Heading north: Late Pleistocene environments and human dispersals in central and eastern Asia

Abstract

The adaptability of our species, as revealed by the geographic routes and palaeoenvironmental contexts of human dispersal beyond Africa, is a prominent topic in archaeology and palaeoanthropology. Northern and Central Asia have largely been neglected as it has been assumed that the deserts and mountain ranges of these regions acted as ‘barriers’, forcing human populations to arc north into temperate and arctic Siberia. Here, we test this proposition by constructing Least Cost Path models of human dispersal under glacial and interstadial conditions between prominent archaeological sites in Central and East Asia. Incorporating information from palaeoclimatic, palaeolake, and archaeological data, we demonstrate that regions such as the Gobi Desert and the Altai Mountain chains could have periodically acted as corridors and routes for human dispersals and framing biological interactions between hominin populations. Review of the archaeological datasets in these regions indicates the necessity of wide-scale archaeological survey and excavations in many poorly documented parts of Eurasia. We argue that such work is likely to highlight the ‘northern routes’ of human dispersal as variable, yet crucial, foci for understanding the extreme adaptive plasticity characteristic of the emergence of Homo sapiens as a global species, as well as the cultural and biological hybridization of the diverse hominin species present in Asia during the Late Pleistocene.

Intra-assemblage variation in the macro-blade assemblage from the 1963 excavation at Shuidonggou locality 1, northern China, in the context of regional variation

“…The assemblage from SDG 1 is more similar to material from the Siberian Altai than to material from northern Mongolia and the Transbaikal region, despite the fact that the later are geographically closer. This suggests that the SDG IUP technology may have dispersed from the Siberian Altai independently instead of from northern Mongolia as others have proposed [11]. We argue that a multi-directional model of diffusion of the IUP in northeast Asia would be more appropriate than a unilineal one.…”

“…For many years, the southern route of modern human dispersals into East and South Asia was the main focus of attention [1][2][3][4][5][6]. However, more recently researchers have suggested an independent northern route of modern human dispersal across eastern Eurasia, based both on genetic evidence and general comparisons between lithic assemblages grouped together as Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) or early Upper Paleolithic [7][8][9][10][11][12]. The term IUP was generally used to describe the earliest Upper Paleolithic assemblages with Levallois elements in blade production [13][14][15].…”

In search of a Paleolithic Silk Road in Kazakhstan

“…In order to deal with the dearth of data, several authors have used predictive mathematical models to propose various routes taken by hominins. Li et al (2019) used Least Cost Path models to evaluate the likelihood of various competing routes between known sites in the context of both glacial and interstadial climatic conditions. Their approach is interesting particularly for suggesting corridors through deserts such as the Gobi, which have been previously considered barriers to dispersal (Dennell, 2017).…”

Assessing the Impact of Including Traversal across Slope on Least Cost Path Accuracy: A Roman road case study

“…LCP analysis has been implemented in multiple GIS software such as ArcGIS and GRASS (Surface-Evans and White, 2012). Although frequently used for the modelling of past movement (Beyin et al, 2019;Gustas and Supernant, 2017;Kealy et al, 2018;Li et al, 2019;Verhagen and Jeneson, 2012), methodological issues are often ignored and can lead to the model not realistically representing the cost of movement through a landscape (Herzog, 2014a;Surface-Evans and White, 2012;Verhagen et al, 2019). Most notably, the spreading algorithm, which identifies the lowest cost from destination to origin, is implemented differently in different LCP software, resulting in LCP results that may not be comparable (Gietl et al, 2008;Herzog, 2013;Herzog and Posluschny, 2011).…”