EGU24-14448, updated on 09 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-14448
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Concurrent Asian monsoon strengthening and early modern human dispersal to East Asia during the last interglacial

Jiaoyang Ruan2, Hong Ao1, María Martinón-Torrese3, Mario Krapp4, Diederik Liebrandh5, Mark J. Dekkers6, Thibaut Caley7, Tara N. Jonell8, Zongmin Zhu9, Chunju Huang9, Xinxia Li1, Ziyun Zhang1, Qiang Sun10, Pingguo Yang11, Jiali Jiang1, Xinzhou Li1, Yougui Song1, Xiaoke Qiang1, Peng Zhang1, and Zhisheng An1
Jiaoyang Ruan et al.
  • 1CAS Institute of Earth Environment, China (aohong@ieecas.cn)
  • 2IBS Center for Climate Physics; Pusan National University, South Korea (jiaoyangruan@pusan.ac.kr)
  • 3National Research Center on Human Evolution, Spain
  • 4University of Cambridge, UK
  • 5The University of Manchester, UK
  • 6Utrecht University, The Netherlands
  • 7University of Bordeaux, France
  • 8University of Glasgow, UK
  • 9China University of Geoscience (Wuhan), China
  • 10Xi'an Universtiy of Science and Technology, China
  • 11Shanxi Normal University, China

The relationship between initial Homo sapiens dispersal from Africa to East Asia and the orbitally paced evolution of the Asian summer monsoon (ASM)—currently the largest monsoon system—remains underexplored due to lack of coordinated synthesis of both Asianpaleoanthropological and paleoclimatic data. Here, we investigate orbital-scale ASM dynamics during the last 280 thousand years (kyr) and their likely influences on early H. sapiens dispersal to East Asia, through a unique integration of i) new centennial-resolution ASM records from the Chinese Loess Plateau, ii) model-basedEast Asian hydroclimatic reconstructions, iii) paleoanthropological data compilations, and iv) global H. sapiens habitat suitability simulations. Our combined proxy- and model-based reconstructions suggest that ASM precipitation responded to a combination of Northern Hemisphere ice volume, greenhouse gas, and regional summer insolation forcing, with cooccurring primary orbital cycles of ~100-kyr,41-kyr, and ~20-kyr. Between ~125 and 70 kyr ago, summer monsoon rains and temperatures increased in vast areas across Asia. This episode coincides with the earliest H. sapiens fossil occurrence at multiple localities in East Asia. Following the transcontinental increase in simulated habitat suitability, we suggest that ASM strengthening together with Southeast African climate deterioration may have promoted the initial H. sapiens dispersal from their African homeland to remote East Asia during the last interglacial.

How to cite: Ruan, J., Ao, H., Martinón-Torrese, M., Krapp, M., Liebrandh, D., Dekkers, M. J., Caley, T., Jonell, T. N., Zhu, Z., Huang, C., Li, X., Zhang, Z., Sun, Q., Yang, P., Jiang, J., Li, X., Song, Y., Qiang, X., Zhang, P., and An, Z.: Concurrent Asian monsoon strengthening and early modern human dispersal to East Asia during the last interglacial, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-14448, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-14448, 2024.

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supplementary materials version 1 – uploaded on 12 Apr 2024
  • AC1: Comment on EGU24-14448, Jiaoyang Ruan, 12 Apr 2024

    Postdoc position in simulating climatic effects on human evolution

    https://www.egu.eu/jobs/5785/postdoc-position-in-simulating-climatic-effects-on-human-evolution/

  • AC2: Comment on EGU24-14448, Jiaoyang Ruan, 12 Apr 2024

    Postdoc position in simulating climatic effects on human evolution

    https://www.egu.eu/jobs/5785/postdoc-position-in-simulating-climatic-effects-on-human-evolution/