Early human occupation in mainland East Asia: Implication for climate change and human evolution

Abstract

<p>East Asia is a key area for early human migration and evolution in the Old World. During the early Pleistocene, humans began to spread out of Africa. Detailed magnetostratigraphic dating coupled with high-precision isotopic chronology of early humans in mainland East Asia, western and southeastern Asia has provided insights into our understanding of early human adaptability to a variety of environments in the eastern Old World. Before the Middle Pleistocene, early humans occupied over a broad latitudinal range, from temperate northern China (e.g., the Nihewan Basin and the Loess Plateau) to subtropical southern China (e.g., the Yuanmou Basin). Thus oldest recorded human dispersal to East Asia apparently culminated in the ability to adapt diverse environments. Around the Middle Pleistocene Climate Transition, when the climate of Earth underwent profound changes in the length and intensity of its glacial-interglacial cycles with the dominant periodicity of high-latitude climate oscillations changing from 41 kyr to 100 kyr, there is a prominent early human flourishing in the high northern latitudes of East Asia and geographic expansion from low, through middle, to high northern latitudes of the area. The improved ability to adjust to diverse environments for early humans could have benefited from the increasing variability of global, regional and local paleoclimates and paleoenvironments and from the innovation of diet, e.g., the use of animal tissues.</p>