Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

by Oppenheimer, Stephen

  26. Homo georgicus: Gabunia et al., op. cit.

  27. Foley and Lahr op. cit. Following my practice in the Prologue, I use the term Homo helmei loosely to distinguish Archaic Homo sapiens from modern humans. The term does not have general acceptance. See also next note.

  28. Stringer op. cit. The summary I have given here is oversimplified. The exact details of the cladistic relationships, names, and ages of these later large-brained humans living between 130,000 and 500,000 years ago are still argued over. For our discussion the important issue is that although they looked different from and were more robust than modern humans, they had similar-sized brains and resembled us more than they did previous humans. The subject is discussed further in McBrearty and Brooks op. cit., Foley and Lahr op. cit., and Lahr and Foley op. cit.

  29. Mishra, S. (1995) ‘The chronology of the Indian stone age: Impact of recent absolute and relative dating attempts’ Man and Environment 20(2): 11–17; Acharya, S.K. and Basu, P.K. (1993) ‘Toba ash on the Indian subcontinent and its implications for correlation of Late Pleistocene alluvium’ Quaternary Research 40: 10–19.

  30. Acharya and Basu op. cit. The date of such a changeover may not be exactly 74,000 years ago: it depends on exact stratigraphic analysis of the deposits. Acharya and Basu broadly bracket this whole stratigraphic unit as ‘Late Pleistocene’, from 40,000 to 100,000 years ago.

  31. McKie. R. (2000) Ape-man (BBC Worldwide, London).

  32. dated to around 130,000 years ago: See the discussion of dating estimates in McBrearty and Brooks op. cit. modern humans as the only survivor: The deepest branch in the mtDNA tree (190,000 years ago, see panel diagram) is between L1a, found in the San of southern Africa, and the rest. This is consistent with isolation and separation of groups during OIS 6 and survival of only two branches from that time, possibly in southern and East Africa.

  33. Oppenheimer, S. (1998) Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London).

  34. Caton-Thompson, G. (1944) The Tombs and Moon Temple of Hureidha (Hadhramaut) (Oxford University Press/The Society of Antiquaries).

  35. Walter, R.C. et al. (2000) ‘Early human occupation of the Red Sea coast of Eritrea during the last interglacial’ Nature 405: 65–9. The actual dating was to between 118,000 and 132,000 years ago.

  36. Watson et al., op. cit., originally estimated 60,000–80,000 years ago for the out-of-Africa expansion, but see note 22, where the mean age, ± SE) of L3 would be 83,000 (± 6,000) years. For confirmation of the age of L3 at 83,000 years by another dating method, see Hill, C. et al. (2003) ‘Mitochondrial DNA variation in the Orang Asli of the Malay Peninsula’ (in preparation) (L3 age 83,500 ± SE 8,400 years).

  37. oceanographic evidence denies: Rohling et al., op. cit.; Fenton et al., op. cit. Such an event: Red Sea aplanktonic episodes occurring at OIS 12, 6, and 2, ibid.

  38. OIS 4; see Dansgaard, W. et al. (1993) ‘Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250–kyr ice-core record’ Nature 364: 218–20.

  39. Rohling et al., op. cit.; Fenton et al., op. cit.; Siddall, M. et al. (2003) ‘Sea-level fluctuations during the last glacial cycle’ Nature 423: 853–8.

  40. Rohling et al., op. cit.; Fenton et al., op. cit.; Siddall et al., op. cit.

  41. Globigerinoides sacculifer, see ibid.

  42. Schultz, H. et al. (1998) ‘Correlation between Arabian Sea and Greenland climate oscillations of the past 110,000 years’ Nature 393: 54–7.

  43. Majid, Z. (1998) ‘Radiocarbon dates and culture sequence in the Lenggong Valley and beyond’ Malaysia Museums Journal 34: 241–9.

  44. Kivisild, T. et al. (2000) ‘A likely post-LGM impact of Western Asian maternal lineages to Eastern Africans’ Cold Spring Harbour Symposium on Human Origins & Disease. New York.

  45. 74,000 years: Kivisild, T. et al. (1999) ‘The place of the Indian mitochondrial DNA variants in the global network of maternal lineages and the peopling of the Old World’ in S.S. Papiha et al. (eds) Genomic Diversity: Applications in Human Population Genetics (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York) pp. 135–52. 75,000 years: Redd, A.J. and Stoneking, M. (1999) ‘Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA variation in aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean populations’ American Journal of Human Genetics 65: 808–28. 73,000 years: Kivisild, T. et al. (2003) ‘The genetic heritage of the earliest settlers persists both in Indian tribal and caste populations’ American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 313–33. Equal and more ancient figures have been estimated in China for two primary derivatives of the N clan: B, 74,600 ± 18,700 years ago, and R9, 81,400 ± 24,600 years ago; see Yong-Gang Yao et al. (2002) ‘Phylogeographic differentiation of mitochondrial DNA in Han Chinese’ American Journal of Human Genetics 70: 635–51.

  46. For Asian descendants, see Kivisild et al. (2003) op. cit.; Yong-Gang Yao et al. op. cit. For Australian descendants, see Redd and Stoneking op. cit.

  47. Schultz et al., op. cit.

  48. no more than 47,000 years old: or 50,000 years, depending on whether radiocarbon dates are corrected – see Chapter 3. The Belgian archaeologist Marcel Otte: Otte, M. (2003) The Aurignacian in Asia (in press), citing inter alia Olszewski, D.I. and Dibble, H.L. (1994) ‘The Zagros Aurignacian’ Current Anthropology 35(1): 68–75; and Otte, M. (2000) ‘The history of European populations as seen by archaeology’ in C. Renfrew and K. Boyle (eds) Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population Prehistory of Europe (MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge) pp. 139–41.

  49. a date of 28,000 years ago: Joshi, R.V. (1994) ‘South Asia in the period of Homo sapiens sapiens up to the beginnings of food production (Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic)’ in S.J. De Laet (ed.) The History of Humanity Vol. 1 (Routledge, London) pp. 256–8. between 64,000 and 74,000 years ago: Deraniyagala, S.U. (2001) Prehistory of Sri Lanka (Department of Archaeological Survey, Government of Sri Lanka) pp. 685–702.

  Chapter 2

  1. Gamble, C. (1994) Timewalkers (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA) p. 160, Table 8.2, p. 160.

  2. Klein, R. G. (1989) The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Chicago University Press).

  3. Diamond, J. (1998) Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jonathan Cape, London).

  4. Lawrence, P. (1964) Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District New Guinea (Melbourne University Press/Manchester University Press).

  5. Middle Palaeolithic technology: See the discussion, and especially Table 1 and Figures 2 and 13, in McBrearty, S. and Brooks, A.S. (2000) ‘The revolution that wasn’t: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior’ Journal of Human Evolution 39: 453–563. See also the discussion in Foley, R. and Lahr, M. (1997) ‘Mode 3 technologies and the evolution of modern humans’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal 7(1): 3–36. Confusingly, Middle Palaeolithic stone tools: See the simplified discussion, ibid.

  6. McBrearty and Brooks op. cit.; Foley and Lahr op. cit.

  7. appeared in India about 150,000 years ago: Mishra, S. (1995) ‘The chronology of the Indian Stone Age: Impact of recent absolute and relative dating attempts’ Man and Environment 20(2): 11–17. the Narmada skull: Stringer, C. (1996) ‘Current issues in modern human origins’ in W.E. Meikle et al. (eds) Contemporary Issues in Human Evolution (California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco) pp. 115–34.

  8. Harrison, T. (1959) ‘New archaeological and ethnological results from Niah caves, Sarawak’ Man 59: 1–8.

  9. I am grateful to Andrew Sherratt of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, who patiently took me through the Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic sequence again.

  10. Foley and Lahr op. cit. This argument falls down for the Far East (see Chapters 4–6). In any case, as we shall see, blades were probably invented several times earlier during the Middle Palaeolithic, although not used for the same variety of purposes.

  11. computer analysis of sites and dates: Bocquet-Appel, J.-P. and Demars, P.Y. (2000) ‘Neanderthal contraction and modern human colonization of Europe’ Antiquity 74:
544–52; see also Davies W. (2001) ‘A very model of a modern human industry: New perspectives on the origins and spread of the Aurignacian in Europe’ Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 67: 195–217. picked up quite a few ‘modern’ habits: An example of this ‘acquired technology’ is the ‘Chatelperronian’ industry in southern France, which was a later Upper Palaeolithic tradition associated with Neanderthals. Other so-called transitional stone industries have been attributed to the Neanderthals’ attempts to adapt to the pace of change. These include the Uluzzian in Italy and, much earlier in eastern Europe at the time of first appearance of moderns there around 40,000 years ago, the Szeletian, the Bohunician, and the Micoquian (named after the locations where characteristic tools were found). Unfortunately for this argument, there have always been fewer bones than stones in the record, so that it has not been absolutely confirmed who was responsible for these last four – Neanderthals or moderns. See Bocquet-Appel and Demars op. cit.

  12. being used even by Neanderthals and whether a particular set of bones was deliberately buried: Solecki, R. (1972) Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man (Allen Lane, London). See also the critical discussion of such evidence of early burials in Klein, R.G. (1999) The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins, 2 edn (Chicago University Press) pp. 395, 469–70, 550–53.

  13. Klein (1999) op. cit. pp. 469–70.

  14. Gamble op. cit. p. 161.

  15. Both quotes from Klein (1989) op. cit. pp. 358–60.

  16. second edition of his book: Klein, R.G. (1999) op. cit. ‘to me it suggests that . . .’: ibid. pp. 593–4.

  17. Takahata, N. and Satta, Y. (1998). ‘Footprints of intragenic recombination at HLA locus’ Immunogenetics 47: 430–41.

  18. For instance, a comparison of mtDNA types between Europe and Australia found no overlap between the well delineated Caucasian N haplogroups (Table 2 of Richards, M. et al. (2000) ‘Tracing European founder lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA pool’ American Journal of Human Genetics 67: 1251–76; Richards, M. and Macaulay, V. (2000) ‘Genetic data and the colonization of Europe: Genealogies and founders’ in C. Renfrew and K. Boyle (eds) Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population Prehistory of Europe (MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge) pp. 139–41), and Australian or New Guinean haplotypes (Figure 2 of Redd, A.J. and Stoneking, M. (1999) ‘Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean populations’ American Journal of Human Genetics 65: 808–28). See also for Y chromosome: Karafet, T.M. et al. (1999) ‘Ancestral Asian source(s) of New World Y-chromosome founder haplotypes’ American Journal of Human Genetics 64: 817–31. Crucially, none of the unique European Y or mtDNA clades can be found in full-blooded Aboriginal Australians.

  19. Foley and Lahr op. cit. But see also the discussion in McBrearty and Collins op. cit. pp. 480–85.

  20. Foley, R. and Lahr, M. op. cit.

  21. McBrearty and Brooks op. cit.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Tanzania, around 70,000 years ago: ibid. Sri Lanka, around 30,000 years ago: Joshi, R.V. (1994) ‘South Asia in the period of Homo sapiens sapiens up to the beginnings of food production (Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic)’ in S.J. De Laet (ed.) The History of Humanity Vol. 1 (Routledge, Paris London UNESCO) pp. 256–8.

  24. McBrearty and Brooks op. cit. p. 524.

  25. Ibid p. 524.

  26. Ibid. p. 526.

  27. Clottes, J. et al. (1995) ‘Radiocarbon dates for the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave’ International Newsletter on Rock Art (INORA) 11: 1–2.

  28. McBrearty and Brookes op. cit.

  29. Bednarik, R. (1993) ‘Palaeolithic art in India’ Man and Environment 18(2): 33–40.

  30. evidence for it from 40,000 years ago: Table 8.2 in Gamble op. cit. Here, 24,000 years ago: Pettitt, P.B. and Bader, N.O. (2000) ‘Direct AMS radiocarbon dates for the Sungir mid-Upper Palaeolithic burials’ Antiquity 74: 269–70.

  31. McBrearty and Brookes op. cit.

  32. Adapting to new and varied foods: ibid. Neanderthals also practised beach-combing: ibid.; Stringer, C. (2000) ‘Coasting out of Africa’ Nature 405: 24–7.

  33. McBrearty and Brookes op. cit.

  34. Here, around 125,000 years ago: Walter, R.C. et al. (2000) ‘Early human occupation of the Red Sea coast of Eritrea during the last interglacial’ Nature 405: 65–9. occurred in Africa by 110,000 years ago: McBrearty and Brookes op. cit. p. 530.

  35. Microliths start appearing: McBrearty and Brooks op. cit. the earliest microliths outside Africa: Joshi op. cit.; see also a report of non-geometric microliths in a beach layer dated to 64,000–75,000 years ago in Sri Lanka: Deraniyagala, S.U. (2001) Prehistory of Sri Lanka (Department of Archaeological Survey, Government of Sri Lanka) pp. 685–702.

  36. McBrearty and Brooks op. cit.

  Chapter 3

  1. The first of these waves: ‘Earliest Upper Palaeolithic/Earliest Aurignacian’ in Table 6.5 in Gamble, C. (1999) The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe (Cambridge University Press); see also Davies, W. (2001) ‘A very model of a modern human industry: New perspectives on the origins and spread of the Aurignacian in Europe’ Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 67: 195–217.

  2. after 50,000 years ago: Uncorrected radiocarbon date, 46,000 ± 8,000 years. The earliest Aurignacian artefacts were found at Temnata, south of the Danube, west of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. There are no earlier Aurignacian tools outside Europe. See Table 6.1 in Gamble op. cit. Fairly soon after this: 44,300 ± 1,900 years, ibid. to Willendorf, in Austria: 41,700 ± 3,700 years ago, ibid. at Geissenklösterle, Germany: By 36,500 ± 1,500 years ago, ibid. from Austria into northern Italy: at Riparo Fumane 40,000 ± 400 years ago, ibid. through El Castillo in northern Spain: 40,000 ± 2,100 years ago, ibid. 38,000 years ago: at Gato Preto, 38,000 ± 2,100 years ago, ibid.; see also Davies op. cit.

  3. until much later: Later Aurignacian, 25,000–33,000 years ago, Gamble op. cit. p. 287. core homeland for the Aurignacian culture: described as ‘core typological region’ in Otte, M. (2003) The Aurignacian in Asia (in press), citing inter alia Olszewski, D.I. and Dibble, H.L. (1994) ‘The Zagros Aurignacian’ Current Anthropology 35(1): 68–75. The so-called ‘transitional’ Upper Palaeolithic industries are also found 500–5,000 years earlier than the Temnata site (i.e. 47,200 ± 9,000 years ago, see Gamble op. cit.) in the Near East at a site called Boker Tatchit in the Negev Desert.

  4. Some population geneticists still regard the use of the molecular clock and the phylogeographic method as anathema.

  5. Richards, M. et al. (2000) ‘Tracing European founder lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA pool’ American Journal of Human Genetics 67: 1251–76.

  6. J, T, U5, and I in the figure: and in Richards et al., op. cit. the earliest Upper Palaeolithic dates: e.g. from the Negev Desert of 47,100 years ago – see above.

  7. over 50,000 years in the Near East: 54,400 years ago (95% credible region (CR) 50,400–58,300 years ago), Richards et al., op. cit. Europa, U5, also dates back 50,000 years: 95% CR 45,100–52,800 years ago, Richards et al., op. cit. (A 95% ‘credible region’ is analogous to a 95% ‘confidence interval’, but has a different mathematical basis.) under-recording of radiocarbon dates: It would be easy to dismiss such a discrepancy of 4,000–7,000 years by blaming the notoriously wide error margins of the molecular clock. Another more definite reason has to do with the archaeological dating. Archaeological dates for Upper Palaeolithic sites have almost all been obtained by radiocarbon dating, the precision and accuracy of which drops off markedly for objects older than 40,000 years. In objects that old there is very little radiocarbon left to decay, and by the time we get back to 40,000 years ago, the radiocarbon dates are systematically underestimating the true age. Using other methods of dating the same sites, archaeologists have shown the radiocarbon underestimates to be 2,000–3,500 years for dates between 20,000–40,000 years ago, and as much as 5,600 years for dates between 38,000 and 40,000 years. After 40,000 years the systematic error rises even more. With such und
erestimates of archaeological dates, the genetic dates (which do not have this age ceiling problem) for modern human colonization of the Levant and Europe start to look quite reasonable. See also Gamble op. cit. p. 273.

  8. Europa was genetic daughter of Rohani . . . Nasreen . . . L3: Richards, M. and Macaulay, V. (2000) ‘Genetic data and the colonization of Europe: Genealogies and founders’ in C. Renfrew and K. Boyle (eds) Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population Prehistory of Europe (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge) pp. 139–41. Note that ‘generation’ is not used in a literal sense here. Each ‘generation’ of the gene line represents one or more new mutations and may cover a period of well over 10,000 years. This was around 55,000 years ago: Kivisild, T. et al. (1999) ‘The place of the Indian mitochondrial DNA variants in the global network of maternal lineages and the peopling of the Old World’ in S.S. Papiha et al. (eds) Genomic Diversity: Applications in Human Population Genetics (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York) pp. 135–52. The estimate in this publication is based on a poorly resolved R tree in India, and an older age of R is possible, perhaps nearer to 70,000 years. One estimate was even as much as 73,000 years in a more recent paper by Kivisild et al.: see the discussion on p. 322 of Kivisild, T. et al. (2003a) ‘The genetic heritage of the earliest settlers persists both in Indian tribal and caste populations’ American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 313–33. the ages of two Asian subgroups of Rohani: e.g. R9 (81,400 years ago) and B (74,600 years ago) – Yong-Gang Yao et al. (2002) ‘Phylogeographic differentiation of mitochondrial DNA in Han Chinese’ American Journal of Human Genetics 70: 635–51.

  9. U6 moved west round the southern shore of the Mediterranean: Rando, J.C. et al. (1998) ‘Mitochondrial DNA analysis of northwest African populations reveals genetic exchanges with European, near-Eastern, and sub-Saharan populations’ Annals of Human Genetics 62: 531–50. Note that U6 is present in Bedouin and Syrian Arabs at low rates of 4–7%, which is consistent with a route for U6 into North Africa via the Levant: data from Richards, M. et al. (2000), further reported in: Richards, M. et al. (2003) ‘Extensive female-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab populations’ American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 1058–64. Early Upper Palaeolithic tools: blades and burins – Close, A.E. and Wendorf, F. (1989) ‘North Africa at 18,000 BP’ in C. Gamble and O. Soffer (eds) The World at 18,000 BP (Unwin Hyman, London) p. 47. Other evidence for early modern human presence in North Africa includes the Taramsa Hill child on the Nile, dated by Optically Stimulated Luminescence to 50,000–80,000 years ago but associated, in this case, with Middle Palaeolithic technology: Vermeersch, P.M. et al. (1998) ‘Middle Palaeolithic burial of a modern human at Taramsa Hill, Egypt’ Antiquity 72: 475–84.