The commission aims to promote and organize research on the Final Palaeolithic of Northern Eurasia. The focus is on the development of hunter-gatherers adapted to the more temperate conditions of the Late Glacial and Early Postglacial periods, as well as on their expansion into previously uninhabited areas.
To achieve this goal, a multinational network of archaeological and palaeo-environmental researchers has been established to study the range of human-environment interactions during the Late Glacial and Earliest Postglacial periods, approximately from 15,000 to 8,000 years BP.
Cyclic climatic changes resulted in massive glaciations of the Northern Hemisphere that significantly affected the landscape, vegetation, fauna, and human occupations in the northern part of Eurasia. Given the magnitude of these changes during this period, the Final Palaeolithic communities of Northern Eurasia were characterized by a variety of adaptive responses. These responses are reflected in lithic and bone technologies, settlement patterns, subsistence practices, social organizations, and even ideologies. Underlying this regional diversity of specific environmental and cultural changes were the fundamentals of rapid and extreme climatic shifts, which clearly had a major influence on contemporary hunter-gatherer land-use patterns and demography as reflected in aDNA results. The thematic focus of our commission highlights all these research questions.
