The Paleobiology of the Sunghir People

Abstract

The preceding chapters provide extensive information on the context, mortuary rituals, skeletal and dental morphology and morphometrics, dental wear, functional anatomy, paleopathology, and paleochemistry of the human remains from the northern Russian site of Sunghir. The three associated skeletons from Graves 1 and 2 provide the overwhelming volume of data and inferences on the Pleistocene people of Sunghir. Yet the other elements help to fill out a few aspects of the sample. It would be possible, if arduous, to summarize here the various aspects of these human remains that are detailed in the preceding chapters. However, many of the aspects relate to the interpretation of a specific anatomical unit or functional complex. As such, they provide insight into the evolution of these complexes through the Late Pleistocene, as well as inferences regarding their configurations at Sunghir and other Early/Mid Upper Paleolithic (E/MUP) sites. To review each one here would be unnecessarily redundant. Of more interest at this point is to try to fit these people into their Mid Upper Paleolithic (MUP) context and to assess degrees to which the Sunghir human remains might contribute to some of the more general issues relating to last interpleniglacial human populations. In this context, there are aspects of population dynamics, for which the Sunghir humans have some bearing. These aspects involve, in particular, issues of consanguinity and population stability. It has been suggested, based on shared unusual anatomical features, that several of the MUP human skeletal samples (particularly those from multiple burials) include closely related individuals. This has been suggested in particular for the samples from Barma Grande (Formicola 1990), Bausu da Ture (Villotte et al. 2011), Dolní Věstonice II (Vlček 1991; but see data in Fu et al. 2013), and Fanciulli (Grotte des Enfants; Vlček 1965), as well as the El Sidrón Neandertal site (Lalueza-Fox et al. 2011). Moreover, it seems likely that most of these contemporaneous groups of individuals were closely related, if one provides an even generous estimate of the human population densities on the European MUP landscape and the need for individuals to find appropriate mates for reproduction (cf. Wobst 1976).