Residential Mobility in Upper Palaeolithic Europe

In the past and still today, hunter-gatherer communities rely on moving around to find what they need from food and raw materials to places with cultural or social importance. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that how often people move depends on things like the environment and group size. These patterns of movement shape many aspects of life: what tools people make, how they live together, and what traces they leave behind for archaeologists to find. Recent archaeological research has mostly looked at how individuals moved (for example, by analysing chemicals in teeth) or at movement around a single site or cluster of sites (like studying where stone tools came from). While these studies give us snapshots of individual lives or movement around specific places, they dont tell us much about how whole groups moved around over longer times and bigger areas. For Europes Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,00012,000 years ago), we still dont have a clear, large-scale picture of how mobile people were and how this shaped what we find today. This project aims to uncover how often Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer groups moved their camps (residential mobility) and how they used different landscapes across Europe. Specifically, it will look at: (1) Whether changes in climate affected how people hunted animals and made stone tools; (2) If people changed their toolkit when environments became riskier or when they moved more often; (3) Whether hunting practices and stone tool strategies were connected; (4) How mobility and landscape use were influenced by climate. To do this, the project will analyse animal bone and stone tool data from across Europe and within three specific regions. The project uses methods from human behavioural ecology, analysing data on animal remains and stone tools to estimate mobility patterns. Statistical methods will help compare these patterns with past environmental and climate data. This project will provide the first large-scale, systematic assessment of group mobility during the European Upper Palaeolithic. Instead of treating stone tools simply as finished products, it will analyse them as resources that people used and discarded over time, revealing new insights into how hunter-gatherers lived, moved, and adapted to changing climates.