Despite advances in our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the Paleolithic record, we know remarkably little about the evolutionary and ecological consequences of changes in human behavior. Recent inquiries suggest that human evolution reflects a long history of interconnections between the behavior of humans and their surrounding ecosystems (e.g., niche construction). Developing expectations to identify such phenomena is remarkably difficult because it requires understanding the multi‐generational impacts of changes in behavior. These long‐term dynamics require insights into the emergent phenomena that alter selective pressures over longer time periods which are not possible to observe, and are also not intuitive based on observations derived from ethnographic time scales. Generative models show promise for probing these potentially unexpected consequences of human‐environment interaction. Changes in the uses of landscapes may have long term implications for the environments that hominins occupied. We explore other potential proxies of behavior and examine how modeling may provide expectations for a variety of phenomena.

中文翻译：

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南非西海岸第四纪的生态系统工程

尽管我们对旧石器时代记录的地理和时间范围有了新的了解，但我们对人类行为变化的进化和生态后果知之甚少。最近的调查表明，人类进化反映了人类行为与其周围生态系统之间相互联系的悠久历史（例如，利基建设）。建立期望以识别此类现象非常困难，因为这需要了解行为变化的多代影响。这些长期动态需要洞悉会在更长的时间段内改变选择压力的新兴现象，这些现象是无法观察到的，并且基于民族志时间尺度的观察结果也不直观。生成模型显示出有望探究人类与环境相互作用的这些潜在意想不到的后果。景观用途的变化可能对人类所居住的环境产生长期影响。我们探索了行为的其他潜在代理，并研究了建模如何为各种现象提供期望。