Teresa Steele

University of California, Davis, Anthropology, Faculty Member

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I am a paleoanthropologist who studies the later phases of human evolution – the emergence of the earliest people who were behaviorally and anatomically modern. In particular, I want to know why these fully modern humans spread out of Africa about 50,000 years ago and were able to replace the Neandertals in Europe. To address these issues, my research focuses on Middle and Late Pleistocene (780,000-10,000 years ago) archaeology – the Middle Paleolithic made by Neandertals in Europe and the Middle Stone Age (MSA) and Mousterian made by their anatomically near modern contemporaries in Africa. I study the mode and tempo of human behavioral evolution during this time through zooarchaeology – reconstructing human subsistence and ecology through the patterns of variation found in vertebrate and molluscan faunal assemblages. Zooarchaeology offers a unique and critical window into modern human origins, because the migration of and replacement by modern humans involved significant demographic expansions with dietary correlates that should be detectable in the faunal record.

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Varsche Rivier 003, South Africa

Springer eBooks, Dec 31, 2022

Reconstructing Late Pleistocene paleoclimate at the scale of human behavior: an example from the Neandertal occupation of La Ferrassie (France)

Scientific Reports, Jan 14, 2021

Exploring the role of changing climates in human evolution is currently impeded by a scarcity of ... more Exploring the role of changing climates in human evolution is currently impeded by a scarcity of climatic information at the same temporal scale as the human behaviors documented in archaeological sites. This is mainly caused by high uncertainties in the chronometric dates used to correlate long-term climatic records with archaeological deposits. One solution is to generate climatic data directly from archaeological materials representing human behavior. Here we use oxygen isotope measurements of Bos/Bison tooth enamel to reconstruct summer and winter temperatures in the Late Pleistocene when Neandertals were using the site of La Ferrassie. Our results indicate that, despite the generally cold conditions of the broader period and despite direct evidence for cold features in certain sediments at the site, Neandertals used the site predominantly when climatic conditions were mild, similar to conditions in modern day France. We suggest that due to millennial scale climate variability, the periods of human activity and their climatic characteristics may not be representative of average conditions inferred from chronological correlations with long-term climatic records. These results highlight the importance of using direct routes, such as the high-resolution archives in tooth enamel from anthropogenically accumulated faunal assemblages, to establish climatic conditions at a human scale. The study of Pleistocene human behavior is intimately connected to the environmental context in which human activity took place. During the Late Pleistocene, Europe was characterized by rapidly oscillating climatic shifts of dramatic magnitude 1,2. Such changes would have posed significant challenges for all hominins, requiring great flexibility and resilience. However, how and to what degree hominin groups responded to harsh and rapidly changing climatic conditions in Late Pleistocene Europe is both debated and remains poorly understood, largely due to a lack of high resolution climate records that can be sufficiently linked to archaeological evidence. Specifically, while excellent local and global climate archives do exist 3-6 , the low precision in chronological dating methods for the archaeological record and for relevant climate archives often leads to a high uncertainty in correlating climatic data obtained from spatially removed archives with archaeological evidence of human activity.

Teresa Steele

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