TY - JOUR
T1 - Small game hunting in montane rainforests
T2 - Specialised capture and broad spectrum foraging in the Late Pleistocene to Holocene New Guinea Highlands
AU - Gaffney, Dylan
AU - Summerhayes, Glenn R.
AU - Luu, Sindy
AU - Menzies, James
AU - Douglass, Kristina
AU - Spitzer, Megan
AU - Bulmer, Susan
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the Bulmer family for making the collection available for study, along with the National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea for ongoing loan of the material. We are indebted to David Bulmer for initial bulk faunal identifications and bagging undertaken in the 1980s. Many thanks go to Tim Denham and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the draft manuscript. We particularly thank J. Ouwendijk for bibliographic assistance and L. O'Neill for photographing the faunal material.
PY - 2021/2/1
Y1 - 2021/2/1
N2 - Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleistocene Homo sapiens as they expanded out of Africa and through Southeast Asia and Sahul for the first time. However, faunal sequences from these environments that shed light on past hunting practices are rare. In this paper we assess zooarchaeological evidence from Yuku and Kiowa, two sites that span that Pleistocene to Holocene boundary in the New Guinea Highlands. We present new AMS radiocarbon dates and a revision of the stratigraphic sequences for these sites, and examine millennial-scale changes to vertebrate faunal composition based on NISP, MNI, and linear morphometric data to shed light on variability in hunting practices, processes of natural cave deposition, and the local palaeoenvironment at the end of the LGM through to the Late Holocene. We show that Yuku was first occupied at least c. 17,500 years ago and that Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene hunters targeted a wide range of small-bodied and agile species from the mid-montane forest, with a particular focus on cuscus (Phalanger spp.). At Kiowa, occupied from around 12,000 years ago, a similar range of species were targeted, but with an added emphasis on specialised Dobsonia magna fruit bat hunting. We then integrate other zooarchaeological data from the wider Highlands zone to build a model of generalist-specialist hunting dynamics and examine how this more broadly contributes to our understanding of tropical foraging during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene.
AB - Moving into montane rainforests was a unique behavioural innovation developed by Pleistocene Homo sapiens as they expanded out of Africa and through Southeast Asia and Sahul for the first time. However, faunal sequences from these environments that shed light on past hunting practices are rare. In this paper we assess zooarchaeological evidence from Yuku and Kiowa, two sites that span that Pleistocene to Holocene boundary in the New Guinea Highlands. We present new AMS radiocarbon dates and a revision of the stratigraphic sequences for these sites, and examine millennial-scale changes to vertebrate faunal composition based on NISP, MNI, and linear morphometric data to shed light on variability in hunting practices, processes of natural cave deposition, and the local palaeoenvironment at the end of the LGM through to the Late Holocene. We show that Yuku was first occupied at least c. 17,500 years ago and that Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene hunters targeted a wide range of small-bodied and agile species from the mid-montane forest, with a particular focus on cuscus (Phalanger spp.). At Kiowa, occupied from around 12,000 years ago, a similar range of species were targeted, but with an added emphasis on specialised Dobsonia magna fruit bat hunting. We then integrate other zooarchaeological data from the wider Highlands zone to build a model of generalist-specialist hunting dynamics and examine how this more broadly contributes to our understanding of tropical foraging during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106742
DO - 10.1016/j.quascirev.2020.106742
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85098726808
VL - 253
JO - Quaternary Science Reviews
JF - Quaternary Science Reviews
SN - 0277-3791
M1 - 106742
ER -