Search

We review four examples of ritual or symbolic behavior from the central European Mousterian site of Krapina in present-day Croatia. These include evidence of ritual cannibalism and secondary burials; a cranium of a Neandertal female with 35 mostly parallel postmortem lines inscribed into the forehead; eight talons and an associated foot bone from three or four different white-tailed eagles, all with signs of manipulation and assembly into a necklace, bracelet, or rattle; and a limestone rock with black inclusions that appears to have been carried onto the site as a curiosity. These occur well before any modern Homo sapiens entered Europe and are evidence that the Krapina Neandertals had ritual and symbolic capacities. Along with Krapina, there is mounting evidence from other earlier and later Neandertal sites of behaviors generally exclusively attributed to modern H. sapiens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent fossil and genetic data poses new questions about the degree of variability of the Late Pleistocene fossils from China and the possible interaction of modern humans with other archaic hominins. This paper presents a general overview of the variability of the dental fossil record from some key Late Pleistocene localities in China. Our study reveals that despite having similar chronologies, not all the samples present the same suite of derived traits. This finding may reflect complex demographic dynamics with several migrations and dispersals and/or a degree of population substructure similar to that described for the African continent. Simple and linear models to explain the origin and dispersals of Homo sapiens seem to be progressively outdated by the new fossil, demographic and genetic evidence. In addition, we warn about genetic admixture as a possible source of morphological variability and we hypothesize that some skeletal features of Homo floresiensis and Denisovans could be related to their hybridization with other hominin groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The origin and evolution of modern humans continues to be of great interest to the scientific and public communities alike; the field has long been dominated by findings from Europe and Africa. With new discoveries of hominin fossils and archaeological sites, in addition to the application of recent genomic and paleoclimate modeling studies, findings from Asia are serving to revolutionize the field of modern human origins. The identification of Neanderthals and Denisovans in Siberia, for example, along with growing fossil and archaeological evidence for the presence of early modern humans in East and Southeast Asia, much earlier than originally thought, places the spotlight on the evolutionary history of our species in Asia over the last 125,000 years. Exciting and unanticipated new discoveries call for a need to critically reexamine the Asian record. Taking a multidisciplinary perspective, a group of active researchers participated in a week-long Wenner-Gren symposium titled "Human Colonization of Asia in the Late Pleistocene" (#153) in March 2016. Here we review the major themes and findings emerging from the symposium and discuss avenues to move the field forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of next-generation DNA sequencing technologies over the past decade has had a transformative effect on the study of human population history. Advances in the retrieval and analysis of ancient DNA from human remains for the first time offer a direct window into our genetic past. These data sets have revealed an increasingly complex picture of human demographic history in Asia, suggesting multiple waves of migration across the continent and repeated episodes of admixture with archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. I review seminal earlier studies and discuss some of the more exciting recent results emerging from these data sets, ranging from the early dispersal into Australia and Oceania to the peopling of Far Northeastern Asia. I also highlight important limitations of genetic data and discuss open questions and future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews evidence from biogeography, palynology, geology, historical linguistics, and archaeology and presents a new synthesis of the paleoclimatic context in which the early Bantu expansion took place. Paleoenvironmental data indicate that a climate crisis affected the Central African forest block during the Holocene, first on its periphery around 4000 BP and later at its core around 2500 BP. We argue here that both phases had an impact on the Bantu expansion but in different ways. The climate-induced extension of savannas in the Sanaga-Mbam confluence area around 4000-3500 BP facilitated the settlement of early Bantu-speech communities in the region of Yaoundé but did not lead to a large-scale geographic expansion of Bantu-speaking village communities in Central Africa. An extensive and rapid expansion of Bantu-speech communities, along with the dispersal of cereal cultivation and metallurgy, occurred only when the core of the Central African forest block was affected around 2500 BP. We claim that the Sangha River interval in particular constituted an important corridor of Bantu expansion. With this interdisciplinary review, we substantially deepen and revise earlier hypotheses linking the Bantu expansion with climate-induced forest openings around 3000 BP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]