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

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Asian Paleoanthropology

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Grasslands” are used here in a generic sense to denote ones with a short growing season,characterized by strong seasonal contrasts in temperature and precipitation,and a prolonged dry season of ≥3 months.Precipitation can be either in summer (as in monsoonal grasslands) or in winter and spring,as in Central and Southwest Asia.Edaphic (i.e. wetland grasslands) are excluded.See Harris (1980) for a selection of papers on past and present usage.

  2. 2.

    This estimate is not affected by the more recent dates now available for the tuffs over and under this specimen. The revised ages (McDougall and Brown 2006) for the KBS, Chari and Lower Nariokotome Tuffs are indistinguishable from the previous ones, although the revised estimates for the age of the Morutut Tuff are slightly younger (1.607 ± 0.019 Ma instead of 1.64 ± 0.03 Ma). As the age of the Nariokotome specimen is derived from estimates of sedimentation rates between dated tuffs, the original estimate of 1.53 ± 0.05 Ma is not significantly affected.

  3. 3.

    The Mojokerto hominin now appears to be ≤1.49 Ma (Morwood et al. 2003).

  4. 4.

    This finding is consistent with anatomical evidence that Homo habilis retained arboreal capabilities as late as 1.8 Ma (Susman and Stern 1982).

  5. 5.

    The term “monsoon ” is derived from the Arabic “mausim”, meaning “a wind in South West Asia and the Indian Ocean blowing from the south-west from April to October, and from the north-east the rest of the year” (Baker 1949: 940).

  6. 6.

    A long-running debate amongst Russian scientists over whether loess formed in glacial or interglacial periods can be regarded as conclusively settled in favor of the former viewpoint: loess is glacial (see Dodonov and Baiguzina 1995: 708).

  7. 7.

    As an early example, see also “Homo erectus is an Asian lineage at least as old as Homo habilis” (Dennell et al. 1988: 105).

  8. 8.

    This is the French spelling of Gabunia, as is Dmanissi for Dmanisi.

  9. 9.

    See also Dennell (1995: 24): “Another and more daring suggestion is that Homo erectus evolved in Asia and then migrated into Africa 1.5 million years ago, and was therefore not descended from Homo habilis and its African contemporaries”.

  10. 10.

    This argument rests heavily upon the assumption that Sangiran 17 is older than OH 9. However, according to proponents of a “short chronology” for the Javan hominins, its age may be only ≤1.1 Ma (Hyodo et al. 1993; Itihara et al. 1994).

  11. 11.

    ‘Ubeidiya to Sangiran is c. 5,640 air-miles; London–Johannesburg is 5,617 air-miles, and Paris–San Francisco is 5,683 air-miles. ‘Ubeidiya to Zhoukoudian is c. 4,455 air-miles; New York–Sarajevo is 4,477 air-miles. Nihewan to Sangiran is 3,300 air-miles, or about the same as Atapuerca, Spain, to the Omo Valley, Ethiopia (see Fitzpatrick and Modlin 1986).

  12. 12.

    If a claim that hominins were present in a region is to be credible, it has to satisfy three criteria of context, dating and identification. That is to say, the material must be in a clear stratigraphic context, preferably shown by photographs and detailed section drawings; the dating has to be unequivocal; and the evidence itself has to be demonstrably hominin in origin (i.e. fossil specimens have to be unequivocally hominin, and claimed artefacts have to be clearly different from geofacts), and preferably published as both drawings and photographs. In the author’s opinion, the sites mentioned in this group fail at least one of those criteria.

  13. 13.

    Ethiopia = 435,521 square miles; Kenya = 224,081 square miles; Somalia = 246,201 square miles; and Tanzania = 364,899 square miles.

  14. 14.

    Gardner and Bate (1937) also recognised Testudo (two types), Hippopotamus and Stegodon, but the last two of these were not confirmed by Hooijer (1958).

  15. 15.

    As example, it was commonly believed in the 1920s and 1930s that hominins evolved in Central Asia and later migrated into Africa; not until the 1960s could it clearly be shown that the reverse pattern was more likely; see, e.g. Dennell (2001).

  16. 16.

    No Africanist would suggest that three points of observation were sufficient to document the emergence of the genus Homo, or that the East African record is now so well known that any further information is redundant.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Chris Norton for inviting me to the session that he co-organised at the AAPA meeting in Philadelphia in 2007, and the cogent criticism of an anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this paper. Wil Roebroeks (Leiden) and Paul Pettitt (Sheffield) are thanked for their role in earlier formulations of some of the ideas expressed in this paper. The British Academy is also thanked for granting me a 3-year research sabbatical (2003–2006) in which to concentrate on researching early Asian prehistory.

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    Robin William Dennell

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    Christopher J. Norton

  2. , Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa

    David R. Braun

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Dennell, R.W. (2011). The Colonization of “Savannahstan”: Issues of Timing(s) and Patterns of Dispersal Across Asia in the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene. In: Norton, C., Braun, D. (eds) Asian Paleoanthropology. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9094-2_2

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