From Serial Specialist to Cereal Specialist: Managing Hunting and Husbandry in the Context of the Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene Fitness Landscape of North China

Summary

Recent reconstructions of terminal Pleistocene-early Holocene settlement and subsistence patterns in northern China indicate that the intensive yet highly mobile hunting pattern that developed during the Younger Dryas as a way of mediating the increased temporal and spatial patchiness of the terminal Pleistocene resource base was maintained and even facilitated by early experiments with farming millet in the early Holocene. The long-term viability of this novel adaptation was evaluated in the context of other adaptations that first appeared in the region in the Early Holocene. Within this framework of competing adaptations, it is argued that though mobile hunter-farmers may have initiated the adoption of agriculture multiple times across northern China in the terminal Pleistocene, this lifeway was ultimately outcompeted by a less mobile, more agriculturally-dependent adaptation that could support greater population densities in the early and middle Holocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Foragers to Frontiers: Recent Research on the Archaeology of the Ordos Region, China   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15435