Life without the Movius Line: The structure of the East and Southeast Asian Early Palaeolithic

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA.The starting point of this paper is that the Movius Line is no longer an appropriate way of studying the Early Palaeolithic of East and Southeast Asia, and should be disregarded. Instead, it is argued that the Early Palaeolithic of East and Southeast Asia needs to be seen as comparable to that in the rest of Eurasia, rather than the product of an isolated backwater. Contra Movius, East Asia was not isolated throughout the entire Early and Middle Pleistocene, but open to immigration during interglacials, as is indicated by its fossil hominin record. As in Europe and Southwest Asia, both bifacial and non-biface assemblages are present in China and Korea, thus indicating the presence of an Acheulean component, although the lack of agreement over how the Acheulean should be defined creates difficulties in establishing its extent in Southeast Asia. Regarding non-biface assemblages, Zhoukoudian was an unfortunate choice of an East Asian site that lacked bifaces, as bifaces are also rare or absent in a number of caves in Southwest Asia and Europe. Additionally, the absence of bifaces in some sites is not convincingly demonstrated because of the small size of the lithic assemblage. Finally, the simple flake industries in Southeast Asia are likely contemporary with Upper Pleistocene, Middle Palaeolithic and microlithic assemblages in India rather than with Middle Pleistocene, Acheulean assemblages, as proposed by Movius

Middle Pleistocene genome calibrates a revised evolutionary history of extinct cave bears

Palaeogenomes provide the potential to study evolutionary processes in real time, but this potential is limited by our ability to recover genetic data over extended timescales.1 As a consequence, most studies so far have focused on samples of Late Pleistocene or Holocene age, which covers only a small part of the history of many clades and species. Here, we report the recovery of a low coverage palaeogenome from the petrous bone of a ∼360,000 year old cave bear from Kudaro 1 cave in the Caucasus Mountains. Analysis of this genome alongside those of several Late Pleistocene cave bears reveals widespread mito-nuclear discordance in this group. Using the time interval between Middle and Late Pleistocene cave bear genomes, we directly estimate ursid nuclear and mitochondrial substitution rates to calibrate their respective phylogenies. This reveals post-divergence mitochondrial transfer as the dominant factor explaining their mito-nuclear discordance. Interestingly, these transfer events were not accompanied by large-scale nuclear introgression. However, we do detect additional instances of nuclear admixture among other cave bear lineages, and between cave bears and brown bears, which are not associated with mitochondrial exchange. Genomic data obtained from the Middle Pleistocene cave bear petrous bone has thus facilitated a revised evolutionary history of this extinct megafaunal group. Moreover, it suggests that petrous bones may provide a means of extending both the magnitude and time depth of palaeogenome retrieval over substantial portions of the evolutionary histories of many mammalian clades

The Upper Palaeolithic site of Kalavan 1 (Armenia): An Epigravettian settlement in the Lesser Caucasus

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