Relocation of the 1936 Mojokerto skull discovery site near Perning, East Java

Human Evolution in Asia: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

We review the state of paleoanthropology research in Asia. We survey the fossil record, articulate the current understanding, and delineate the points of contention. Although Asia received less attention than Europe and Africa did in the second half of the twentieth century, an increase in reliably dated fossil materials and the advances in genetics have fueled new research. The long and complex evolutionary history of humans in Asia throughout the Pleistocene can be explained by a balance of mechanisms, between gene flow among different populations and continuity of regional ancestry. This pattern is reflected in fossil morphology and paleogenomics. Critical understanding of the sociocultural forces that shaped the history of hominin fossil research in Asia is important in charting the way forward.

Evolution and dispersal of the genus Homo: A landscape approach

The notion of the physical landscape as an arena of ecological interaction and human evolution is a powerful one, but its implementation at larger geographical and temporal scales is hampered by the challenges of reconstructing physical landscape settings in the geologically active regions where the earliest evidence is concentrated. We argue that the inherently dynamic nature of these unstable landscapes has made them important agents of biological change, creating complex topographies capable of selecting for, stimulating, obstructing or accelerating the latent and emerging properties of the human evolutionary trajectory. We use this approach, drawing on the concepts and methods of active tectonics, to develop a new perspective on the origins and dispersal of the Homo genus. We show how complex topography provides an easy evolutionary pathway to full terrestrialisation in the African context, and would have further equipped members of the genus Homo with a suite of adaptive characteristics that facilitated wide-ranging dispersal across ecological and climatic boundaries into Europe and Asia by following pathways of complex topography. We compare this hypothesis with alternative explanations for hominin dispersal, and evaluate it by mapping the distribution of topographic features at varying scales, and comparing the distribution of early Homo sites with the resulting maps and with other environmental variables.

Endocasts: possibilities and limitations for the interpretation of human brain evolution

Brains are not preserved in the fossil record but endocranial casts are. These are casts of the internal bony braincase, revealing approximate brain size and shape, and they are also informative about brain surface morphology. Endocasts are the only direct evidence of human brain evolution, but they provide only limited data ('paleoneurology'). This review discusses some new fossil endocasts and recent methodological advances that have allowed novel analyses of old endocasts, leading to intriguing findings and hypotheses. The interpretation of paleoneurological data always relies on comparative information from living species whose brains and behavior can be directly investigated. It is therefore important that future studies attempt to better integrate different approaches. Only then will we be able to gain a better understanding about hominin brain evolution. © 2014 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Early evidence of the genus Homo in East Asia

The timing and route of the earliest dispersal from Africa to Eastern Asia are contentious topics in the study of early human evolution because Asian hominin fossil sites with precise age constraints are very limited. Here we report new high-resolution magnetostratigraphic results that place stringent age controls on excavated hominin incisors and stone tools from the Yuanmou Basin, southwest China. The hominin-bearing layer resides in a reverse polarity magnetozone just above the upper boundary of the Olduvai subchron, yielding an estimated age of 1.7Ma. The finding represents the age of the earliest documented presence of Homo, with affinities to Homo erectus, in mainland East Asia. This age estimate is roughly the same as for H. erectus in island Southeast Asia and immediately prior to the oldest archaeological evidence in northeast Asia. Mammalian fauna and pollen obtained directly from the hominin site indicate that the Yuanmou hominins lived in a varied habitat of open vegetation with patches of bushland and forest on an alluvial fan close to a lake or swamp. The age and location are consistent with a rapid southern migration route of initial hominin populations into Eastern Asia.

Stone artifacts and hominins in island Southeast Asia: New insights from Flores, eastern Indonesia

This study reexamines the current understanding of Pleistocene stone-artifact assemblages in island Southeast Asia. A differentiation has long been made between assemblages of large-sized "core tools" and assemblages of small-sized "flake tools." "Core tool" assemblages are often argued to be the handiwork of early hominin species such as Homo erectus, while small-sized "flake tool" assemblages have been attributed to Homo sapiens. We argue that this traditional Southeast Asian perspective on stone tools assumes that the artifacts recovered from a site reflect a complete technological sequence. Our analyses of Pleistocene-age artifact assemblages from Flores, Indonesia, demonstrate that large pebble-based cores and small flake-based cores are aspects of one reduction sequence. We propose that the Flores pattern applies across island Southeast Asia: large-sized "core tool" assemblages are in fact a missing element of the small-sized flake-based reduction sequences found in many Pleistocene caves and rock-shelters. We conclude by discussing the implications of this for associating stone-artifact assemblages with hominin species in island Southeast Asia.