Environmental changes and cultural adaptations of human populations during the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition in southwestern France between 44.000 and 35.000 BP

• Main Authors: Fourcade, Tiffanie, Sánchez Goñi, María Fernanda, Lahaye, Christelle, Linda, Rossignol, D’errico, Francesco
• Other Authors: IRAMAT-Centre de recherche en physique appliquée à l’archéologie (IRAMAT-CRP2A), Institut de Recherches sur les Archéomatériaux (IRAMAT), Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM)-Université d'Orléans (UO)-Université Bordeaux Montaigne (UBM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM)-Université d'Orléans (UO)-Université Bordeaux Montaigne (UBM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Environnements et Paléoenvironnements OCéaniques (EPOC), Observatoire aquitain des sciences de l'univers (OASU), Université Sciences et Technologies - Bordeaux 1 (UB)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Sciences et Technologies - Bordeaux 1 (UB)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL), De la Préhistoire à l'Actuel : Culture, Environnement et Anthropologie (PACEA), Université de Bordeaux (UB)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2019
• Subjects: [SDV.EE]Life Sciences [q-bio]/Ecology; environment; [SDU.STU.CL]Sciences of the Universe [physics]/Earth Sciences/Climatology; Greenland; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-03692626

International audience One of the joint issues in archaeology and paleoenvironment is the impact of climate changes on human populations and their means of adaptation. Determining the impact of climatic changes on past human populations is difficult and needs to identify possible synchronicities between a climatic event and a cultural transition. However, the identification of a concomitance is undermined by the uncertainties inherent in the chronologies of archaeological sites (dating methods) and by the resolution of environmental data. Our study focuses on improving the temporal resolution of these environmental data for southwestern France, a region that has provided abundant studies on cultural traditions since the Middle Palaeolithic.Pollen grains and spores preserved in marine sediments are good tracers of environmental changes and our study was carried out using a deep-sea core collected in the Bay of Biscay. This analysis made it possible to study at very high-resolution (100-300 years), the environmental changes in southwestern France between 44,000 and 35,000 years before the present. We then compare our results with the chronology of culturaltransitions in the southwestern France, allowing us to better understand whether climate changes may have been concomitants with the development of these cultural transitions.Our very high-resolution pollen study and other climate tracers preserved in the same samples allowed us to detect several climate phases and associate them with the main climate events in the North Atlantic Ocean and Greenland, i.e. Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and Heinrich events. In addition, we were able to observe three phases during the Heinrich 4 stadial, which were identified in very high-resolution studies of Greenland icecores, but also in deep-sea cores from the Iberian margin.