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The climatic, hydrographic, and environmental regimes of terminal Pleistocene and Holocene northwestern Mongolia are reconstructed using archaeological and pedological data sets at Bayan Nuur, a lake on the northwestern perimeter of the Altan Els dune field in eastern Uvs Province, Mongolia. The archaeological data consist of land-use patterns controlled for time via time-sensitive, diagnostic artifacts. The pedological data consist of soil classifications and radiocarbon dating of paleosols that track lake levels and water table. These data are combined using a geographic information system (GIS) to ascertain site and paleosol geographic relationships to modern lake levels at Bayan Nuur. They point to a more xeric Younger Dryas than previously recognized, significant Holocene lake regressions, and to Mid- to Late Holocene lake standstills/transgressions, the scale of which had previously been unrecognized. Combined, these data point to a complex late Quaternary picture of paleoclimate and paleoenvironment across the region and the importance of using multiple proxies, including archaeological data, in paleoecological reconstructions.

Though chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are globally ubiquitous today, the timing, location, and manner of their domestication is contentious. Until recently, archaeologists placed the origin of the domestic chicken in northern China, perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago. Such evidence however complicates our understanding of how the chicken was domesticated because its wild progenitor – the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus) – lives in tropical ecosystems and does not exist in northern China today or in the recent past. Increasingly, multiple lines of evidence suggest that many of the archaeological bird remains underlying this northern origins hypothesis have been misidentified. Here we analyze the mitochondrial DNA of some of the earliest purported chickens from the Dadiwan site in northern China and conclude that they are pheasants (Phasianus colchicus). Curiously, stable isotope values from the same birds reveal that their diet was heavy in agricultural products (namely millet), meaning that they lived adjacent to or among some of the earliest farming communities in East Asia. We suggest that the exploitation of these baited birds was an important adaptation for early farmers in China’s arid north, and that management practices like these likely played a role in the domestication of animals – including the chicken – in similar contexts throughout the region.

The Paleolithic record of the southwestern Ordos Loop region of northwestern China suggests settlement variability, increased occupational intensity, and the intrusion or development of blade-based technology ca. 41,000–37,000 cal BP. These phenomena are also associated with equivocal evidence for ornamentation. More substantial changes in hominin behavior, however, are evident during and immediately after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), this marked by the development or intrusion of microblade technologies, perhaps groundstone technologies, and reductions in hominin population density. While changes in technology and settlement at approximately 40,000 cal BP arguably equate with some qualitative descriptors of modern human behavior and are contemporaneous with some estimates for the arrival of anatomically modern humans in the region, at present it is unclear whether these changes represent the expression of truly modern human behaviors. In part, this is because the East Asian Paleolithic record is so different from Europe and Africa and because the critical changes leading to the unequivocally modern human behaviors of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene appeared fairly late, during the LGM. Consequently, we argue that the LGM provided the environment of selection for modern human behaviors in northwestern China, whether their origins were ultimately the result of immigration, diffusion, in situ development, or some combination thereof.

This article provides a theoretical treatment of hunter-gatherer diet and physiology. Through a synthesis of nutritional studies, informed by ethno-archaeological data, we examine the risk of protein-rich diets for human survival, and how societies circumvent "salmon starvation" in the northeastern Pacific Rim. Fundamental nutritional constraints associated with salmon storage and consumption counter long-standing assumptions about the engine of cultural evolution in the region. Excess consumption of lean meat can lead to protein poisoning, termed by early explorers "rabbit starvation." While consumption of fats and carbohydrates is widely portrayed as a pathway to "offsetting" protein thresholds, there are true limits to the amount of protein individuals can consume, and constraints are most extreme for smaller individuals, children, and pregnant/nursing mothers. While this problem is not usually perceived as associated with fish, the risk of protein poisoning limits the amount of low-fat fish that people can eat safely. Compared with smaller, mass-harvested species (e.g., eulachon), dried salmon are exceedingly lean. Under certain circumstances fattier foods (small forage fish, marine mammals, whales, and even bears) or carbohydrate-rich plants may have been preferred not just for taste but to circumvent this "dietary protein ceiling." Simply put, "salmon specialization" cannot evolve without access to complimentary caloric energy through fat-rich or carbohydrate-rich resources. By extension, the evolution of storage-based societies requires this problem be solved prior to or in tandem with-salmon intensification. Without such solutions, increased mortality and reproductive rates would have made salmon reliance unsustainable. This insight is in line with genomic research suggesting protein toxicity avoidance was a powerful evolutionary force, possibly linked to genetic adaptations among First Americans. It is also relevant to evaluating the plausibility of other purportedly "focal" economies and informs understanding of the many solutions varied global societies have engineered to overcome physiological protein limits.

The Alaska Peninsula is a landscape defined by volcanic, tectonic, and glacial processes, and life throughout is conditioned on the interactions among them. During the middle Holocene (ca. 4100–3600 yr ago), intense caldera-forming eruptions of the Aniakchak and Veniaminof volcanoes changed the shape of the central portion of the Peninsula dramatically, and had significant and perhaps devastating impacts on both terrestrial and marine biota. Here we evaluate the severity of these impacts by tracking human settlement patterns using 75 unique radiocarbon (14C) age determinations on buried cultural features from the central Alaska Peninsula. Coastal regions were re-colonized within a few hundred years while river systems most proximate to the volcanoes were uninhabited for up to 1500 years following the most severe eruptions. Patterns of human settlement may also document previously unrecorded landscape change throughout the region, and further contribute to our understanding of post-volcanic ecological succession.

International audience; This paper reviews recent archaeological research on human-environment interaction in the Holocene, taking continental China as its geographic focus. As China is large, geographically diverse, and exceptionally archaeologically and historically well-documented, research here provides critical insight into the functioning of social- natural systems. Based on a broad review of the field as well as recent advances and discoveries, the authors reflect on research themes including climate change and adaptive systems theory, spatial and temporal scale, anthropogenic environmental change, risk management and resilience, and integration of subdisciplines. These converge on three overarching conclusions. First, datasets relevant to climate change and ancient human- environment interaction must be as local and specific as possible, as the timing of environmental change differslocally, and the human response is highly dependent on local social and technological conditions. Second, the field still needs more robust theoretical frameworks for analyzing complex social-natural systems, and especially for integrating data on multiple scales. Third, for this work to contribute meaningfully to contemporary climate change research, effective communication of research findings to the public and to scientists in other disciplines should be incorporated into publication plans.

Explanations for the use of pots as practical domestic tools permeate the literature of technological adoption and change. While many arguments focus on the economic merits of pots, few have attempted to trace the conditions that promote or deter the adoption of pottery. This is especially true for the use of pottery by mobile peoples. We adapt an established model of technological investment to draw attention to three key variables affecting pottery adoption: manufacturing time, utility, and use time. We use the logic of this model to examine how social and environmental contexts, specifically residential mobility in marginal environments, impacts use of and investment in ceramic technology. We further illustrate how the model can be used to reveal seasonal patterns of behavior from the spatial distribution of pottery discarded by mobile foragers and herders.

Permanent, year-round occupation of high elevation, low oxygen environments is next to impossible for human populations adapted to low elevation, high oxygen environments. Sustained human habitation of high elevation environments is therefore a comparatively late development in global human history. Though we are beginning to understand the biological differences between contemporary highland and lowland populations, we do not understand how, or when, these differences evolved. This paper presents a hypothesis for the historical context of human adaptation to the Tibetan Plateau. Archaeological data suggest that Neolithic agricultural groups living on the northeast margins of the Plateau expanded to the altitudinal limits of their farming systems by 5200 cal BP, but also to the limits of human physiological capacity for high elevation (at ~ 2500 m above sea level). With the introduction of novel, exotic domesticates (namely barley, wheat, and sheep), Neolithic agriculturalists started to push these limits, and in roughly 1600 years (by 3600 cal BP) small groups of people were living at higher elevations and deeper into the Tibetan Plateau. This required and encouraged novel cultural solutions to high elevation settings, but also imposed heavy selective pressure on the physiological capacity for low oxygen environments. These new cultural capacities enabled people to move into a stronger environment of selection (above 2500 m above sea level) that favored the physiological capacities for life at high elevation, which in turn became more common across these populations. This hypothesis about bio-cultural evolution is testable with a combination of high-resolution archaeological evidence and high throughput sequencing of datable prehistoric human DNA.

At the global scale, conceptions of hunter-gatherer economies have changed considerably over time and these changes were strongly affected by larger trends in Western history, philosophy, science, and culture. Seen as either “savage” or “noble” at the dawn of the Enlightenment, hunter-gatherers have been regarded as everything from holdovers from a basal level of human development, to affluent, ecologically-informed foragers, and ultimately to this: an extremely diverse economic orientation entailing the fullest scope of human behavioral diversity. The only thing linking studies of hunter-gatherers over time is consequently simply the definition of the term: people whose economic mode of production centers on wild resources. When hunter-gatherers are considered outside the general realm of their shared subsistence economies, it is clear that their behavioral diversity rivals or exceeds that of other economic orientations. Hunter-gatherer behaviors range in a multivariate continuum from: a focus on mainly large fauna to broad, wild plant-based diets similar to those of agriculturalists; from extremely mobile to sedentary; from relying on simple, generalized technologies to very specialized ones; from egalitarian sharing economies to privatized competitive ones; and from nuclear family or band-level to centralized and hierarchical decision-making. It is clear, however, that hunting and gathering modes of production had to have preceded and thus given rise to agricultural ones. What research into the development of human economies shows is that transitions from one type of hunting and gathering to another, or alternatively to agricultural modes of production, can take many different evolutionary pathways. The important thing to recognize is that behaviors which were essential to the development of agriculture—landscape modification, intensive labor practices, the division of labor and the production, storage, and redistribution of surplus—were present in a range of hunter-gatherer societies beginning at least as early as the Late Pleistocene in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Whether these behaviors eventually led to the development of agriculture depended in part on the development of a less variable and CO2-rich climatic regime and atmosphere during the Holocene, but also a change in the social relations of production to allow for hoarding privatized resources. In the 20th and 21st centuries, ethnographic and archaeological research shows that modern and ancient peoples adopt or even revert to hunting and gathering after having engaged in agricultural or industrial pursuits when conditions allow and that macroeconomic perspectives often mask considerable intragroup diversity in economic decision making: the pursuits and goals of women versus men and young versus old within groups are often quite different or even at odds with one another, but often articulate to form cohesive and adaptive economic wholes. The future of hunter-gatherer research will be tested by the continued decline in traditional hunting and gathering but will also benefit from observation of people who revert to or supplement their income with wild resources. It will also draw heavily from archaeology, which holds considerable potential to document and explain the full range of human behavioral diversity, hunter-gatherer or otherwise, over the longest of timeframes and the broadest geographic scope.

Recent emphasis on the recovery of plant remains from archaeological sites in East Asia permits an analysis of prehistoric cultural contact between East and West. Here we evaluate three prominent hypotheses for the introduction of wheat, a Near Eastern domesticate, to East Asia, specifically northern China. Existing evidence points to a nearly synchronous appearance of the plant, from the Inner Asian Mountains to the Yellow Sea, c. 4600–4200 years ago. Archaeological data, including the spatial distribution of directly dated wheat grains, argue against a wave of wheat-farming colonists, but point to the gradual in situ adoption of novel exotics by a diverse array of pre-existing agricultural peoples. Logic borrowed from the diffusion of innovations literature accounts for the near synchronous appearance of wheat over an enormous area, and allows for the occasional observation of anomalously older evidence without having to imagine such evidence as the origin of the diffusion.

A review of recently published temporal data from Shuidonggou Locality 1 indicates that a 40–43 cal ka date for the inception of Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) blade-oriented technologies in East Asia is warranted. Comparison of the dates from Shuidonggou to other Asian IUP dates in Korea, Siberia, and Mongolia supports this assertion, indicating that the initial appearance of the IUP in East Asia generally corresponds in time to the fluorescence of the IUP in eastern Europe and western Asia. This conclusion preliminarily suggests that either a version of the IUP originated independently in East Asia just prior to 40 cal ka, or more likely, that an early, initial diffusion of the IUP into East Asia occurred ~41 cal ka, a hypothesis consistent with current estimates for the evolution or arrival of modern humans in the region. DOI: 10.2458/56.16270

Colonizing the roof of the world Humans only settled permanently on the Tibetan plateau about 3600 years ago. Chen et al. examined archaeological crop remains unearthed in northeastern Tibet, which elucidate the timing of agricultural settlement. Although much earlier traces of humans in Tibet have been dated to 20,000 years ago, year-round presence at the highest altitudes appears to have been impossible until the advent of suitable crops, such as barley. Surprisingly, these prehistoric farming communities expanded onto the plateau at the same time as climate was cooling. Science , this issue p. 248

Though present before the Last Glacial Maximum, microblade technology is uncommon in the lithi c assembla ges of north-central China until the onset of the Younger Dryas (12,900–11,600 calBP). While it is clear that microblades here and elsewhere were connected with mobile adaptations organized around hunting, the attendant assumption that they served primarily in hunting weaponry is not. The archaeol ogical record of north-central China, including excavations at Pigeon Mountain (QG3) and Shuidonggou Locality 12 (SDG 12) in Ningx ia Autonomous Region, and Dadiwan in Gansu Providence, and a handful of bone/antler tools slotted for microblade inserts, indicate a more direct linkage to mobility. These data suggest the rise of microblade technology in Younger Dryas north-central China was mainly the result of microblades used as insets in composite knives needed for production of sophisticated cold weather clothing needed for a winter mobile hunting adaptation akin to the residentially mobile pattern Binford termed ‘‘serial specialist.’’ Limited time and opportunities compressed this production into a very narrow seasonal window, putting a premium on highly streamlined routines to which mic roblade technology was especially well-suited.

Intensive research on China's Western Loess Plateau has located 63 Palaeolithic deposits, which together allow the authors to present a general model of hominin occupation from 80 000 to 18 000 years ago. Tools, subsistence and settlement correlate nicely with the climate: the warm wet MIS3 seeing expansion and more organised acquisition of quartz, and the Late Glacial Maximum that followed, a reduction in human presence but possibly an increase in ingenuity.

Recent excavations at the Dadiwan site in the western Loess Plateau, Gansu Province, People’s Republic of China (PRC), document the first continuous foraging-to-farming sequence in North China. The Dadiwan occupation began at about 80,000 BP and became regular by about 60,000 BP, probably before the arrival or evolution of modern Homo sapiens in North China. This record spans the transitions from nonintensive to intensive hunting and gathering and from intensive hunting and gathering to low-level Laoguantai food production and finally intensive Late Banpo, Neolithic agriculture. The intensive hunter-gatherer adaptation from which Dadiwan millet agriculture evolved did not develop at Dadiwan itself. Instead, it came south with intensive hunter-gatherer groups migrating out of the arid deserts north of the Yellow River, where the late Pleistocene–early Holocene North China Microlithic was common.

This paper reports the recent excavation of Unit Dadiwan06 at the Dadiwan site in Qin’an County, Gansu. A 65 ka chronological framework is established for Dadiwan06 on the basis of absolute dating (AMS 14C and OSL), stratigraphy, climate change events and archaeology. Artifact distributions reveal patterns of human behavioral variation and adaptation over the past 60 ka, from primitive hunting and gathering to advanced hunting and gathering, to primitive Neolithic agriculture, and finally to advanced Neolithic agriculture.

Using −24‰ and −14‰ as the endpoints of stable carbon isotopic composition of total organic carbon (δ13CTOC) of surface soil under pure C3 and C4 vegetation, and surface soil δ13CTOC data from eastern China, Australia and the Great Plains of North America, we estimate the relative abundance of C3/C4 plants (i.e., the ratio of C3 or C4 biomass to local primary production) in modern vegetation for each region. The relative abundance of modern C3/C4 vegetation from each region is compared to the corresponding climatic parameters (mean annual temperature and precipitation) to explore the relationship between relative C4 abundance and climate. The results indicate that temperature controls the growth of C4 plants. However, even where temperature is high enough for the growth of C4 plants, they will only dominate the landscape when precipitation declines as temperatures increase. Our results are consistent with those of other investigations of the geographic distribution of modern C4 plant species. Therefore, our results provide an important reference for interpretation of past C3/C4 relative abundance records in these three regions.

The establishment of agricultural economies based upon domestic animals began independently in many parts of the world and led to both increases in human population size and the migration of people carrying domestic plants and animals. The precise circumstances of the earliest phases of these events remain mysterious given their antiquity and the fact that subsequent waves of migrants have often replaced the first. Through the use of more than 1,500 modern (including 151 previously uncharacterized specimens) and 18 ancient (representing six East Asian archeological sites) pig ( Sus scrofa ) DNA sequences sampled across East Asia, we provide evidence for the long-term genetic continuity between modern and ancient Chinese domestic pigs. Although the Chinese case for independent pig domestication is supported by both genetic and archaeological evidence, we discuss five additional (and possibly) independent domestications of indigenous wild boar populations: one in India, three in peninsular Southeast Asia, and one off the coast of Taiwan. Collectively, we refer to these instances as “cryptic domestication,” given the current lack of corroborating archaeological evidence. In addition, we demonstrate the existence of numerous populations of genetically distinct and widespread wild boar populations that have not contributed maternal genetic material to modern domestic stocks. The overall findings provide the most complete picture yet of pig evolution and domestication in East Asia, and generate testable hypotheses regarding the development and spread of early farmers in the Far East.

按照一个统一的方法, 即以−24‰和−14‰作为纯C 3 和纯C 4 植被下表土总有机质碳同位素组成( δ 13 CTOC)的端元值, 利用来自环北太平洋地区的中国东部、澳大利亚以及北美大平原地区的表土 δ 13 CTOC 数据, 估算了这3个区域现代植被中C 3 和C 4 植物的相对生物量贡献比例, 并和这3个区域相应的主要气候因素(年均温和年降水量)进行了对比, 进而探讨了现代植被中C 3 /C 4 植物相对丰度与气候条件之间的关系. 结果表明, 温度条件对C 4 植物生物量贡献具有决定性影响; 然而, 即使温度条件满足C 4 植物生长的需要, 随着温度的进一步上升, 降水量应相应的下降, C 4 植物方能保持其优势地位. 这一结果与对现代C 4 植物种属地理分布调查获得的结论基本是一致的. 从而, 这一结果为上述区域过去地质历史时期C 3 /C 4 植物相对丰度变化记录的古环境解译提供了重要的参考资料.

Holocene environmental change in Mongolia is reconstructed on the basis of recently published paleoclimate records, including lake levels, pollen assemblages, and eolian sediment records. These data indicate that the early Holocene of Mongolia is characterized by increasing temperature and humidity. Paleosol development, high lake-stands, and a more southward distribution of forest-steppe environments suggest the early-mid Holocene was humid. The mid-Holocene however is characterized by enhanced aridity, even though the onset and termination of the dry interval differs from place to place. Finally, humidity increased again during the late Holocene, as evaporation decreased in concert with dropping temperatures in Mongolia.

Robert L. Bettinger , Christopher Morgan, and Loukas Barton This chapter presents a very simple argument: that technology in general, and lithic technology in particular, can shed critical light on conditions surround-ing and contributing to major behavioral innovations, in this case the origin of agriculture. There are probably as many views on the subject as papers, but there is a fairly clear divide between those who argue that agriculture evolves under conditions of scarcity – among them Binford ( 1968 ), Bar-Yosef ( 1998 ), Childe ( 1951 ), and others (e.g., Moore et al. 2000 )), and those who argue that it evolves under conditions of plenty (Braidwood and Howe 1960 ; Price and Gebauer 1995 :7–9). The “conditions of plenty” view is prominent in discussions of the emergence of millet agriculture in North China (Barton 2009 ) and specifi cally the argument that, in common with nearly all early experiments with food production , millet farming developed among complex, “affl uent” hunter-gatherers living in large, permanent settlements in highly productive riparian and lacustrine settings that off ered a rich variety of wild plants and animals (Crawford 2006 :91; Smith 1995 ). This view portrays exper-iments with millet farming as solidifying a position of strength, increasing the yield and reliability of an already important staple in an already intensive and highly successful hunting-and-gathering economy (Smith 1995 :136–137). Lu ( 2006 ), on the other hand, advocates the alternative “conditions of scar-city” view. Observing no archaeological evidence that China’s fi rst farmers were sedentary and that, in contradiction to the abundance argument, agri-culture arrived relatively late in the areas of greatest natural plant and animal

Spatial changes of effective moisture during the mid-Holocene have been reconstructed based on the compilation of recently published paleoclimate records, including ice core, lake level, pollen assemblage, and loess-paleosol records. Both geological data and the spatial pattern indicate that it was dry in deserts during the mid-Holocene, but the timing of the beginning and end of dry intervals differs from place to place. Deserts having higher aridity index values remain dry longer. Dry intervals during the mid-Holocene are more possibly asynchronous than synchronous in arid and semi-arid China. In the Xinjiang region, except in sites located in deserts, the climate is generally wet during 7000–5000 a BP. In the northern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, effective moisture in most sites began to decrease after 5000 a BP. The climate became dry after 4000 a BP except in the deserts in the Loess Plateau and the Inner Mongolia Plateau.

New data suggest that dramatic environmental change in the Western Loess Plateau of China corresponded with substantial changes in human demography ca. 4000 cal yr B.P. These data demonstrate that a rapid climatic transition from wet to dry led to an ecologically devastated period between 4090 and 3600 cal yr B.P. The sudden reduction in the number of archaeological sites during this period, namely a reduction in the total number of sites and a contraction of the areal distribution of sites, points to declining agricultural productivity associated with widespread aridification beginning at 4000 cal yr B.P. © 2005 Published by University of Washington.

Here we address several concerns Zeder (1) raises about our recent paper (2). [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gremillion.1{at}osu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

The introduction of new analytic methods and expansion of research into previously untapped regions have greatly increased the scale and resolution of data relevant to the origins of agriculture (OA). As a result, the recognition of varied historical pathways to agriculture and the continuum of management strategies have complicated the search for general explanations for the transition to food production. In this environment, higher-level theoretical frameworks are sometimes rejected on the grounds that they force conclusions that are incompatible with real-world variability. Some of those who take this position argue instead that OA should be explained in terms of local and historically contingent factors. This retreat from theory in favor of particularism is based on the faulty beliefs that complex phenomena such as agricultural origins demand equally complex explanations and that explanation is possible in the absence of theoretically based assumptions. The same scholars who are suspicious of generalization are reluctant to embrace evolutionary approaches to human behavior on the grounds that they are ahistorical, overly simplistic, and dismissive of agency and intent. We argue that these criticisms are misplaced and explain why a coherent theory of human behavior that acknowledges its evolutionary history is essential to advancing understanding of OA. Continued progress depends on the integration of human behavior and culture into the emerging synthesis of evolutionary developmental biology that informs contemporary research into plant and animal domestication.

It is difficult to overstate the cultural and biological impacts that the domestication of plants and animals has had on our species. Fundamental questions regarding where, when, and how many times domestication took place have been of primary interest within a wide range of academic disciplines. Within the last two decades, the advent of new archaeological and genetic techniques has revolutionized our understanding of the pattern and process of domestication and agricultural origins that led to our modern way of life. In the spring of 2011, 25 scholars with a central interest in domestication representing the fields of genetics, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and archaeology met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to discuss recent domestication research progress and identify challenges for the future. In this introduction to the resulting Special Feature, we present the state of the art in the field by discussing what is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of domestication, and controversies surrounding the speed, intentionality, and evolutionary aspects of the domestication process. We then highlight three key challenges for future research. We conclude by arguing that although recent progress has been impressive, the next decade will yield even more substantial insights not only into how domestication took place, but also when and where it did, and where and why it did not.

The introduction of new analytic methods and expansion of research into previously untapped regions have greatly increased the scale and resolution of data relevant to the origins of agriculture (OA). As a result, the recognition of varied historical pathways to agriculture and the continuum of management strategies have complicated the search for general explanations for the transition to food production. In this environment, higher-level theoretical frameworks are sometimes rejected on the grounds that they force conclusions that are incompatible with real-world variability. Some of those who take this position argue instead that OA should be explained in terms of local and historically contingent factors. This retreat from theory in favor of particularism is based on the faulty beliefs that complex phenomena such as agricultural origins demand equally complex explanations and that explanation is possible in the absence of theoretically based assumptions. The same scholars who are suspicious of generalization are reluctant to embrace evolutionary approaches to human behavior on the grounds that they are ahistorical, overly simplistic, and dismissive of agency and intent. We argue that these criticisms are misplaced and explain why a coherent theory of human behavior that acknowledges its evolutionary history is essential to advancing understanding of OA. Continued progress depends on the integration of human behavior and culture into the emerging synthesis of evolutionary developmental biology that informs contemporary research into plant and animal domestication.

Stable isotope biochemistry (δ 13 C and δ 15 N) and radiocarbon dating of ancient human and animal bone document 2 distinct phases of plant and animal domestication at the Dadiwan site in northwest China. The first was brief and nonintensive: at various times between 7900 and 7200 calendar years before present (calBP) people harvested and stored enough broomcorn millet ( Panicum miliaceum ) to provision themselves and their hunting dogs ( Canis sp.) throughout the year. The second, much more intensive phase was in place by 5900 calBP: during this time both broomcorn and foxtail ( Setaria viridis spp . italica ) millets were cultivated and made significant contributions to the diets of people, dogs, and pigs ( Sus sp.). The systems represented in both phases developed elsewhere: the earlier, low-intensity domestic relationship emerged with hunter–gatherers in the arid north, while the more intensive, later one evolved further east and arrived at Dadiwan with the Yangshao Neolithic. The stable isotope methodology used here is probably the best means of detecting the symbiotic human–plant–animal linkages that develop during the very earliest phases of domestication and is thus applicable to the areas where these connections first emerged and are critical to explaining how and why agriculture began in East Asia.

Temporal and spatial patterns in archeological data from Pleistocene north China suggest strong correlations between climate change and culture change, but only in extreme cases. In these cases, climate has an immediate impact on human mobility, which is severely constrained during the pronounced cold/dry intervals of the Pleistocene. As high mobility becomes incompatible with the environmental limitations of extreme intervals, such as the Last Glacial Maximum, previously disparate mobile human groups aggregate and compete for limited and spatially segregated resources. During such times, regional cultural variation evolves in isolation and natural selection acts on group-level adaptations, facilitating the evolution of cohesive and cooperative social networks. The process of group selection further allows for the rapid diffusion of cultural and technological innovation and may explain the rapid diffusion of microblade technology throughout northeast Asia during the post-glacial period. While climate change does present challenges to human survival and may promote alternative adaptive strategies, rapid cultural evolution is driven primarily by group formation, between-group competition, and the mechanics of cultural transmission. The degree to which climate change mediates these interactions is the extent to which climate should be implicated in cultural evolution.

Agriculture can evolve independently only where intensive hunter-gatherer plant use has previously evolved, and both developments are limited by two major evolutionary constraints: climatic variability and social convention. During the Pleistocene, environmental variability constrained plant productivity and therefore plant-intensive subsistence; but during the Holocene it was the hunter-gatherer social conventions that constrained the evolution of plant-based agricultural subsistence. Specifically, in places with continuous hunter-gatherer occupation (i.e., the Near East), social conventions prohibiting the ownership of land curtailed intensification and prolonged the transition to agriculture. In contrast, northwest China was virtually uninhabited during the Early Holocene. Here, new social orders favoring the ownership of land were free to emerge without restriction, so the transition to agriculture was rapid. Semi-permanent settlements and domesticated broomcorn millet emerged abruptly in the western Loess Plateau at Dadiwan by 7.0 ka with no local hunter-gatherer ancestry. We propose that the intensive plant specialization required for domestication and incipient agriculture emerged first in the desert margins north of the Yellow River and migrated southwards to the more humid and fertile floodplains of the Loess Plateau west of the Liu Pan Mountains, perhaps in response to increasing aridity and climatic instability during the Early Holocene.