Pleistocene water crossings, long thought to be an innovation of Homo sapiens, may extend beyond our species to encompass Middle and Early Pleistocene Homo. However, it remains unclear how water crossings differed among hominin populations, the extent to which Homo sapiens are uniquely flexible in these adaptive behaviors, and how the tempo and scale of water crossings played out in different regions. I apply the adaptive flexibility hypothesis, derived from cognitive ecology, to model the global data and address these questions. Water-crossing behaviors appear to have emerged among different regional hominin populations in similar ecologies, initially representing nonstrategic range expansion. However, an increasing readiness to form connections with novel environments allowed some H. sapiens populations to eventually push water crossings to new extremes, moving out of sight of land, making return crossings to maintain social ties and build viable founder populations, and dramatically shifting subsistence and lithic provisioning strategies to meet the challenges of variable ecological settings.

中文翻译：

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人属中的更新世水系和适应性灵活性

长期以来被认为是智人的创新的更新世渡口可能会扩展到我们的物种之外，包括中更新世和早期更新世。但是，尚不清楚人参种群之间的水交叉方式如何不同，智人在这些适应行为中具有独特的灵活性程度，以及不同地区的水交叉方式和规模如何发挥作用。我将源自认知生态学的适应性灵活性假设应用于模型全局数据并解决这些问题。跨水域的行为似乎已在具有相似生态的不同区域人参素种群中出现，最初代表了非战略范围的扩大。但是，越来越愿意与新颖的环境形成连接，这使得H成为可能。