Knut Bretzke

Not Just a Crossroad: Population Dynamics and Changing Material Culture in Southwestern Asia during the Late Pleistocene

Southwestern Asia plays an essential part in all models that have been developed to explain how and when modern humans colonized Eurasia. Given the rich record of Southwestern Asia and the long history of research, it is not surprising that the region provides an enormous wealth of information on the lifeways and population dynamics of prehistoric human groups. We argue here that many archaeological models oversimplify the processes of human dispersals and contractions by underestimating the importance of archaeological and paleoenvironmental records on the regional scale. Based on our surveys and excavations in southwest Syria, the Zagros Mountains, and southeast Arabia, we conclude that the different regions provide distinct records of population dynamics during the Late Pleistocene. This led us to conclude that dispersal processes should not be understood as simple unidirectional movements during well-defined windows of opportunity but rather as complex changes in human biogeography with different effects in different regions at different times. We see more promise for research on human dispersals by facing up to this complexity instead of simplifying the problem for the sake of achieving striking results of only schematic value.