Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (39 page)

Two famous human skulls found at the end of the nineteenth century at Wajak in Central Java have provided a focus for a number of different reconstructions of the human prehistory of the region. For more than a century, these skulls were thought to predate the LGM and to have represented an early proto-Australian type. However, a complete reverse of this Australo-Melanesian view has been put forward by a number of anthropologists who have pointed out that the Wajak skulls show no similarities to Australians of any
antiquity. Instead, the skulls have been claimed to be early Mongoloid, or even identical to but more robust than modern (Mongoloid) Javanese. Most convincingly, David Bulbeck argues that they too are like the Ainu and are part of a Pacific coast/Sundaland continuum. While early reports insisted that the Wajak skulls were Pleistocene – older (or much older) than 10,000 years, two recent carbon dates suggest that they are either 10,560 or 6,560 years old, which puts them more in the pre-agricultural early Holocene.
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Clearly, the possibility that the Niah, Tabon, and Wajak skulls may be evidence of the early presence of early Mongoloid or pre-Mongoloid types in Island Southeast Asia might have a bearing on the date of such a presence. There may not be a single date at all, if the transition to Southern Mongoloid was a gradual local evolutionary process. This could be a problem for the orthodox view of a late Mongoloid replacement. While this does not prove that Mongoloid features appeared in Island Southeast Asia at the time of the LGM, it does suggest they may have reached Java well before the Neolithic period, which is normally put forward as the date of their arrival. In summary, from both physical as well as genetic evidence, Aboriginal Malays may turn out to be descendants of the earliest Southern Mongoloids, as their original name, ‘Proto-Malays’, was intended to imply.
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Mongoloid replacement in China?

Turning now to the north, a similar picture of post-glacial, local genetic expansion clusters of mitochondrial DNA may be seen along the Pacific coastline from South China up to North Asia, reflecting refugee flow east from the Central Asian plain and subsequent expansion along the coast. Of these genetic expansions, the closest to the LGM is part of the common Asian Haplogroup D, with an age of 16,800 years. One D subgroup characteristic of the Chukchi aboriginals of the far north-east of Siberia is dated to
14,900 years ago. Others include A2 (11,200 years) and a C type (10,800 years).
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In China and on the Pacific coast we find again relict aboriginal coastal groups from before the arrival of the Mongoloids, isolated this time not by jungle but by the sea. One of these groups is the well-known Ainu of northern Japan. The Ainu are descended from the original Jomon peoples of Japan, who 12,500 years ago made some of the world’s first pots. Later Mongoloid immigration from the mainland by the Yayoi of Korea all but replaced the original population, and the modern Ainu represent varying degrees of admixture. There are sufficient similarities between the prehistoric Jomon skulls, the ice-age Japanese Minatogawa 1 skull from Okinawa (dated to between 16,600 and 18,250 years ago; see
Plate 20
), and the modern Ainu for them to be regarded as lying on the same continuous line of descent. As mentioned above, these Pacific Rim groups may represent a pre-Mongoloid substratum.
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As a result of its isolation, Japan probably received its last Mongoloid immigrants, the Yayoi, starting 2,300 years ago. This event is thought to have left its genetic trace. Studies conducted in different parts of Japan suggest that the YAP+ marker, Abel, one of the oldest out-of-Africa beachcombing lines, would have characterized the Jomons. In Okinawa, the rare Asian YAP+ marker achieves frequencies of 55 per cent. The other beachcombing Y marker, Cain, is also found among Japanese at rates of up to 10 per cent.
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The Minatogawa 1 skull shows similarities with two other famous ancient skulls of China, the Upper Cave 101 and Liujiang (see
Plate 19
). The former is from the Zhoukoudian or Dragon Bone Hill in northern China and although poorly dated is certainly more than 10,000 years old and probably preglacial. The Liujiang skull is from southern China (see
Chapter 4
). Australian physical anthropologist Peter Brown has argued against the view that these three rather robust skulls show proto-Mongoloid features. On his plots they are
closer to Australian aboriginals than to modern East Asians, although they are not even particularly close to the former.
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This evidence is consistent with the idea that the preglacial population of China and the Pacific coast may still have resembled the first beachcombing settlers, before the Mongoloid expansions took place, and that their genetic heritage may still persist. The other ancient beachcombing Y marker, Cain, is also found in Northeast Asia, but this time on the mainland and coast in peoples of the Amur River, Okhotsk, Mongolia, and central and southern Siberia (see
Figure 6.4
). In these regions Cain, normally only present as a tiny minority, is found at rates of 50–90 per cent.
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The fact that this ancient Northeast Asian beachcombing marker persists is entirely consistent with the evidence from the skulls, which suggests that the ancestral non-Mongoloid population survived in that region until at least the LGM.

Cultural evidence for an Asian dispersal

Is there any archaeological evidence, apart from the Wajak skulls, to support the presence of antique Palaeolithic societies throughout North and East Asia who were infiltrated, or replaced by, Mongoloid dispersals from the Central Asian Steppe 20,000 years ago? There is, but with caveats. The interpretation of the archaeological record from Northeast Asia, China, and Korea (and also Southeast Asia) between 5,500 and 25,000 years ago is hampered by lack of coastal archaeological evidence. This is because today’s high sea level now covers the coastal sites that would have preferentially been occupied by the invaders (see above and
Figure 6.3
). What is left is a number of inland and island cave sites that could easily have been the refuges of the original indigenous peoples rather than those of the invaders.

At this stage I would like to present a highly simplified interpretation of East Asian archaeology of the glacial period. This will serve as a background against which changes from the LGM onwards can be viewed. As we have seen (
Chapter 3
), Europe
underwent a replacement of the Middle Palaeolithic technology of the Neanderthals by the more sophisticated Upper Palaeolithic technology of the first Anatomically Modern Humans there. We also saw that the Middle Palaeolithic technology of the Neanderthals was by no means primitive, but represented a tradition parallel to styles of Middle Stone Age tool-making by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa before 50,000 years ago.

It is therefore a surprise to find a low level of stone technology being used by modern humans in East and Southeast Asia at the time of the Neanderthals’ final competition with Cro-Magnons. Tools associated with Anatomically Modern Humans in Southeast Asia and Australia seem to have been less sophisticated than those used by the Neanderthals.
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The contrast is so great that in some cases archaeologists who have concentrated on the African and European Palaeolithic traditions cannot believe that some of the tools attributed to modern humans by their Asianist colleagues were artefacts at all.

This contrast of styles and ‘quality’ was first pointed out by an American archaeologist, Hallam Movius, in 1948. What became known as the Movius Line separated off the Far East, including Southeast Asia, from the rest of the world as an area of cultural ‘backwardness’ and ‘unstandardized tools’ more or less right up to the last ice age. To make things even more confusing, the East Asian Palaeolithic tool-making tradition which produced what are called ‘chopper-chopping’ tools stretches from the time of modern human occupation back into the Middle Palaeolithic period, at least a million years ago. This was a time when East Asia was occupied by
Homo erectus
, and long before modern humans had even evolved. There is some dispute about when chopper-chopping tools were first made in Island Southeast Asia, with several archaeologists claiming, with reason, that they were first introduced by modern humans possibly around 70,000 years ago (see
Chapter 4
).
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Several archaeologists have pointed out that the lack of sophistication of the chopper-chopping tools reflects the poor knapping
quality of the types of stone available, for example quartzite and basalt. It has been surmised that people then were making (as they still do today) much more sophisticated implements from perishable materials such as hardwood, bamboo, and plant fibres.
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The fact that people of Oceania managed to colonize the Northern Solomon Islands by boat 30,000 years ago, and tens of thousands of years before evidence of European sailing, is ample evidence – if any were needed – of the level of early technical sophistication in the Far East.

A tale of two rivers

Whatever the reasons for the persistence of the distinctive chopper-chopping industries in the Far East, they do provide us with a simple background on which to record the intrusions of other cultures into China and Southeast Asia from Central Asia at the height of the last ice age. On top of this general background is a geographical and chronological structure that we might call ‘a tale of two rivers’. Northern Chinese Palaeolithic cultures are geographically clustered around the Yellow River and, well before the LGM, under the increasing influence of Upper Palaeolithic innovations from Central Asia. First flakes, then blades, and finally the characteristic bifacial points reminiscent of the Diuktai cultures of eastern Siberia during the LGM, could have moved to places as far east as Japan to replace the older tools and weapons. Southern China, on the other hand, dominated as it was by the Yangtzi River and shielded both geographically and environmentally from the cultural influences of the Central Asian steppe, seems to have had a separate and rather slower evolution.
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Other potential western influences on China and Southeast Asia at the LGM, which may have developed in parallel with the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic, are a flaked stone industry in the Tarim River basin on the southern margins of the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang province and a microblade industry on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau
(a microblade is a small prismatic parallel-sided flake struck from a prepared core).
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Some western Upper Palaeolithic technical influences appeared in northern China and southern Inner Mongolia even before the ice age. Perhaps the earliest, between 35,000 and 50,000 years ago, have been uncovered near a loop of the middle Yellow River known as the Ordos Plateau. The famous Upper Cave near Beijing yielded sophisticated bone, shell, and stone artefacts from around the LGM, including an eyed needle and a complex necklace of bone, shell, and stone dated to around 18,000 years ago. Even more sophisticated Upper Palaeolithic cultures, featuring three-eyed needles and bone-and-antler tools, continued to develop after the LGM along the lower reaches of the Yellow River towards the coast.
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But much of the east coast of China which was most habitable during the LGM now lies under the sea, inaccessible to the archaeologist.

Farther to the north and east, the Russian Far East, Japan, and Korea showed dramatic changes in technology at the time of the LGM. In the Russian Far East, the earliest carbon-dated Upper Palaeolithic macroblade site is what has become known as the Geographical Society Cave, on the Amur River. (Any blade longer than about 50 mm (2 inches) is classified as a macroblade.) Microblades first appear in this region around the LGM (19,350 years ago) but nearer the coast of the Sea of Japan, in Primorye.
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Japan has one of the most detailed sequential records of events around the LGM anywhere in the world. Before 20,000 years ago, Japan shared the East Asian predominantly core tool and chopper-chopping tradition. Between 18,000 and 20,000 years ago this gave way to a rich new stone technology, reminiscent of the Western Upper Palaeolithic, with flakes and blades (the latter becoming more and more frequent with time) and a profusion of other derived products. Finally, from 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, microblades and bifacial points became common. Korea remains rather less intensively researched, although the same sequence of core tools
giving way to flakes then blades around the time of the LGM has been found. In both of these sequences we see the period around the ice age as a time of expansion and technological change, with old East Asian traditions being swept away, presumably by an influx of skills and hunters coming in from the freezing Asian steppe to the west.
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The regions around the Yangtzi River in southern China appear to have been shielded to a certain extent from the full impact of Western Upper Palaeolithic technology, but the preglacial, quartzite-based chopper-chopping industry was modified (although not replaced) at the LGM by new tools and materials. The new tools were smaller and more varied, including flakes, and were also fashioned from other materials such as chert, bone, and antler. As in the north, the coastal regions of southern China at the LGM now lie deep beneath the waves, hiding any possible evidence of LGM technical change on the seafront.
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