2011 Volume 50 Issue 2 Pages 85-94
This paper focuses on the interaction between the natural environment and Palaeolthic human activity with particular reference to faunal changes and tool assemblages. However, causal relations between the natural environment and humans are easy to speculate about but difficult to elucidate. There are three different research areas. The first is a macro environment area that is totally independent from human activity or accessibility. The second is a so-called “effective environment” area. The third area is a pure archaeological area that is exclusively led by human-made artifact phenomena. The “effective environment” area should be the central target for an explicit discussion of humans-environmental interactions. Responding to climatic changes during the Pleistocene, Palaeoloxodon antiquus appeared during the warm climate period, and Mammuthus primigenius appeared during the glacial environment. Thick compact bones of the elephant were used to provide massive bifacial tools like bone handaxes and bone cleavers. After the extinction of the mammoth in the final stage of the Pleistocene, ca. 14,000 cal BP, no these tool types could have been produced from medium and small animal bones. However, the real historical process between mega fauna and bone tool production in MIS 2 did not proceed along this line. Bifacial bone handaxes were no longer produced after ca. 40,000 cal BP, even though mammoth elephants existed near Palaeolithic hunters in Europe. The emergence of “blade technique” at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic produced various fine blade tools ; specifically, burins were often applied to the bone tool production. The extraction of thin and narrow plate from bone/horn/ivory blanks was only made possible by the “groove and splinter technique.” This technique was applicable not only to mammoth bones and tusks, but also to the long bones of deer and other middle-sized animals, irrespective of their thickness or compactness. This paper proposes a testable referential model for the interaction between natural environment and humans through concrete material evidence.
