Environmental and cultural changes across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in Cantabrian Spain

A review of the cultural evidence from northern coastal Atlantic Spain (a.k.a., Vasco-Cantabria) spanning the late Last Glacial and early Postglacial (from Greenland Interstadial 1 to the mid-Holocene) reveals that some changes may have been related to major climate/environmental changes, while others may be attributed to demographic factors that caused possible resource overexploitation and to historical factors such as the long-term availability of Neolithic domesticates and technology in adjacent regions. The culmination of the warming trend of the Last Glacial Interstadial in the Allerød seems to have been of particular importance in the transition from the classic Upper Magdalenian (with its rupestral and portable art and complex stone and bone technologies) to the Azilian, despite continuity in the main game species and in the process of subsistence intensification. The Younger Dryas, on the other hand, seems to have had little immediate direct repercussion in this region, as the Azilian continued, straddling the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. On the other hand, the climatically non-dramatic Preboreal-Boreal boundary seems to have seen the abrupt, marked break between the “Epimagdalenian” Azilian and the Asturian coastal shell midden Mesolithic in the western sector of the region. This contrasted with greater technological continuity (albeit with similarities to the Sauveterrian tradition in adjacent SW France) in the Mesolithic of the Basque Country, with no archeological indications that the 8.2 cal kya event had important consequences in this region. Then, some 15 centuries later, came the sudden, but centuries-delayed appearance of Neolithic domesticates and ceramics on the Atlantic side of the Cantabrian Cordillera originating from sources in the Mediterranean environments of the upper Ebro basin and/or southern France. This major lifeway change was possibly finally accepted, within a still mixed economy, in the face of the overexploitation of wild food resources. The “neolithization” of Vasco-Cantabria was finally underway by c. 6.6 cal kya, quickly leading to new human-land relationships characterized by mainly ovicaprine pastoralism, apparently limited cereal agriculture, continued foraging, recolonization of the montane interior and the construction of modest megalithic monuments.