I believe that the reduction in the number of mountain sheep compared to deer during Period 2A, combined with the new strontium ratio values, indicate that mountain sheep were no longer locally available, forcing hunters to travel further to acquire them. The higher carbon values suggests that these new locations were at slightly higher elevations. The local pollen data indicates that this occurred during a brief period of warmer, wetter summers. This change in climate should have resulted in a shift in oxygen isotope values, but this effect may have been canceled out by the move to higher, cooler elevations.

Mountain sheep must have been valuable enough to hunters to continue hunting for them despite the higher travel and transportation costs. This value may be either energetic or social; one would have to show that the costs of acquiring these mountain sheep were greater than the calories retrieved, a difficult inference to make using the archaeological record. My dissertation original aimed at correlated such a change with shifts in sharing between households, but this portion of research was not possible due to preservation issues (an important discussion for another time).

The data on the animal use extends beyond understanding human behavior and hunting patterns. In particular, the isotope data for mountain sheep provides essential data for understanding how such species respond to climate change, critical for contemporary global warming. Mountain sheep are in decline, and my research shows that some of the reduction may be related to global warming over the past century.