The tortoise and the hare - Small-game use, the broad-spectrum revolution,and paleolithic demography

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. Archaeo faunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (I) early Middle Paleolithic population s were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major popula tion growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean probably occurred before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and (3) subsequent demographic pulses in th e Upper and Epi-Paleolithic greatly reshaped the conditions of selection th at operated on human subsistence ecology, technology, and society. The find ings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's broad -spectrum-revolution hypothesis. However, ranking small prey in terms of wo rk of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proved far more effective in this investigation of human diet breadth than have the taxonom ic-diversity analyses published previously.