Prehistoric Eurasia600,000-3,000 BCE

Instructor Pacas

Prehistoric AsiaThe Paleolithic Period

• In the 1920’s, in a village Zhoukoudian, 27 miles southwest of Beijing, a team of Chinese and Swedish archaeologist discovered the remains of one of our earliest human ancestors, Sinanthropus Pekinensis- Peking Man.

• Peking Man was perhaps related to Homo Erectus of Java.

• Peking Men settled in caves around the region from roughly 400,000 to 200,000 years ago, they hunted and cooked wild animals and used sharpened stone tools.

• Their tool manufacture seems to have developed independent of technologies of Europe and Africa.

Peking Man here

Peking Man

• Their brain capacity was halfway between the great apes and modern human beings.

• Peking Man might have been able to make fire and cook their food. It is possible that they were even cannibalistic, eating the flesh, brain, and marrow of his own kind.

• They used vein quartz to fashion their tools.• Not much of Peking Man is known because the

remains disappeared en-route to U.S. shortly after Pearl Harbor 1941.

Fossils of Lantian

• The remains of hominids found in Lantian are considered older than those found in Zhoukoudian (Peking Man)-perhaps pre-dating it by 100,000 years.

• From their discovery anthropologists believe that these early ancestors migrated to Asia via Outer Eurasia.

Asian Continent

Inner Eurasia

Outer Eurasia

Middle Paleolithic Sites in Asia 200,000-45,000 BCE

• Only a limited number of middle Paleolithic sites have been found in Asia, predominantly in the Ordos region of China and the Fen River valley in Shanxi province.

• Anthropologist and historians theorize that the Middle Paleolithic transition period did not fully develop in Asia, perhaps because of climate conditions that made settlements and migrations extremely difficult.

Upper Paleolithic Asia 40,000-10,000 BCE

• Remains of Upper Paleolithic specimens found near Zhoukoudian and carbon dated to about 17,000 BCE resembled Native Americans and were considered pre-Chinese, ‘un-specialized’ mongoloids-resembling American Indians by Anthropologists.

• These are the people believed to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge to settle the Americas around this time following the herds of wild animals that they depended for food.

Controversy in the field

• The technology used by these Upper Paleolithic group have much in common with the blade artifacts of the Perigordian and Aurignacian types of Western Europe though, causing some confusion among Anthropologists of exactly where these people originated from or migrated from into Asia.

Controversy cont’d

• Some anthropologist speculate that there might be a continuity from Peking Man to modern mongolic branch of living man.

• These theory was advocated in the 1960’s due to common cranial and dental features.

• They proposed that Peking Man was solely ancestral to mongoloids and that separate contemporary hominids were ancestral to other races of present-day man.

Neanderthals and Denisovans in Asia

• An alternative view is that all present day men have a common ancestor who was later than Peking Man perhaps dating to about 200,000 BCE.

• Around 100,000 BCE some Neanderthals made inroads into Inner Eurasia during the last Ice Age.

• Denisovan branch of human beings made inroads into the warmer regions of Eurasia.

Out of Africa-Early Modern Humans and Migrations

Professor Pacas

Modern Humans and Climate- A History

• 100,000 years ago, in the continent that we know as Africa today, modern human population numbered 1,000,000 globally (it is estimated).

• It is estimated that 900,000 of that population resided within Africa.

Modern Humans Opportunists• According to the anthropologist John

Reader, modern human beings are ‘supreme-opportunists.’

• “supreme opportunist, who survive in numbers some way below the carrying capacity of the environment much of the the time, but whose growth rate potential enables them to multiply rapidly when circumstances permit.”*

* Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. Pg. 131

30,000 BCE and Population Explosions

• Starting around 60,000 BCE, the modern human communities began to experience a surge in population growth.

• It is believed that by 35,000 BCE all regions and ecological niches in Africa were occupied/exploited by modern humans.

30,000 BCE cont’d• The ice sheets retreated, flooding the

world oceans with fresh water; sea levels rose worldwide, in Africa, the forests advanced, the savannas were well watered, the lakes and rivers were full.

• Human beings exploited the new opportunities that this favorable development presented to them.

18,000 BCE –The Last Ice Age

• However, by 18,000 BCE the benign climate of humidity gave way to climatic changes that brought about advancing ice sheets that were responsible for extreme massive aridity in Africa and globally as well.

18,000 BCE Ice Age cont’d

• The ice covered much of North America, Europe, the mountainous regions of Asia, as well as New Zealand, Australia, South America, and parts of Africa.

• Human populations began to decrease world wide.

Technology and Periods of Great Duress

• It was when conditions were at their worse that modern humans engaged in sophisticated adaptations to their environment.

• The archaeological record supports a spike in weapons technology for the hunt (bone harpoons for fishing, bone tipped javelins able to be shot further distances, arrows, etc.) to increase the chance of survival.

Hunters vs. Gatherers

• The hunt provided essential and necessary animal fat and protein for human communities. Eventually the hunt would become much more important than the gatherers in supplying necessary nourishment.

Different Human Communities in Asia

• Most of the settlements of these early modern humans were confined to the warmer southern borders between Inner Eurasia and Outer Eurasia.

• By 35,000 BCE full Neanderthals and Denisovans settlers, were replaced by fully modern humans.

• Some scholars believe that there was inter-breeding between all three groups.

Inner Eurasia during the Upper Paleolithic era

• Inner Eurasia roughly 40,000-10,000 BCE was extremely inhospitable so that early modern human would- be colonists found it extremely difficult to settle this region.

• Those that did manage to scrape a living found that unlike the milder climate of Outer Eurasia, which allowed groups to exploit animal and plant resources, in Inner Eurasia human populations were extremely dependent on animal resources for their survival.

Asian Continent

Inner Eurasia

Outer Eurasia

Upper Paleolithic Asia cont’d

• This development meant that our ancestors that scraped out a living in Inner Eurasia became specialists (hunter bands, technology need to take down specific kinds of animals, depended on specific fauna to survive) it is perhaps due to this reason that the fossil record of human beings is much less diverse in Inner Eurasia compared to Outer Eurasia.

Neolithic Revolution• Between 40,000-10,000 BCE there

emerged a wide range of life ways, some were fairly modern, equipped with more varied technologies and with fully developed capacity of speech and language.

• Modern humans colonized even northern regions of Ice Age Inner-Eurasia such as Siberia and from there some crossed the Bering land bridge into the Americas.

• Some of these people in Asia, between 40,000-20,000 BCE, actually ventured into the sea in rafts to colonize Java, the Island of Sulawesi, New Guinea and eventually Australia.

• They are believed to be the world’s first boat people.

Theories for migrations• Some historians believe that the early Asian

migrations might have been the result of a dramatic shift in the course of the Yangzi River.

• Some geologists believe that at some time during the last ice age, the collisions of continental plates that produced the Himalayas also caused rifting in the Yunnan plateau which forced the Yangzi to flow from its source in the Tibetan mountains due east into the South China Sea, instead of following its original path south to the Gulf of Tonkin.

The First Great Migrations14,000-3,000 BCE

Instructor Pacas

Asian Continent

Inner Eurasia

Outer Eurasia

Global Rise of Sea Levels

• Between 14,000-3,500 BCE it is believed that the Earth experienced climate changes that were responsible for melting some glaciers that prompted the level of the world’s oceans to rise.

• Many Neolithic communities throughout the Eurasian land mass were forced to evacuate their former territories.

The Black Sea

• Perhaps around 4,500-4,000 BCE the communities around the Black Sea region, which had originally been a fresh water lake, experienced a catastrophic development as the rising level of the Mediterranean sea flooded into the Black Sea and this body of water over-flooded its banks forcing the migration of the Indo-European/Aryan peoples that inhabited the northern region.

Rising Sea Level Effects in the Far East

• Between 14,000-4,000 BCE, a hundred-mile strip of coast off south China was submerged.

• This forced the coastal inhabitants to contend with swamp land and rapidly submerging river valleys.

• It is believed that this forced one of the earliest phases of naval migrations.

Cont’d• About 9,000 BCE, it has been estimated, people from

the mainland of Asia crossed the Formosa Strait and settled Taiwan.

• From 7,000-5,500 BCE, they moved from Taiwan to the Philippines and later, around 4,000 BCE, on to the Malay Peninsula and the Moluccas and east to the Bismarck Archipelago.

• By 1300 BCE, they reached Fiji.

• By the 8th - 6th century BCE these southeast Asians had reached Madagascar and perhaps the Americas.

The Eurasian Migrations and the First Civilizations of Asia

Instructor Pacas

Eurasian Migrations/Invasions

• The histories of the polities, whether kingdoms or empires, of the European and Asian continents have traditionally been susceptible to the influences of intrusions/invasions/migrations from the region known as Central Asia or the Eurasian Steppes from prehistory until fairly recently 1700’s.

The Indo-Europeans• Of particular importance to the history not only of

Asia but also Europe are the Indo-Europeans whose possible origin was north of the Black Sea.

• Of particular importance to the history of Iran, India, and China are the Indo-Aryan groups of Indo-Europeans.

• These Indo-Aryans would give their name to Iran, forever change the history of India, and be a constant presence in the annals of Chinese history.

Indo-Europeans cont’d

• The Indo-Europeans formed a linguistic community that lived in the Black Sea Steppes around 4500-4000 BCE.

• By about 3000-2500 BCE, the community had begun to break up, perhaps due to inundation of their communities by the rising Black Sea; with groups moving into central, south, and west Asia and the northern Mediterranean.

Indo-Europeans

• Although we know that they were a separate linguistic community by circa 4000 BCE, Indo-Europeans do not enter the annals of history until much later, circa 1900 BCE in Assyrian documents dealing with trade in northeastern Anatolia.