Robin Dennell

An Asian perspective on early human dispersal from Africa

The past decade has seen the Pliocene and Pleistocene fossil hominin record enriched by the addition of at least ten new taxa, including the Early Pleistocene, small-brained hominins from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the diminutive Late Pleistocene Homo floresiensis from Flores, Indonesia. At the same time, Asias earliest hominin presence has been extended up to 1.8 Myr ago, hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously envisaged. Nevertheless, the preferred explanation for the first appearance of hominins outside Africa has remained virtually unchanged. We show here that it is time to develop alternatives to one of palaeoanthropologys most basic paradigms: ‘Out of Africa 1’.

The Economic Importance of Plant Resources Represented on Archaeological Sites

Techniques for estimating the economic importance of plants represented on archaeological sites have usually assumed that plant samples were random in composition. The effects of crop-processing activities and other factors upon the composition of each sample have frequently been overlooked, or their importance minimized. This article proposes an alternative approach and suggests that the economic value of a prehistoric plant resource can be ascertained by considering its context within crop-processing activities. It is argued that the merits of this technique are that it provides a more accurate means, first, of distinguishing between actual and potential plant resources, and secondly, of evaluating their importance.

Early Tool-Making in Asia : Two-Million-Year-Old-Artefacts in Pakistan

For the last half-century, the story of very early hominids, and their stone industries, has been almost exclusively ‘in Africa’. This first report of a very early industry takes the story ‘out of Africa’ and into the Indian sub-continent – that is, in a geographical direction towards the early industries of eastern Asia.

Recent Excavations at Nahal Oren, Israel.

The site of Nahal Oren is 10 km south of Haifa in the Wadi Fellah at its junction with the old Tel Aviv-Haifa road, Israel. The first excavations at Nahal Oren were made by Professor Stekelis in 1941, when the cave was emptied; a Natufian industry was found (Stekelis 1942). In 1954–9 there were further excavations in front of the cave (Stekelis and Yisraeli 1963). Numerous fine artefacts indicated the presence of two phases of the Kebaran, Natufian and ‘pre Pottery Neolithic A and B’ industries. The well known complex of house foundations on artificial platforms or terraces was exposed during this work. The industrial succession indicated that the site was suitable for the study of late Palaeolithic cultures and their associated economies. The recent excavations, supported by the British Museum and carried out by Cambridge University and the Israel Museum, had the following objectives: to attempt the total collection of artefacts from restricted areas, to establish the relevant stratigraphy, and to collect a broad spectrum of organic remains, by methods developed by the British Academys Major Research Project, the History of Early Agriculture.

The Hunter–Gatherer/Agricultural Frontier in Prehistoric Temperate Europe

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the importance of the agricultural/hunter–gatherer frontier in European prehistory. Hunter–gatherers and agriculturalists coexisted in many parts of prehistoric Europe for several centuries, and in some areas, for millennia. In some cases, farming communities—particularly the earliest ones in temperate Europe—were scattered amongst predominantly hunter–gatherer populations; in other areas, and especially in later prehistory, the two were more clearly segregated, and a distinct frontier existed between them. The spread of agriculture was sometimes rapid, sometimes gradual, while at other times, little change occurred for long periods. Static frontiers would have developed between hunter–gatherers and farmers in areas where hunter–gatherers felt no advantage in either acquiring and developing agricultural resources or in becoming assimilated into agricultural groups or in regions that agriculturalists did not feel were worth colonizing. Two types of static frontier can be recognized, one open and the other closed. The chapter discusses the open and closed static frontiers.

Late Pliocene Artefacts from Northern Pakistan

In an earlier article (Rendell and Dennell I985), we reported the I983 discovery of handaxes and other stone artefacts in firmly dated contexts between o.s and 0.7 million years old at two localities in northern Pakistan. We now report the discovery of what we regard as hominid-struck stone artefacts and/or debitage in a geological horizon at another locality in northern Pakistan that is, in our opinion, ca. 2 million years old. These artefacts were also discovered in I983, in the area near Riwat, south-east of Rawalpindi (fig. i), where members of the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan had previously been mapping a complex series of Upper Pleistocene fluviatile and aeolian deposits spanning the last I50,000 years. The first to be found was embedded in a gritstone outcrop at the base of a deeply incised gully. Flow in the gully is ephemeral, and this outcrop now forms the head of a small waterfall after heavy rains. Erosion of this gritstone had exposed a quartzite cobble (fig. 2) from which some flakes had been detached. As the flaked surfaces were still partially embedded in the gritstone, the flaking of this piece could not have taken place after the erosion of the gritstone to its present form. The piece was therefore photographed and carefully chiselled out and was found to have been flaked in three planes, involving the removal of six and perhaps seven flakes (fig. 3). Downstream of this find, the same conglomerate horizon is exposed as a series of large tabular fragments (up to io m2) caused by undercutting and subsequent fracturing. Careful inspection of the surfaces of these blocks for other quartzite clasts

Palaeoanthropology: Early Homo sapiens in China

The timing of the dispersal of our species from Africa is a continuing and lively topic of debate. Evidence that modern humans existed in China more than 100,000 years ago is both equivocal and thought-provoking.

“Resource-rich, stone-poor”: Early hominin land use in large river systems of northern India and Pakistan

This chapter explores two related issues. The first is whether Early Pleistocene hominins were successful in colonizing the IndoGangetic floodplains of northern India and Pakistan; and the second is whether the paucity of evidence that they did so might help explain why the evidence for hominins in peninsula India dates to the Middle Pleistocene (Petraglia, 1998), with the exception of one recent, and unconfirmed, date of 1.27Ma from Isampur, Karnataka (Paddayya et al., 2002). In an earlier paper (Dennell, 2003), I pointed out that current evidence indicates several major discontinuities in regional hominin records across Asia in the Early Pleistocene (see Figure 1). Peninsula India currently has one of the longest, as hominins were present at Dmanisi, Georgia, to the west at 1.75Ma (Gabunia et al., 2000a), and Java to the east by ca. 1.6Ma (Larick et al., 2001) and possibly by ca.1.8Ma (Swisher et al., 1994). However, apart from a small amount of material that remains controversial from Riwat (Dennell et al., 1988) and the Pabbi Hills, Pakistan (Dennell, 2004; Hurcombe, 2004), there is no incontrovertible evidence that hominins were living in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent in the Early Pleistocene, even though it is the obvious corridor route between Southwest and Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I suggest that Early Pleistocene hominins would have found it very difficult to colonize successfully extensive floodplains such as those of northern India and Pakistan, and current evidence suggests that if they were there at all, it was probably on an intermittent basis and at very low densities of population. Important geological changes in this region towards the end of the Early

Magnetic polarity stratigraphy of Upper Siwalik Sub-Group, Soan Valley, Pakistan: implications for early human occupance of Asia

Abstract The results of a detailed paleomagnetic study of a 68 m section of Upper Siwalik sediments in the Soan syncline, northern Pakistan, are presented. A palaeolithic artefact and other pieces of struck quartzite were found in situ in a gritstone/conglomerate horizon near the base of the section. Incremental thermal demagnetization was used to remove later magnetic overprints in these sediments, since alternating field demagnetization was shown to be inappropriate. With the exception of the lowest stratigraphic level, the Upper Siwalik sediments examined in the Riwat section show reverse polarity magnetization. The declination values are consistent with a 16° (±4°) counterclockwise rotation of the Soan syncline tectonic block since deposition of the sediments. On the basis of the palaeomagnetic analyses and the tectonic and stratigraphic context of the section, our current best estimate of the age of the artefact-bearing horizon is 2.0 ± 0.2Ma .

The Colonization of “Savannahstan”: Issues of Timing(s) and Patterns of Dispersal Across Asia in the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene

This paper examines current weaknesses in the Out of Africa 1 model concerning the earliest hominin dispersals into Asia. It proposes first that the development of grasslands in Late Pliocene East Africa was the final part of a process of eastward expansion of grasslands across Asia that began in the Miocene; and secondly that early H. erectus in East Africa was not particularly distinctive relative to its contemporaries. It then reviews assessments that the Dmanisi hominins may have been ancestral to H. erectus in both East Africa and East Asia, and argues that the current fossil vertebrate record of Southwest Asia cannot demonstrate that hominins were absent before 1.8 Ma. Some alternatives are explored, of which the most parsimonious is that hominins may have dispersed into Southwest Asia before 2.0 Ma, and perhaps shortly after 2.6 Ma when stone tool-making became routine. Regarding the direction of dispersal, hominins probably dispersed southwards towards Java, and northwards via Central Asia to North China. Because of the climatic and vegetational changes that affected Asia during the Pliocene and Pleistocene, hominin populations would have expanded and contracted in tune with these fluctuations. Out of Africa 1 was therefore not an isolated, continental-level colonization event shortly after 1.8 Ma, but probably a process of numerous, small-scale latitudinal and longitudinal dispersals that began before 2 Ma.