Seminar with James Clark and Gonzalo Linares Matas

The diet and technology of early hominins has shaped conversations about  human evolution, but these have often been framed in terms of hundreds  of thousands of years. We still know little about the behavioural  choices that hominins made to ensure their day-to-day  survival in the face of seasonal fluctuations. Recent observations  demonstrate that extant primates and modern human hunter-gatherer  populations exhibit seasonal adaptations in the way they move across the  landscape, as well as in the acquisition and consumption  of plant and animal resources. Here, we first present some of our  research into detecting these seasonal patterns in the Oldowan  archaeological record, and examine the wider implications for hominin  behaviour. We argue the ways in which hominins adapted to  such seasonal changes are represented by changes in subsistence  strategy, mobility, and lithic investment. The second part will be an  open Q&A session, where we look forward to discussing the wider  importance of seasonality in human evolution.