Abstract
The late Pleistocene settlement of highland settings in mainland Southeast Asia by Homo sapiens has challenged our species’s ability to occupy mountainous landscapes that acted as physical barriers to the expansion into lower-latitude Sunda islands during sea-level lowstands. Tham Lod Rockshelter in highland Pang Mapha (northwestern Thailand), dated between 34,000 and 12,000 years ago, has yielded evidence of Hoabinhian lithic assemblages and natural resource use by hunter-gatherer societies. To understand the process of early settlements of highland areas, we measured stable carbon and oxygen isotope compositions of Tham Lod human and faunal tooth enamel. Our assessment of the stable carbon isotope results suggests long-term opportunistic behavior among hunter-gatherers in foraging on a variety of food items in a mosaic environment and/or inhabiting an open forest edge during the terminal Pleistocene. This study reinforces the higher-latitude and -altitude extension of a forest-grassland mosaic ecosystem or savanna corridor (farther north into northwestern Thailand), which facilitated the dispersal of hunter-gatherers across mountainous areas and possibly allowed for consistency in a human subsistence strategy and Hoabinhian technology in the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia over a 20,000-year span near the end of the Pleistocene.
Highlights
The late Pleistocene settlement of highland settings in mainland Southeast Asia by Homo sapiens has challenged our species’s ability to occupy mountainous landscapes that acted as physical barriers to the expansion into lower-latitude Sunda islands during sea-level lowstands
Mainland Southeast Asia has yielded a high number of archaeological sites with rich animal remains and lithic artifacts, human remains were rarely found in association with them especially during the late Pleistocene (e.g.,11–19)
Chrono-cultural frameworks for human remains and stone artifacts recovered from many archaeological sites in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) have suggested a typical “Hoabinhian” techno-complex characterized by flexed burials, sumatraliths, large and small tools made on cobbles, with an age ranging from the late Pleistocene to the mid-Holocene (e.g.23–27)
Summary
The late Pleistocene settlement of highland settings in mainland Southeast Asia by Homo sapiens has challenged our species’s ability to occupy mountainous landscapes that acted as physical barriers to the expansion into lower-latitude Sunda islands during sea-level lowstands. Much botanical, biogeographical, and geochemical evidence has suggested that a north–south savanna corridor (i.e. a band of open vegetation or a mixture of forest/grassland ecosystem) was present, starting from the central part of Thailand and streching across the exposed Sunda shelf during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, around 29–17 ka) when the sea level dropped up to 120 m below the present-day stand (e.g.,2–5) Such a corridor might have facilitated the rapid dispersal of early humans through the intermediate migratory region of S EA4,6. Tham Lod Rockshelter (TLR) in Pang Mapha District (Mae Hong Son Province, northwestern Thailand) situated on a mountainous karst landscape with the elevation of 640 m above mean sea level (Fig. 1) is a good example of such important highland sites where the human and animal remains associated with the Hoabinhian techno-complex have systematically been excavated with available and detailed stratigraphic, taphonomic, zooarchaeological, and chronological d ata[14,15,26,28,29,30,31]. Carbon and nitrogen isotope measurements of dentine collagen of a few late Pleistocene mammals (38.4–13.5 ka) from the cave of Scientific Reports | (2021) 11:16756 |
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