conference paper
(Tracking Upper Pleistocene human dispersals into the Iranian Plateau: a geoarchaeological model Saman Heydari-Guran Universität Tübingen – Germany
- Title
- (Tracking Upper Pleistocene human dispersals into the Iranian Plateau: a geoarchaeological model Saman Heydari-Guran Universität Tübingen – Germany
- Creator(s)
- Heydari-Guran, Saman
- Date
- 2015
- Pages
- 40 - 54
- Language
- eng
- Publisher
- Unesco
- Abstract
- Western Asia lies at the crossroad of human migrations out of Africa during the Pleistocene. Here, Neanderthals and their African counterparts - Anatomically Modern Humans (AMHS) met for the first time about 100 Ka (for instance, see the Akazawa et al., 1998 and references therein). Therefore, it is in this region that we can expect the earliest evidence for the successful expansion of our species into new regions and environments. Based on skeletal remains from the Levant at Skhul, Tabun and Qafzeh Caves (Lieberman, 1993: 602), AMHS appear to have first left Africa between 80-120 Ka, although these initial dispersals were not necessarily successful. Despite some early evidence for modern human presence in the Arabian Peninsula by 100 Ka (Armitage et al., 2011), most researchers suggest that it was only between 60-40 Ka that a wave of AMHS from Africa successfully moved into Eurasia (Dennell, 2010, Mellars, 2006, Shea and Bar-Yosef, 2005) thereby replacing and admixing with endemic populations of archaic humans (Green et al., 2010). Recent discoveries of AMHS skeletons in east Asia older than 40 Ka years (for instance, see Liu et al., 2010 and Demeter et al., 2012) and the discovery of genetic evidence for a previously unknown species of archaic hominine in southern Siberia (Krause et al., 2010) suggest that the demographic history of Eurasia was much more complicated than previously assumed.
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