Quaternary climates, paleoenvironments and human prehistory of the Tibetan plateau

This project will yield critical new insights into the climate, landscape and archaeological history of the upper Tibetan Plateau between 50 000 and 11 000 years ago, the period when Homo sapiens first ventured from the benign lowlands into the oxygen-depleted environment of High Asia. The Tibetan Plateau is the largest contiguous high-elevation terrain on the planet and ranks amongst the most extreme environments on Earth and as such is a largely blank area on the archaeological map. Only very few well dated paleolithic sites exists so far on the upper Tibetan Plateau and no consensus exists on the timing or pattern of H. sapiens migration into Asia`s high-altitude core, or on how early dispersal were influenced by climate change. We will use modern dating and geochemical techniques to construct a robust timeframe and paleoclimate record for the period of initial spread of H. sapiens onto the high elevation step of the Tibetan Plateau and thereby test current archaeological and DNA-based models for the expansion of our species into one of the most extreme environments on our planet.

The Tibetan Plateau is the largest contiguous high-elevation terrain on the planet and ranks amongst the most extreme environments on Earth and as such is a largely blank area on the archaeological map. In this project we targeted selected archaeological sites and provided robust time estimates of site occupation and also reconstructed the environmental site contexts during the time of human presence. The project provided one of the oldest indications for permanent human occupation of the high elevation step of the Tibetan Plateau and the data have been published in Science. These early settlers already roamed the south- eastern quadrant of the Tibetan highlands by ca. 8 000 to 12 000 years before present (b.p.) and their subsistence was likely facilitated by a strong Indian summer monsoon that prevailed during that time and penetrated further into the plateau compared to today. Contrary to previous claims by other authors, no evidence has been found for human occupation of the Tibetan plateau prior to the last glacial maximum (> 20 000 years b.p.). Data generated in the course of this project from the southern and western part of the plateau support this picture. Our geochronological and archaeological findings together with data published by geneticists, linguists and other (geo)archaeologists suggest that peopling the Tibetan plateau was a complex process involving multiple migration waves from potentially multiple low-land sources.