EGU2020-12194
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-12194
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Early human occupation in mainland East Asia: Implication for climate change and human evolution

Rixiang Zhu
Rixiang Zhu
  • Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China (rxzhu@mail.iggcas.ac.cn)

East Asia is a key area for early human migration and evolution in the Old World. During the early Pleistocene, humans began to spread out of Africa. Detailed magnetostratigraphic dating coupled with high-precision isotopic chronology of early humans in mainland East Asia, western and southeastern Asia has provided insights into our understanding of early human adaptability to a variety of environments in the eastern Old World. Before the Middle Pleistocene, early humans occupied over a broad latitudinal range, from temperate northern China (e.g., the Nihewan Basin and the Loess Plateau) to subtropical southern China (e.g., the Yuanmou Basin). Thus oldest recorded human dispersal to East Asia apparently culminated in the ability to adapt diverse environments. Around the Middle Pleistocene Climate Transition, when the climate of Earth underwent profound changes in the length and intensity of its glacial-interglacial cycles with the dominant periodicity of high-latitude climate oscillations changing from 41 kyr to 100 kyr, there is a prominent early human flourishing in the high northern latitudes of East Asia and geographic expansion from low, through middle, to high northern latitudes of the area. The improved ability to adjust to diverse environments for early humans could have benefited from the increasing variability of global, regional and local paleoclimates and paleoenvironments and from the innovation of diet, e.g., the use of animal tissues.

How to cite: Zhu, R.: Early human occupation in mainland East Asia: Implication for climate change and human evolution, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-12194, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-12194, 2020

This abstract will not be presented.