Abstract The role of environmental change in the evolution of cultural traits is a topic of long-standing scientific debate with strongly contrasting views. Major obstacles for assessing environmental impacts on the evolution of material culture are the fragmentary nature of archaeological and – to a somewhat lesser extent – geoscientific archives and the insufficient chronological resolution of these archives and related proxy data. Together these aspects are causing difficulties in data synchronization. By no means does this paper attempt to solve these issues, but rather aims at shifting the focus from demonstrating strict chains of causes and events to describing roughly contemporaneous developments by compiling and comparing existing evidence from archaeology and geosciences for the period between 40 and 15 ka in Central Europe. Analysis of the archaeological record identifies five instances at around 33, 29, 23.5, 19, and 16 ka, for which evidence suggests an increased speed of cultural evolution. By comparing data from different geoscientific archives, we discuss whether or not these instances have common characteristics. We stress that common characteristics per se are no proof of causality; repeated co-occurrences of certain features over long periods of time, however, suggest that certain explanations may be more plausible than others. While all five cases roughly coincide with pronounced and rapid environmental changes, it is also observed that such conditions do not necessarily trigger major changes in the material culture. Increases and decreases in the diversity of cultural traits seem to be rather correlated with the overall demographic development. In compiling and comparing our data, we also identify periods with high need and potential for future research regarding the relation between environmental change and cultural evolution.

中文翻译：

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40 至 15 ka 中欧的文化演变和环境变化

摘要 环境变化在文化特征演变中的作用是一个长期存在的科学争论话题，其观点截然不同。评估环境对物质文化演变的影响的主要障碍是考古和地球科学档案的零碎性质——在某种程度上——地球科学档案以及这些档案和相关代理数据的时间分辨率不足。这些方面共同导致数据同步困难。本文绝不试图解决这些问题，而是旨在通过汇编和比较 40 至 15 ka 时期考古学和地球科学的现有证据，将重点从展示严格的原因和事件链转移到描述大致同时期的发展。在中欧。对考古记录的分析确定了大约 33、29、23.5、19 和 16 ka 的五个实例，证据表明文化进化速度加快。通过比较来自不同地球科学档案的数据，我们讨论了这些实例是否具有共同特征。我们强调，共同特征本身并不能证明因果关系；然而，某些特征在很长一段时间内反复同时出现，表明某些解释可能比其他解释更合理。虽然所有五个案例都与显着和快速的环境变化相吻合，但也观察到这些条件不一定会引发物质文化的重大变化。文化特征多样性的增加和减少似乎与总体人口发展相当相关。