Tropical rainforests are complex and varied environments found around the globe in tropical and subtropical regions. They hold a large biodiversity but also present multiple challenges, both for their human occupations and archaeological studies. In recent decades, we have learned that our ancestors lived in these environments much earlier than we thought and continuously over tens of thousands of years. Using stable isotope analyses, we hope to better understand how hunter-gatherers lived there in the past and if they perhaps gradually started using them differently before the introduction of agriculture.
Tropical rainforests are complex and varied environments found around the globe in tropical and subtropical regions. They hold a large biodiversity but also present multiple challenges, both for their human occupations and archaeological studies. In recent decades, we have learned that our ancestors lived in these environments much earlier than we thought and continuously over tens of thousands of years. Using stable isotope analyses, we hope to better understand how hunter-gatherers lived there in the past and if they perhaps gradually started using them differently before the introduction of agriculture.
Urbanization, forestry, and agriculture are readily associated with contemporary human land use, but how we use the land around us has changed greatly through our species' long history. The availability of food, seasonality, or the concentration of a particularly abundant rich food source are all examples of concerns that prehistoric populations would have faced, all of which would have been managed through land use strategies.
Directly and systematically assessing how past populations utilized their ecosystems, especially as far back as the Pleistocene, remains particularly challenging because pre-urban hunter-gatherer societies may not have left us with large-scale or significant traces. However, such studies are important to identify and assess drivers of long-term land changes and dynamics and to provide baselines for subsequent changes.
Dr. Nicolas Bourgon is carrying out zinc isotope analyses using a multi-collector mass spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma (MC-ICP-MS). The isotope analysis is carried out on fossil tooth enamel samples dissolved in acid from which the element zinc was previously separated using ion chromatography. The results obtained can help us distinguish between diets that rely more heavily on plants or meat, for example.
Dr. Nicolas Bourgon is carrying out zinc isotope analyses using a multi-collector mass spectrometer with inductively coupled plasma (MC-ICP-MS). The isotope analysis is carried out on fossil tooth enamel samples dissolved in acid from which the element zinc was previously separated using ion chromatography. The results obtained can help us distinguish between diets that rely more heavily on plants or meat, for example.
Using a systematic comparison of multi-isotopic data of δ66Zn, δ13C, and δ18O, we seek to quantify hunter-gatherers' dietary reliance on different resource types (e.g., plant, animal, and aquatic). Although the choice of food consumed may not have left visible traces in the landscape or the archeological records, these geochemical tracers can help us explore whether gradual dietary transitions were already underway even before the introduction of agriculture or animal husbandry.
This project is co-funded by an ongoing Walter Benjamin funding program of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, with the project specifically looking into omnivory and how zinc isotopes can help us detect this dietary behaviour. This project is also being conducted in collaboration with the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (Berlin, Germany), the University of Sri Jayewardenepura (Gangodawila, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka), and the Australian National University (Canberra, Australia).
The starting point for the project, conducted in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, is existing initiatives in Indigenous and traditional territories in South America and Europe, that work to regenerate relationships between many species, human and non-human, based on the ways of life of ForestPeoples.
RESILIENT: Forest Cities - Utopia and Development in the Modern Amazon is a 3 year-funded project of the Gerda Henkel Foundation as part of the special Programme: Lost Cities: Perception of and living with abandoned cities in the cultures of the world. It focuses on 20th century ‘lost cities’ in the Amazon created and abandoned in association with…
The present system of globalisation and the increasing interdependence of disparate human populations is rooted in the mass migration of people, non-human animals, crops and cultural beliefs from Eurasia to the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia.
Since the evolutionary relationships among languages can be seen analogously to the genealogical relationships of different species, phylogenetic models and methods developed originally for biological evolution are increasingly being applied to the reconstruction of past dynamics of language evolution. Namely, approaches utilizing Bayesian inference have become popular techniques to generate binary-branching trees upon linguistic material, such as lexical data. For several language families, these approaches have been utilized to estimate when languages diverged from their common ancestor and the temporal origins of language subgroups.
Loss of biodiversity is one of the most urgent threats to ecosystems, particularly on tropical islands such as Madagascar. Effective conservation efforts should be informed by assessing the combined threats of deforestation, biological invasions, and climate change, which operate on multiple timescales. This project uses proxy data from the bones of both human-introduced animals (e.g., livestock, dogs, and rodents) and endemic animals (e.g., extinct megaherbivores and extant mouse lemurs and rodents) to estimate taxon-specific responses to past changes in resource availability during the past ~3,000 years.
