The Tortoise and the Hare: Small-Game Use, the Broad-Spectrum Revolution, and Paleolithic Demography

TLDR

The study demonstrates how small‑game data can identify and date Paleolithic demographic pulses linked to modern human origins and the rise of food‑producing economies. The authors employ small‑game archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy to trace these demographic events. They find that early Middle Paleolithic populations were very small and dispersed, that a major population growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean likely predated the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and that subsequent Upper and Epi‑Paleolithic pulses reshaped selection pressures on subsistence, technology, and society, supporting Flannery’s broad‑spectrum revolution hypothesis and showing that ranking small prey by capture effort is more effective than taxonomic diversity analyses.

Abstract

This study illustrates the potential of small‐game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food‐producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major population growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean probably occurred before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and (3) subsequent demographic pulses in the Upper and Epi‐Paleolithic greatly reshaped the conditions of selection that operated on human subsistence ecology, technology, and society. The findings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's broad‐spectrum‐revolution hypothesis. However, ranking small prey in terms of work of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proved far more effective in this investigation of human diet breadth than have the taxonomic‐diversity analyses published previously.