Younger Dryas Cold Adaptation in the Northern Great Basin and Southern Columbia Plateau of North America

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cold mitigation through technological, social, and settlement strategies is one of humanity’s defining evolutionary benchmarks. Even with fire and shelter, humans are unable to sustainably live in environments where temperatures fall below 0°C. The innovation of structurally and functionally complex technologies such as multi-layered insulated clothing, snares and deadfalls, and projectile weaponry allowed our ancestors to withstand bitter cold and procure adequate food in places with low biodiversity. The First Peoples of the Americas undoubtedly used cold adaptive strategies, yet details from the Pleistocene archaeological record are rare with previous discourse being focused on select regions. In this paper I use expectations derived from archaeological and ethnographic data to evaluate new and existing archaeological evidence for cold adaptive strategies during the Younger Dryas in the Northern Great Basin and Southern Columbia Plateau of North America. Findings show the collective archaeological evidence as one of the most detailed and robust datasets in the world of this antiquity. Ultimately, these data highlight the area as a key laboratory for understanding the complex intersection of social organization, technology, and climate in the settlement of North America, humanity’s adaptations to cold.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Early Human Dynamics in Arid and Mountain Environments of the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51268