Project Grant 2244673

This three-year, $279,546 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075) will fund research into the drivers and proxies of behavioral diversity among late Pleistocene and Holocene hunter-gatherers. A team led by Yale University will conduct archaeological excavations and analyses in two regions where ancient DNA analysis has revealed hunter-gatherer populations began maintaining separate biological groupings near the end of the last ice age. High-resolution excavations will be performed and existing materials reanalyzed to develop well-dated cultural and environmental records from sites where ancient DNA was discovered. Simulation models of forager resource use will be built to understand interaction rates between groups and test if cultural barriers or interaction rates better explain the lack of genetic exchange. The research aims to study conditions under which cultural boundaries are established and maintained, with the goal of enhancing understanding of how ethnolinguistic identities first emerged and were maintained in early human populations.