conditions, and to arrange regular return trips to recruit new individuals for establishing a viable founder population.

More recently, several crucial (and controversial) sites around the world have sparked debate and have been cited as evidence that the first water crossings were made by earlier hominin lineages, potentially extending the global history of seafaring into the Early and Middle Pleistocene. At the same time, following the discovery of numerous Middle Pleistocene H. sapiens sites across eastern Eurasia, unilinear models for the dispersal of coastally adapted Late Pleistocene H. sapiens along the southern coast of Eurasia are now untenable (Dennell and Petraglia 2012; Rabett 2018). Rather, there seems to have been a series of complex dispersal processes and population interactions predating 70,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al. 2017). Moreover, the antiquity of pigment use, engraving, and personal decoration, conventionally used to mark the emergence of modern human behavior in H. sapiens, has been pushed back in time and attributed to Homo erectus (Joordens et al. 2015), Homo neanderthalensis (Hoffmann et al. 2018), and possibly Homo heidelbergensis (Burdukiewicz 2014). Thus, the concept of “modernity”—what it is to be a behaviorally modern and distinct species—and how this interrelates to water-crossing behaviors needs to be reexamined.

In this paper, I wade into the debate about Pleistocene water crossings, island colonization, and what this means for understanding behavioral variability within our genus. This builds on pivotal discussions by Keegan and Diamond (1987), Bednarik (2003), Leppard (2015b), and Erlandson (2017), who have investigated the same topic from archaeological and biogeographic perspectives. In particular, I pose three questions: how did water crossings vary across different hominin populations, to what extent did H. sapiens uniquely express adaptive flexibility during water crossings and the colonization of novel environments, and how can this help us understand the rate and scale of hominin adaptive flexibility in different regions? The Pleistocene is a useful temporal focus for this discussion, marking the emergence of the Homo genus, and our own species H. sapiens, alongside glacial and interglacial transgressions prior to the establishment of approximately modern sea levels during the Holocene

Public at
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-020-09149-7

DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves wrote:
> Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus
> Dylan Gaffney
> Journal of Archaeological Research volume 29, pages255–326 (2021)
>
> Abstract
> Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.
>
> Introduction
> Crossing substantial bodies of water—lakes, straits, seas, and oceans—to arrive at new landmasses has previously been seen as a unique innovation within our species, Homo sapiens. These adaptive capacities were thought to be first acquired as a population of anatomically and behaviorally “modern” H. sapiens moved out of Africa and skirted the coast of southern Eurasia before entering Wallacea (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), sometime after 60,000 years ago. Over a quarter century ago, Davidson and Noble (1992) described this maritime colonization as the earliest global evidence for modern human behavior, because the deliberate water crossings through island Wallacea to continental Sahul were associated with systems of symbolic communication and shared meaning (i.e., language) to produce effective seagoing vessels. It also required forward planning and technological provisioning to envisage potential futures, to predict currents and weather conditions, and to arrange regular return trips to recruit new individuals for establishing a viable founder population.
>
> More recently, several crucial (and controversial) sites around the world have sparked debate and have been cited as evidence that the first water crossings were made by earlier hominin lineages, potentially extending the global history of seafaring into the Early and Middle Pleistocene. At the same time, following the discovery of numerous Middle Pleistocene H. sapiens sites across eastern Eurasia, unilinear models for the dispersal of coastally adapted Late Pleistocene H. sapiens along the southern coast of Eurasia are now untenable (Dennell and Petraglia 2012; Rabett 2018). Rather, there seems to have been a series of complex dispersal processes and population interactions predating 70,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al. 2017). Moreover, the antiquity of pigment use, engraving, and personal decoration, conventionally used to mark the emergence of modern human behavior in H. sapiens, has been pushed back in time and attributed to Homo erectus (Joordens et al. 2015), Homo neanderthalensis (Hoffmann et al. 2018), and possibly Homo heidelbergensis (Burdukiewicz 2014). Thus, the concept of “modernity”—what it is to be a behaviorally modern and distinct species—and how this interrelates to water-crossing behaviors needs to be reexamined.
>
> In this paper, I wade into the debate about Pleistocene water crossings, island colonization, and what this means for understanding behavioral variability within our genus. This builds on pivotal discussions by Keegan and Diamond (1987), Bednarik (2003), Leppard (2015b), and Erlandson (2017), who have investigated the same topic from archaeological and biogeographic perspectives. In particular, I pose three questions: how did water crossings vary across different hominin populations, to what extent did H. sapiens uniquely express adaptive flexibility during water crossings and the colonization of novel environments, and how can this help us understand the rate and scale of hominin adaptive flexibility in different regions? The Pleistocene is a useful temporal focus for this discussion, marking the emergence of the Homo genus, and our own species H. sapiens, alongside glacial and interglacial transgressions prior to the establishment of approximately modern sea levels during the Holocene
>

Op dinsdag 18 mei 2021 om 02:32:28 UTC+2 schreef DD'eDeN aka note/nickname/alas_my_loves:

Thanks, we see more & more scient.papers that address Homo's aquatic adaptations.
Only complete idiots still believe Pleistocene Homo ran antelopes to exhaustion.
Google "coostal dispersal Pleistocene Homo PPT":
AFAWCS,
- Pliocene probably followed the Indian Ocean shores,
- early-Pleistocene archaic Homo was probably the most-aquatic (littoral shellfish collection),
- mid-Pleistocene Homo evolved to diving-wading, e.g. neandertals,
- late-Pleistocene H.sapiens evolved to wading-walking.

> Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus
> Dylan Gaffney
> Journal of Archaeological Research volume 29, pages255–326 (2021)
>
> Abstract
> Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.
>
> Introduction
> Crossing substantial bodies of water—lakes, straits, seas, and oceans—to arrive at new landmasses has previously been seen as a unique innovation within our species, Homo sapiens. These adaptive capacities were thought to be first acquired as a population of anatomically and behaviorally “modern” H. sapiens moved out of Africa and skirted the coast of southern Eurasia before entering Wallacea (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), sometime after 60,000 years ago. Over a quarter century ago, Davidson and Noble (1992) described this maritime colonization as the earliest global evidence for modern human behavior, because the deliberate water crossings through island Wallacea to continental Sahul were associated with systems of symbolic communication and shared meaning (i.e., language) to produce effective seagoing vessels. It also required forward planning and technological provisioning to envisage potential futures, to predict currents and weather conditions, and to arrange regular return trips to recruit new individuals for establishing a viable founder population.
>
> More recently, several crucial (and controversial) sites around the world have sparked debate and have been cited as evidence that the first water crossings were made by earlier hominin lineages, potentially extending the global history of seafaring into the Early and Middle Pleistocene. At the same time, following the discovery of numerous Middle Pleistocene H. sapiens sites across eastern Eurasia, unilinear models for the dispersal of coastally adapted Late Pleistocene H. sapiens along the southern coast of Eurasia are now untenable (Dennell and Petraglia 2012; Rabett 2018). Rather, there seems to have been a series of complex dispersal processes and population interactions predating 70,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al. 2017). Moreover, the antiquity of pigment use, engraving, and personal decoration, conventionally used to mark the emergence of modern human behavior in H. sapiens, has been pushed back in time and attributed to Homo erectus (Joordens et al. 2015), Homo neanderthalensis (Hoffmann et al. 2018), and possibly Homo heidelbergensis (Burdukiewicz 2014). Thus, the concept of “modernity”—what it is to be a behaviorally modern and distinct species—and how this interrelates to water-crossing behaviors needs to be reexamined.
>
> In this paper, I wade into the debate about Pleistocene water crossings, island colonization, and what this means for understanding behavioral variability within our genus. This builds on pivotal discussions by Keegan and Diamond (1987), Bednarik (2003), Leppard (2015b), and Erlandson (2017), who have investigated the same topic from archaeological and biogeographic perspectives. In particular, I pose three questions: how did water crossings vary across different hominin populations, to what extent did H. sapiens uniquely express adaptive flexibility during water crossings and the colonization of novel environments, and how can this help us understand the rate and scale of hominin adaptive flexibility in different regions? The Pleistocene is a useful temporal focus for this discussion, marking the emergence of the Homo genus, and our own species H. sapiens, alongside glacial and interglacial transgressions prior to the establishment of approximately modern sea levels during the Holocene

Op dinsdag 18 mei 2021 om 12:31:09 UTC+2 schreef littor...@gmail.com:

(sorry I forgot the word "Homo" somewhere)

Thanks, we see more & more PA papers that address Homo's aquatic adaptations.
Only complete idiots still believe Pleistocene Homo ran antelopes to exhaustion.
Google "coostal dispersal Pleistocene Homo PPT":
They didn't need boats to colonize islands.
AFAWCS,
- Pliocene Homo probably followed the Indian Ocean shores in S-Asia,,
- early-Pleistocene archaic Homo was perhaps the most-aquatic (littoral shellfish collection),
- mid-Pleistocene Homo evolved to diving-wading, e.g. neandertals,
- late-Pleistocene H.sapiens evolved to wading-walking.

______

> > Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus
> > Dylan Gaffney
> > Journal of Archaeological Research volume 29, pages255–326 (2021)
> >
> > Abstract
> > Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.
> >
> > Introduction
> > Crossing substantial bodies of water—lakes, straits, seas, and oceans—to arrive at new landmasses has previously been seen as a unique innovation within our species, Homo sapiens. These adaptive capacities were thought to be first acquired as a population of anatomically and behaviorally “modern” H. sapiens moved out of Africa and skirted the coast of southern Eurasia before entering Wallacea (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), sometime after 60,000 years ago.. Over a quarter century ago, Davidson and Noble (1992) described this maritime colonization as the earliest global evidence for modern human behavior, because the deliberate water crossings through island Wallacea to continental Sahul were associated with systems of symbolic communication and shared meaning (i.e., language) to produce effective seagoing vessels. It also required forward planning and technological provisioning to envisage potential futures, to predict currents and weather conditions, and to arrange regular return trips to recruit new individuals for establishing a viable founder population.
> >
> > More recently, several crucial (and controversial) sites around the world have sparked debate and have been cited as evidence that the first water crossings were made by earlier hominin lineages, potentially extending the global history of seafaring into the Early and Middle Pleistocene. At the same time, following the discovery of numerous Middle Pleistocene H. sapiens sites across eastern Eurasia, unilinear models for the dispersal of coastally adapted Late Pleistocene H. sapiens along the southern coast of Eurasia are now untenable (Dennell and Petraglia 2012; Rabett 2018). Rather, there seems to have been a series of complex dispersal processes and population interactions predating 70,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al. 2017).. Moreover, the antiquity of pigment use, engraving, and personal decoration, conventionally used to mark the emergence of modern human behavior in H. sapiens, has been pushed back in time and attributed to Homo erectus (Joordens et al. 2015), Homo neanderthalensis (Hoffmann et al. 2018), and possibly Homo heidelbergensis (Burdukiewicz 2014). Thus, the concept of “modernity”—what it is to be a behaviorally modern and distinct species—and how this interrelates to water-crossing behaviors needs to be reexamined.
> >
> > In this paper, I wade into the debate about Pleistocene water crossings, island colonization, and what this means for understanding behavioral variability within our genus. This builds on pivotal discussions by Keegan and Diamond (1987), Bednarik (2003), Leppard (2015b), and Erlandson (2017), who have investigated the same topic from archaeological and biogeographic perspectives. In particular, I pose three questions: how did water crossings vary across different hominin populations, to what extent did H. sapiens uniquely express adaptive flexibility during water crossings and the colonization of novel environments, and how can this help us understand the rate and scale of hominin adaptive flexibility in different regions? The Pleistocene is a useful temporal focus for this discussion, marking the emergence of the Homo genus, and our own species H. sapiens, alongside glacial and interglacial transgressions prior to the establishment of approximately modern sea levels during the Holocene

On Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 10:54:22 AM UTC-4, littor...@gmail.com wrote:
> Op dinsdag 18 mei 2021 om 12:31:09 UTC+2 schreef littor...@gmail.com:
>
> (sorry I forgot the word "Homo" somewhere)
>
> Thanks, we see more & more PA papers that address Homo's aquatic adaptations.
> Only complete idiots still believe Pleistocene Homo ran antelopes to exhaustion.
> Google "coostal dispersal Pleistocene Homo PPT":
> They didn't need boats to colonize islands.
> AFAWCS,
> - Pliocene Homo probably followed the Indian Ocean shores in S-Asia,,
> - early-Pleistocene archaic Homo was perhaps the most-aquatic (littoral shellfish collection),
> - mid-Pleistocene Homo evolved to diving-wading, e.g. neandertals,
> - late-Pleistocene H.sapiens evolved to wading-walking.
> ______
> > > Pleistocene Water Crossings and Adaptive Flexibility Within the Homo Genus
> > > Dylan Gaffney
> > > Journal of Archaeological Research volume 29, pages255–326 (2021)
> > >
> > > Abstract
> > > Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.
> > >
> > > Introduction
> > > Crossing substantial bodies of water—lakes, straits, seas, and oceans—to arrive at new landmasses has previously been seen as a unique innovation within our species, Homo sapiens. These adaptive capacities were thought to be first acquired as a population of anatomically and behaviorally “modern” H. sapiens moved out of Africa and skirted the coast of southern Eurasia before entering Wallacea (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), sometime after 60,000 years ago. Over a quarter century ago, Davidson and Noble (1992) described this maritime colonization as the earliest global evidence for modern human behavior, because the deliberate water crossings through island Wallacea to continental Sahul were associated with systems of symbolic communication and shared meaning (i.e., language) to produce effective seagoing vessels. It also required forward planning and technological provisioning to envisage potential futures, to predict currents and weather conditions, and to arrange regular return trips to recruit new individuals for establishing a viable founder population.
> > >
> > > More recently, several crucial (and controversial) sites around the world have sparked debate and have been cited as evidence that the first water crossings were made by earlier hominin lineages, potentially extending the global history of seafaring into the Early and Middle Pleistocene. At the same time, following the discovery of numerous Middle Pleistocene H. sapiens sites across eastern Eurasia, unilinear models for the dispersal of coastally adapted Late Pleistocene H. sapiens along the southern coast of Eurasia are now untenable (Dennell and Petraglia 2012; Rabett 2018). Rather, there seems to have been a series of complex dispersal processes and population interactions predating 70,000 years ago (Martinón-Torres et al. 2017). Moreover, the antiquity of pigment use, engraving, and personal decoration, conventionally used to mark the emergence of modern human behavior in H. sapiens, has been pushed back in time and attributed to Homo erectus (Joordens et al. 2015), Homo neanderthalensis (Hoffmann et al. 2018), and possibly Homo heidelbergensis (Burdukiewicz 2014). Thus, the concept of “modernity”—what it is to be a behaviorally modern and distinct species—and how this interrelates to water-crossing behaviors needs to be reexamined.
> > >
> > > In this paper, I wade into the debate about Pleistocene water crossings, island colonization, and what this means for understanding behavioral variability within our genus. This builds on pivotal discussions by Keegan and Diamond (1987), Bednarik (2003), Leppard (2015b), and Erlandson (2017), who have investigated the same topic from archaeological and biogeographic perspectives. In particular, I pose three questions: how did water crossings vary across different hominin populations, to what extent did H. sapiens uniquely express adaptive flexibility during water crossings and the colonization of novel environments, and how can this help us understand the rate and scale of hominin adaptive flexibility in different regions? The Pleistocene is a useful temporal focus for this discussion, marking the emergence of the Homo genus, and our own species H. sapiens, alongside glacial and interglacial transgressions prior to the establishment of approximately modern sea levels during the Holocene

Pygmies cross water many times daily.

Off topic

The Dutch and Belgian teams seem to be the leadership in solar car endurance racing, from Darwin to Adelaide, Australia.
I've been watching the videos, very interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLfJ08OXxI4