Throughout history, humanity has displayed remarkable resilience by diverse cultural adjustments to changing conditions. In the face of unprecedented environmental shifts brought about by global warming, societies are grappling with the urgent need to adapt. In this context, the ClimDivE project proposes to draw on the rich and long history of humankind to better understand how humans and climate have co-evolved at a large temporal scale.
Contemporary anthropological approaches have profoundly renewed our understanding of the relationships between humans and environments, showing that they go far beyond a logic of unidirectional causality or environmental determinism. Many scholars have highlighted the plurality of ontologies—ways of conceiving the relationships between humans and non-humans—and how they structure social, technical, and symbolic practices, and even give birth to new ecosystems. Thus, while human societies cannot be isolated from their ecological contexts, it is nevertheless necessary to move beyond the conception of the environment as a mere framework or constraint.
The MSCA project ClimDivE – Influence of climate variability on the Gravettian cultural diversity and evolution, had the ambition to propose a new perspective on the deep past history of culture-climate co-patterning and co-evolution at large geographic and chronological scales, using the Gravettian archaeological record (ca. 34-24 000 years ago) as a model framework.
The Gravettian period (Figure 1) is a particularly interesting context for addressing the question of the co-evolution of material culture and the environment. This period represents major changes compared to the preceding Aurignacian period, whether in the field of hunting practices with the appearance of new types of projectile points, funeral practices with the oldest known burials of anatomically modern humans in Europe, or graphic expressions with the appearance of “Venus” figures. The Gravettian was historically considered to be the first pan-European culture due to these unifying elements, but this model has been criticized for the past twenty years: the Gravettian now appears above all as a “mosaic” of regional traditions, evolving over time.
This diversity, highlighted through material productions, is echoed in recent paleogenomic analyses (Posth et al., 2023), which reveal some degree of biological heterogeneity within Gravettian populations. These genetic data suggest the existence of two distinct populations: on the one hand, the human communities of Western Europe, and on the other, those of Central and Eastern Europe.
All of this suggests differentiated dynamics of regional evolution and resilience, with a kind of “divide” between Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, which occured during an unstable climate context, preceding the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). This period is characterized by the rapid alternation between cold, dry episodes and brief episodes of warming. These ten millennia are part of a context of global cooling, with a marked transition from a state of low glaciation in Europe (mainly in the Scandinavian mountains) to the full glacial conditions characteristic of the Last Glacial Maximum.
Contrasting regional cultural trajectories and climate instability made it a perfect case study for the ClimDivE project. It allowed to test whether global scale climatic events (such as the Last Glacial alternating cold and milder episodes) have similar impacts on dictinct regional trajectories, or how different populations of humans mitigate with these changing environments. To contribute to this question, two objectives were set in the project: (1) Characterize culture-climate relationship during the Middle and Recent Gravettian period (32-27 000 years ago) in Central Europe, and (2) compare it with already existing work on culture-climate relationships during the same period in Western Europe (Figure 2).
