Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ClimDivE (Influence of Climate variability on the Gravettian cultural Diversity and Evolution)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-01-01 al 2025-12-31
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).
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).
To achieve these objectives, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted: eco-cultural niche modeling. This approach allows one to correlate distributions of archaeological sites with paleoclimate maps to derive an eco-cultural niche model, i.e. the conditions that were occupied by humans who shared specific cultural traits. These models can then be compared quantitatively so that one can identify shared environmental conditions between different human groups, or on the contrary, specific environnements occupied and exploited by each one of them separately. Two types of data are needed: cultural traits geographic occurrences and paleoclimate maps, which constituted two separate work packages in ClimDivE. Integrating this data into a model of human-climate relationships through eco-cultural niche modeling constituted the third work package.
WP1: In order to build our models on appropriate and qualitative data sets of archaeological occurrences, an extensive literature review was conducted by a group of specialists to make an inventory of lithic hunting tools together with environmental and chronological information on Central European archaeological sites. This data base revealed that data was scarse and unequal in quality, which means that they cannot be used as such for further modeling. Our collective work has allowed to underline the weaknesses of documentation and fosters new data collection and documentation in the future. For example, our work in Slovakia has shown that more radiocarbon dating is needed in this region to achieve a better chronological framework (Hromadova et al., in press).
WP2: Modeling the climate during the Gravettian was also a challenge that has rarely been undertaken in precedent works. Together with paleoclimate modelers, a new application of the model iLOVECLIM was set-up to model climate during the whole Gravettian period in Europe (between 34 000 and 24 000 years ago). Because the iLOVECLIM model was not replicating world wide paleoclimate patterns properly – namely, outputs showed a climate too warm as compared with field data – we had to correct the model code to have more realistic outputs.
WP3: To achieve useful eco-cultural niche models that will contribute to our research question, it was first necessary to think about what we expect the model should look like. This aspect is paramount, because some hypothesis is needed on the processes that underlie the relationship between humans and climate in the past, otherwise the model might be too unrealistic for our purpose. Such theoretical work in eco-cultural niche modeling had never been undertaken, which is why we created an international consortium of a dozen of researchers, specialists of Ecology, Prehistoric archaeology, Climate modeling, palenvironmental reconstructions, to build such theoretical framework. The workshop lasted two days in 2025 and successfully led us to better conceptualize eco-cultural niches (Figure 3). In addition, new computational tools were developped to help archaeologists easily create more realistic eco-cultural niche models, targeting methodological gaps that are today rarely considered in eco-cultural niche modeling studies.
WP1: In order to build our models on appropriate and qualitative data sets of archaeological occurrences, an extensive literature review was conducted by a group of specialists to make an inventory of lithic hunting tools together with environmental and chronological information on Central European archaeological sites. This data base revealed that data was scarse and unequal in quality, which means that they cannot be used as such for further modeling. Our collective work has allowed to underline the weaknesses of documentation and fosters new data collection and documentation in the future. For example, our work in Slovakia has shown that more radiocarbon dating is needed in this region to achieve a better chronological framework (Hromadova et al., in press).
WP2: Modeling the climate during the Gravettian was also a challenge that has rarely been undertaken in precedent works. Together with paleoclimate modelers, a new application of the model iLOVECLIM was set-up to model climate during the whole Gravettian period in Europe (between 34 000 and 24 000 years ago). Because the iLOVECLIM model was not replicating world wide paleoclimate patterns properly – namely, outputs showed a climate too warm as compared with field data – we had to correct the model code to have more realistic outputs.
WP3: To achieve useful eco-cultural niche models that will contribute to our research question, it was first necessary to think about what we expect the model should look like. This aspect is paramount, because some hypothesis is needed on the processes that underlie the relationship between humans and climate in the past, otherwise the model might be too unrealistic for our purpose. Such theoretical work in eco-cultural niche modeling had never been undertaken, which is why we created an international consortium of a dozen of researchers, specialists of Ecology, Prehistoric archaeology, Climate modeling, palenvironmental reconstructions, to build such theoretical framework. The workshop lasted two days in 2025 and successfully led us to better conceptualize eco-cultural niches (Figure 3). In addition, new computational tools were developped to help archaeologists easily create more realistic eco-cultural niche models, targeting methodological gaps that are today rarely considered in eco-cultural niche modeling studies.
ClimDivE has produced, or is in the process of producing, results that go far beyond the state of the art in Gravettian archaeology and deep past human-climate interactions studies. It has produced new data sets that will be available openly for other researchers to use upon publication (the data base of sites, the climate simulations). It has also created new computational tools that we hope can help the implementation of eco-cultural niche modeling by other scholars. But the most important contribution of ClimDivE so far is refining and expanding an interdisciplinary framework and conceptual tools to study human-climate interactions in the deep past, a background that is lacking today in studies using ecological niche and species distribution modeling methods applied to material cultural data.