Parsimonious indeed, the notion needs work--a lot of work.
And thank you for the maps and thesis links, btw.
But I guess I have to like the idea that people, hanging out down in the south of Italy, or wherever it was, quietly (and probably quite flexibly) hunting and gathering timid little woodland creatures and fishing, would ultimately prevail, while their sexier, attention grabbing mammoth, bison, aurochs, reindeer and or whatever big game there was hunting cousins up north would ultimately hunt themselves out of food, and/or be unable to adapt quickly enough to changing climatic conditions... Gravettians, Solutreans and Magdalenians haven't made as significant impact upon the population genetics of modern Europe.
That could just be human nature, I suppose, that we get so overspecialized that we find ourselves redundant, or we're inflexible in the face of changing conditions we fail to learn new, adaptive behavior.
You're very welcome. I totally agree with you that the cultures which survive are the ones whose people have the ability to be flexible and to adapt to changing conditions. However, sometimes even native intelligence and flexibility aren't enough. I've seen speculation, whether it's true or not I don't know, that part of the problem for Neanderthals was that a difference in anatomy meant that homo sapiens sapiens had the ability to throw projectile spears at their prey, something that was more difficult for Neanderthals, and gave their competitors an advantage.
Then, hunter-gatherers in general had and have a difficult time in adopting the farming lifestyle, even the WHG. It's not so simple as just teaching them what to do. It's a whole different way of looking at the world, a whole new mode of life, requiring different skills and attributes. The Native Americans have not totally adapted in over three hundred years, and there are lots of other examples.
To get back to the WHG, the following is from a book on Paleolithic and Mesolithic Italy by Margherita Mussi:
https://books.google.com/booksid=0d...=onepage&q=site of Villabruna remains&f=false
It's difficult to get a totally complete and accurate picture from google books because so many pages are missing (so don't take this to the bank), but she seems to be drawing a picture where the changing subsistence strategy moved from south to north along with the climate change and the different animals.
By the time we get to the late Epigravettian in northeastern Italy we have people who first, and even later at hunting camps at higher altitudes hunted ibex, a type of wild goat. Later, as the land and climate changed, they hunted roe deer. They also fished a great deal, of which there apparently is much less evidence in the Gravettian, so perhaps they made advancements in the technology, like hooks, or nets, etc.
They carried pouches, and since there are remains that indicate they were increasingly consuming snails, mussels, and other shellfish, hazelnuts etc., they probably were making baskets.
All of the above can be found on page 338.
On page 315 she seems to be saying that up until 12,000 ybp they were hunting mostly ibex. After that, as the land changed, they switched to red deer. There were almost no equids, few bovines, whereas in other parts of Italy there were a lot of equids.
I get the picture of, as you said, a very flexible group of people who could vary their hunting styles and create new technology to take advantage of changing conditions.
This is another paper which says basically the same thing. It's about another Epigravettian site in northeastern Italy. In this one, the researchers describe a group of people who built a shelter or work space in the mountains, an area described as an open Alpine prairie where pines and larches were beginning to appear, for summer and fall hunting and the preparing of hides. They used grinding stones for this. At colder times of the year they utilized the conifer forests further down the mountain, and in winter the resources on the Brenta valley floor. In the mountains they hunted ibex, like Otzi thousands of years later, but also occasionally chamois, bear, caught birds, and fished.
http://www3.arch.cam.ac.uk/clark/PDFs/jfa37_1_Cristiani.pdf
This is the period called the Bolling and Allerod temperate interstadial discussed by the authors of the paper.
That's why I keep posting pictures on the anthropology section and asking questions of Moesan, who knows a heck of a lot more about it than I do. Unfortunately there's no substitute for examining the remains, and even the pictures I find don't show all views, or the measurements aren't posted in the article. Then there's all the disagreement in the field itself.
