The Effect Of Climate On Long Term Human Dispersal

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Nicolas Zwyns, of the University of California-Davis, along with an international team, will investigate the impact of climate change on the dispersal of early modern humans in Central and Northeast Asia. Previous studies have underlined the potential of this region to document early dispersals of modern humans, Neandertals and perhaps Denisovans along the Eurasian steppe belt. It is assumed, however, that it was particularly challenging for incoming human groups to adapt to the Late Pleistocene environmental setting. Starting from about 120,000 years ago and until the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago, the climate became increasingly unstable with sharp changes in temperature and moisture occurring at an accelerating pace. Hence some scholars have suggested that the peopling of regions with continental climate, such as Mongolia, would be highly dependent on the global variation in temperature and moisture. Climate improvements would favor demographic increases among human populations and trigger range expansions into territories that remained out of reach during the coldest periods. Other scholars argued that humans have been able to cope with challenging environments in most regions of Eurasia before the Late Pleistocene and climate change would have only little effect on population dynamics. These different views illustrate a lack of consensus regarding the impact that climate change had on the peopling of regions such as Europe, Central and Northeast Asia where human responses to such constraints are still poorly understood. The research holds broad significance because it sets within a deep chronological context the interaction between human behavior and climate variability. Dr. Zwyns and his research team will address this issue by building up a high-resolution archeological and environmental sequence for North Mongolia. The research includes targeted excavations and sample collection at Paleolithic sites located along the tributaries of the Selenga River. The Selenga flows to the Northeast and connects Mongolia with Lake Baikal. Its drainage system has yielded the highest concentration of relevant archeological sites in Mongolia and in Siberia and holds one of the richest records for Northeast Asia. Through the analyses of sediments, fauna and using radiometric dating methods, an international team of an archeologist, a geologist, a zooarcheologist, and two geochronologists, along with other specialists will reconstruct the environmental history in and around the Paleolithic sites to better understand the environment in which humans first settled. The goal is to correlate several archeological sites and to build a solid reference sequences for a region where changes in material culture and in the environment can be observed throughout the last 50,000 years. Because it exhibits an extreme continental climate, North Mongolia is suited for studies of human response to sharp changes in climate. Building up a high-resolution and high-quality environmental and archeological sequence will create field and laboratory training opportunities for students and young professionals from Mongolia and elsewhere.