Journal article
Constraining the chronology and ecology of Late Acheulean and Middle Palaeolithic occupations at the margins of the monsoon
- Abstract:
- South Asia hosts the world's youngest Acheulean sites, with dated records typically restricted to sub-humid landscapes. The Thar Desert marks a major adaptive boundary between monsoonal Asia to the east and the Saharo-Arabian desert belt to the west, making it a key threshold to examine patterns of hominin ecological adaptation and its impacts on patterns of behaviour, demography and dispersal. Here, we investigate Palaeolithic occupations at the western margin of the South Asian monsoon at Singi Talav, undertaking new chronometric, sedimentological and palaeoecological studies of Acheulean and Middle Palaeolithic occupation horizons. We constrain occupations of the site between 248 and 65 thousand years ago. This presents the first direct palaeoecological evidence for landscapes occupied by South Asian Acheulean-producing populations, most notably in the main occupation horizon dating to 177 thousand years ago. Our results illustrate the potential role of the Thar Desert as an ecological, and demographic, frontier to Palaeolithic populations.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-021-98897-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Article number:
- 19665
- Publication date:
- 2021-10-05
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-09-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2045-2322
- Pmid:
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34611193
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1202564
- Local pid:
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pubs:1202564
- Deposit date:
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2022-04-13
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Blinkhorn et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- ©2021 The Author(s). Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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