Product Description: Mary Stiner uses ecological niche theory to analyze and interpret several Middle Paleolithic archaeological and paleontological sites in southern Europe. Her concern is with how the hunting, scavenging and foraging behavior of Neandertals compared and contrasted with the subsistence behavior of other large predators living in the region at the time--lions, hyenas, and wolves, for example--and with how Neandertal subsistence behavior related to the behavior of the anatomically modern humans who subsequently came to dominate the area in the Upper Paleolithic...read more

Product Description: Drawing from a wide variety of human societies and prey species, this book seeks to validate the importance of mortality studies for understanding modern and prehistoric human ecology. In a presentation that sets out to be both methodologically and theoretically innovative, the contributors combine archaeological and actualistic approaches with seasonal and longer-term demographic cycles and the controlled integration of mortality data with other classes on information...read more