Archaeofaunal evidence of human adaptation to climate change in Upper Paleolithic Iberia

The rich archaeofaunal record of Upper Paleolithic Iberia has long been a productive source of information about human response to climate change in the latest Pleistocene and earliest Holocene. In this article, I use the archaeozoological record from late Pleistocene Iberia to show that humans responded to late glacial climate extremes in ways specific to the macro-bioclimatic regions in which they lived. Nestedness, cluster (unweighted pair-group method using arithmetic averages [UPGMA]), and non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analyses suggest that in Mediterranean bioclimates, which were less impacted by glacial extremes, people implemented a general broad-spectrum hunting strategy. In the colder, more climatically extreme “Euro-Siberian” region, the data suggest a diversity of hunting adaptations, likely shaped by specifics of local environments. While technological change and increasing global connectivity since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) have moderated the direct impact of climate change on humans, these analyses - and others - suggest that local management rather than global decision-making will be key to human adaptations in environments most strongly affected by modern climate change.