Early Modern Human from Tianyuan Cave, China

Chapter 1 Introduction

1 C h a p t e r 1 Introduction DURING MOST of the past century and into the current century, paleoanthropology has returned time and again to the issue of modern human emergence, querying the when and the where of that evolutionary process and especially of the human behavioral and biological dynamics that were involved. Given the abundance of Paleolithic archeological sites between the Caucasus Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean and the long history of fossil human discoveries in that region, most of the attention of this research has, for better or for worse, been on western Eurasia. This focus has been enhanced by the presence, in that geographical region, of the archetypical premodern humans, the Neandertals. Recent decades have seen this focus spread to the other half of the western Old World, Africa, as paleoanthropological research has increasingly agreed that the earliest anatomically modern humans emerged on that continent. This attention on modern human emergence in the western Old World has tended to shift interest away from eastern Eurasia and its adjacent islands. But that geographically vast portion of the Old World was equally occupied during the Late Pleistocene, and human populations there underwent an evolutionary transition leading to the establishment of anatomically modern human populations. It is in part to take the focus somewhat away from the western Old World and provide modern human emergence with a more cosmopolitan framework that we present here one of the most complete early modern human fossils from eastern Eurasia, the human remains from Tianyuandong. Paleontological considerations of the biological nature and phylogenetic position of early modern humans in eastern Eurasia have a long history, dating principally from the discovery in 1933 by W. C. Pei of human remains and abundant Upper Paleolithic archeological remains in the Upper Cave of Zhoukoudian (Weidenreich , 1939a). In addition to describing these human remains and aspects of their biology (see esp. Weidenreich, 1939a,b), Weidenreich (1943, 1947) incorpo- 2 CHAPTER 1 rated the Upper Cave remains into a more global assessment of the patterns of the process of modern human emergence. Since that time, there have been a series of discoveries of the fossils of both late archaic humans and especially early modern humans in eastern Asia (e.g., Woo, 1959; Brothwell, 1960; Sakura, 1981; Suzuki and Hanihara, 1982; Wu and Poirier, 1995; see also Chapter 4). These discoveries of Late Pleistocene fossils in eastern Eurasia, combined with the ever-present paleoanthropological interest in the phylogenetic emergence of modern humans, have led to a series of attempts by human paleontologists to assess the population dynamics of modern human emergence in the eastern Old World (e.g., Wolpoff et al., 1984; Pope, 1992; Bräuer, 1992; Wu, 1992, 2004, 2006; Trinkaus, 2005a). Many of these paleontological studies have concluded that there was considerable local population continuity between late archaic humans and early modern humans in the region, the studies varying principally in the degree to which population dispersals and/or gene flow were seen as influential in establishing modern human biology in the region. This has occurred despite the limited fossil evidence on either side of the transitional time period and ongoing difficulties in establishing, with limited exceptions (e.g., Barker et al., 2007), the ages of many of the critical fossils (see Brown, 1993; Wu and Poirier, 1995; Trinkaus, 2005a; see also Chapter 4). At the same time, there has been remarkably little assessment of the paleobiology of these Late Pleistocene fossil human remains. The exceptions are Weidenreich ’s early attempt (1939b) to assess the paleodemography and paleopathology of the Zhoukoudian–Upper Cave remains and more recent biomechanical analyses of the Yamashita-cho and Minatogawa remains (Kimura and Takahashi, 1992; Trinkaus and Ruff, 1996). It is in this general context that the 2001 discovery of a human partial skeleton at Tianyuandong (Tianyuan Cave) (see Chapter 2) takes on special importance. Even though Tianyuan 1 lacks the phylogenetically important cranium, it is the first human associated skeleton from eastern Asia that is older than the last glacial maximum and retains substantial portions of the facial skeleton and the limbs. It is the first human skeleton from the region to be directly radiocarbon dated, to ~40,000 years before present (BP). And its geological age places it close to the time period during which modern humans become permanently established across the Old World (between ~50,000 and ~35,000 BP) (Trinkaus et al., 2003; Trinkaus, 2005a; Barker et al., 2007; Grine et al., 2007; Crevecoeur, 2008). A...