HUMAN ADAPTATION TO DIFFERENT ALTITUDES THROUGH TIME AND CLIMATIC CHANGES

The evolution of Homo sapiens has always benefited from its ability to adapt to the most diverse environments.

The subject of the adaptation of human groups to the environment has been of interest to scholars, whose attention is often turned to cases of adaptation to environments with extreme conditions and to the so-called ecological niches.

However, little attention has been given to the choice of human groups to occupy extremely different environments (high mountains, higher than 2000 meter asl vs lowlands) and how high altitude settlements relate to the lowland sites in the framework of the land management. This is particularly the case of the Finale Pleistocene to Mid-Holocene period in the Horn of Africa.

HUMA will be the first project to fully explore the contribution of a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to the understanding of human adaptation to the different environments in the Later Stone Age of the Horn of Africa.

This will be achieved by integrating the most up-to-date approaches in lithic techno-functional analysis with organic and inorganic residues analysis on lithic artefacts and dental calculus analysis.

Focusing on archaeological sites from Ethiopian highlands (Beefa Cave, a site discovered in 2019) and Somali highlands and plains, Huma will investigate the role played by the climate played in the development of the cultural traits and how environmental factors may have fostered specific adaptations to different ecological niches and encouraged seasonal use of them.Lithic techno-functional analysis, Residues analysis, Archaeobotany, Experimental Archaeology, Dental Calculus analysis, and aDNA analysis will be applied in order to answer the research questions.

Both the University of Florence and the University of Connecticut are the ideal environments for undertaking the proposed cross-disciplinary research, as they will contribute with their theoretical, methodological, and professional resources to reaching the project's goals.