User:Madalibi/Prehistoric Asia

Prehistoric Asia refers to Asia before the invention of writing and the beginning of recorded history.

A few early sites of Homo erectus settlements in Asia are important in the history of human evolution. The earliest one is the Dmanisi site in Georgia in the Caucasus. Because the evidence is sparse, it is still uncertain whether Homo erectus came out of Africa and spread into Asia, or whether it evolved in Asia (perhaps in the Caucasus) and from there moved back to Africa and to other parts of the Eurasian landmass.

The Out of Asia theory for the origin of anatomically modern humans is outdated. Homo sapiens came Out of Africa and spread into Eurasia...

Settlement by early humans


The earliest human fossils found in Asia are skulls and mandibles of Homo erectus ("upright man") from Dmanisi (modern Republic of Georgia) in the Caucasus region. They are dated to approximately 1.75 Ma (Megaannum, or million years). Teeth from Yuanmou (southwest China) and stone tools from the Nihewan Basin (northern China) have been dated to 1.7 Ma and 1.66 Ma respectively. Skulls from Sangiran (on Java Island, Indonesia) used to be dated, but a more recent analysis has determined that its earliest possible date was 1.49 Ma. Remains found in Ubeidiya (Israel) date to 1.4 mya. The Riwat site in modern-day Pakistan contains a few artifacts – a core and two flakes – that might date to 1.9 Ma, but these dates are still controversial.

Robin Dennell, an archaeologist who specializes in early human evolution, has compared our knowledge of early hominin settlements in Asia more than 1 Ma ago to sixteenth-century European maps of Asia that plotted a few well-known sites and filled the remaining blanks with speculative content. There is still not enough evidence to determine whether Homo erectus came out of Africa and spread into Asia, or whether it evolved in Southwest Asia (perhaps in the Caucasus) and from there moved back to Africa and to other parts of the Eurasian landmass.

There are two rival theories about the origins of Homo erectus. The long accepted theory was that early Homo(Out of Africa)


 * Out of Africa theory
 * Early human migrations

Migration out of Africa around 2 million years Before Present (BP). Acheulean tools.

It is generally assumed that Homo erectus, or "upright man", moved out of Africa into Southwest Asia, also known as the Near East, around 1.8 million years ago. From there, some populations went north to the Caucasus (the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea) and other groups went toward Europe, whereas yet other communities moved east all the way to Southeast Asia and Indonesia, veering into the sub-Himalayan regions of South Asia and north into China along the way.

Caucasus
The earliest known settlement of Homo erectus in Eurasia is in Dmanisi (modern Georgia) in the Caucasus. The specimens, known from skulls and mandibles, were named Homo erectus georgicus. They are the earliest evidence for the presence of early humans outside the African continent, and therefore also in Eurasia. Age: 1.77 Ma or 1.75 Ma. Maximum age of 1.75-1.77 Ma. We don't know if they inhabited the region for a long time.


 * G. Philips Rightmire (with D. Lordkipanidze and A. Vekua) "Anatomical descriptions, comparative studies and evolutionary significance of the hominin skulls from Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia. Journal of Human Evolution (2006), 50:115-141.

Levant
Ubeidiya (1.4 mya). Prehistoric remains starting from about 1.7 million years were discovered in the excavations, within about 60 layers of soil within which were found human bones and remains of ancient animals. These include some of the oldest remains found outside Africa, and more than 10,000 ancient stone tools.

South Asia
Homo erectus lived on the Pothohar Plateau, in upper Punjab, Pakistan along the Soan River (nearby modern-day Rawalpindi) during the Pleistocene Epoch. Soanian sites are found in the Sivalik region across what are now India, Pakistan and Nepal.

Homo sapiens had probably reached the Indian subcontinent by 74,000 BP, the approximate date of the Toba volcanic eruption in Indonesia – the largest on earth in the last two million years.> Tools found in Jwalapuram (South India) buried in Toba ash are so similar to tools made by modern humans in East Africa that despite the absence of human fossils, archaeologists generally believe that the Jwalapuram tools were made by Homo sapiens.

Biface handaxes and cleaver traditions may have originated in the middle Pleistocene. The beginning of the use of Acheulian and chopping tools of the lower Paleolithic may also be dated to approximately the middle Pleistocene.

Pabbi Hills

Indonesia
In 2007 analysis of cut marks on two bovid bones found in Sangiran, showed them to have been made 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago by clamshell tools, and is the oldest evidence for the presence of early man in Indonesia.


 * Date as maximum age of 1.49 Ma according to Morwood et al. 2003. "Revised age for Mojokerto 1, an early Homo erectus cranium from East Java, Indonesia". Autralian Archaeology 57: 1-4.
 * Huffman et al. "Relocation of the 1936 Mojokerto skull discovery site near Perning, East Java".
 * Russell L. Ciochon & E. Arthur Bettis III. "Palaeoanthropology: Asian Homo erectus converges in time". Nature 458, 153-154 (12 March 2009) | doi:10.1038/458153a; Published online 11 March 2009.
 * Russell L. Ciochon. "The mystery ape of Pleistocene Asia". Nature 459, 910-911 (18 June 2009) | doi:10.1038/459910a
 * Yahdi Zaim, Russell L. Ciochon, Joshua M. Polanski, Frederick E. Grine, E. Arthur Bettis III ,Yan Rizal, Robert G. Franciscus, Roy R. Larick, Matthew Heizler, Aswan, K. Lindsay Eaves, Hannah E. Marsh. "New 1.5 million-year-old Homo erectus maxilla from Sangiran(Central Java, Indonesia)". Journal of Human Evolution 61 (2011): 363-376.

Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as the "Java Man" were first discovered by the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois at Trinil in 1891, and are at least 700,000 years old, at that time the oldest human ancestor ever found.

Further Homo erectus fossils of a similar age were found at Sangiran in the 1930s by the anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, who in the same time period also uncovered fossils at Ngandong alongside more advanced tools, re-dated in 2011 to between 550,000 and 143,000 years old. In 1977 another Homo erectus skull was discovered at Sambungmacan.

In 2003, on the island of Flores, fossils of a new small hominid dated between 74,000 and 13,000 years old and named "Flores Man" (Homo floresiensis) were discovered much to the surprise of the scientific community. This 3 foot tall hominid is thought to be a species descended from Homo Erectus and reduced in size over thousands of years by a well known process called island dwarfism. Flores Man seems to have shared the island with modern Homo sapiens until only 12,000 years ago, when they became extinct. In 2010 stone tools were discovered on Flores dating from 1 million years ago, which is the oldest evidence anywhere in the world that early man had the technology to make sea crossings at this very early time.

Homo floresiensis

Homo erectus were known to utilize simple coarse paleolithic stone tools and also shell tools, discovered in Sangiran and Ngandong. Cut mark analysis of Pleistocene mammalian fossils documents 18 cut marks inflicted by tools of thick clamshell flakes on two bovid bones created during butchery at the Pucangan Formation in Sangiran between 1.6 and 1.5 million years ago. These cut marks document the use of the first tools in Sangiran and the oldest evidence of shell tool use in the world.

China and East Asia
Nihewan Basin = Xiaochangliang site = Majuangou sites (Hebei): 1.66 my. Multiple archaeological strata.

Yuanmou in the southwest: 1.7 my.

Because the Korean peninsula is geographically connected to North China, it is plausible that early hominids moved into the peninsula from what is now China, perhaps following the coastline that has now been eroded, but no evidence for an early hominid presence has been found so far. Palaeolithic research in Japan has been marred by the Fujimura fraud, but it appears that the earliest migration of early humans to the Japanese islands dates to about 40,000 years ago, that they were Homo sapiens (modern humans), and that they came either from China or from Korea.

The arrival of Homo sapiens
Paleolithic, Stone Age, Three-age system. South Asian Stone Age, Japanese Paleolithic
 * Earliest
 * South Asia: Analysis of mitochondrial DNA dates the immigration of Homo sapiens to South Asia to 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. These populations spread further to Southeast Asia, reaching Australia by 40,000 years ago. Cave sites in Sri Lanka have yielded the earliest record of modern Homo sapiens in South Asia. They were dated to 34,000 years ago. (Kennedy 2000: 180). For finds from the Belan in southern Uttar Pradesh, radiocarbon data have indicated an age of 18-17kya.
 * Indonesia: The archipelago was formed during the thaw after the latest ice age. Early humans traveled by sea and spread from mainland Asia eastward to New Guinea and Australia. Homo sapiens reached the region by around 45,000 years ago. In 2011 evidence was uncovered in neighboring East Timor, showing that 42,000 years ago these early settlers had high-level maritime skills, and by implication the technology needed to make ocean crossings to reach Australia and other islands, as they were catching and consuming large numbers of big deep-sea fish such as tuna.

Mesolithic
Mesolithic. Post-Pleistocene, but pre-agriculture. In the Levant: Natufian culture, Khiamian, and perhaps Ohalo

Neolithic and the development of agriculture
Neolithic. Neolithic and Neolithic Revolution. Fertile crescent, Neolithic South Asia, Neolithic China, origins of agriculture. See Neolithic and List of Neolithic cultures of China. For agriculture, note Pengtoushan culture, Mehrgarh

Bronze Age
Bronze Age writing