Virtually all well-documented remains of early domestic dog (Canis familiaris) come from the late Glacial and early Holocene periods (ca. 14,000-9000 calendar years ago, cal BP), with few putative ...dogs found prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ca. 26,500-19,000 cal BP). The dearth of pre-LGM dog-like canids and incomplete state of their preservation has until now prevented an understanding of the morphological features of transitional forms between wild wolves and domesticated dogs in temporal perspective.
We describe the well-preserved remains of a dog-like canid from the Razboinichya Cave (Altai Mountains of southern Siberia). Because of the extraordinary preservation of the material, including skull, mandibles (both sides) and teeth, it was possible to conduct a complete morphological description and comparison with representative examples of pre-LGM wild wolves, modern wolves, prehistoric domesticated dogs, and early dog-like canids, using morphological criteria to distinguish between wolves and dogs. It was found that the Razboinichya Cave individual is most similar to fully domesticated dogs from Greenland (about 1000 years old), and unlike ancient and modern wolves, and putative dogs from Eliseevichi I site in central Russia. Direct AMS radiocarbon dating of the skull and mandible of the Razboinichya canid conducted in three independent laboratories resulted in highly compatible ages, with average value of ca. 33,000 cal BP.
The Razboinichya Cave specimen appears to be an incipient dog that did not give rise to late Glacial-early Holocene lineages and probably represents wolf domestication disrupted by the climatic and cultural changes associated with the LGM. The two earliest incipient dogs from Western Europe (Goyet, Belguim) and Siberia (Razboinichya), separated by thousands of kilometers, show that dog domestication was multiregional, and thus had no single place of origin (as some DNA data have suggested) and subsequent spread.
A critical evaluation of the existing data corpus on the earliest pottery in East Asia and its chronology as of early 2013 is presented here. Pottery in the Old World emerged in three regions within ...greater East Asia, namely South China, the Japanese Islands and the Russian Far East, at c. 14,800-13,300 bp (or c. 18,500-15,500 cal. bp). Most probably, pottery-making appeared in these places independently; no solid evidence exists about migrations and/or diffusion of this technology from a supposed single centre in South China. Because the Upper Palaeolithic humans in Eurasia were familiar with clay (as a raw material for making figurines), the most probable driving force for the origin of pottery was the necessity to produce in large amounts durable, light containers for the processing (including boiling) and storing of food.
In 1999, during the excavation of Khaiyrgas Cave on the Middle Lena River in Yakutia (in the Russian Federation), a fragmented human deciduous tooth was discovered in the upper 5th (Paleolithic) ...horizon, at the contact with the 4th (Mesolithic) horizon. The cave is one of a number of interesting Upper Paleolithic sites on the Lena, located at the border of two cultural regions: Lake Baikal and Yakutia. Previous findings indicate active cultural and perhaps ethnic contacts, in particular with areas of the Lower Angara region and Northern Baikal. In order to determine the morphology and taxonomic position of the tooth, its metric and non-metric parameters were studied. Comparative analysis indicates that the tooth characteristics adhere to the Eastern dental pattern with some archaic traits. This tooth is one of the earliest known human remains in Yakutia, which are crucial for the study of the ancient population of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic in North-East Asia. Its conformity with the Eastern dental pattern confirms the alleged affiliation of human groups that inhabited the territory of Yakutia in the late Pleistocene/early Holocene to the Mongoloid anthropological type. In addition, the results of comparative analysis suggest the presence of ancient affinities between the Upper Paleolithic populations of North-Eastern and Western Siberia.
Patterns for the emergence of pottery-making in greater East Asia based on radiocarbon dates associated with the earliest pottery assemblages are presented. According to a critical evaluation of the ...existing evidence, the oldest centers with pottery in East Asia are located in South China (dated to ca. 18,000 cal BP), the Japanese Islands (ca. 16,700 cal BP), and the Russian Far East (ca. 15,900 cal BP). The claim for earlier pottery in South China at the Xianrendong Cave, supposedly dated to ca. 20,000 cal BP, cannot be substantiated. The appearance of pottery in other parts of greater East Asia was a slow process, without clear diffusion from any of these centers toward the periphery. In neighboring Siberia, the oldest pottery dated to ca. 14,000 cal BP is known from the Transbaikal.
Obsidian provenance studies, conducted in Northeast Asia over the last 40 years, give us solid evidence about human migrations and contacts in prehistory. Active exchange of raw material began at ca. ...33,000–25,000 BP in both the mainland and insular parts of this region, and continued afterward. The scale of interaction between Stone Age people was quite large, with distances sometimes greater than 800–1000 km in later prehistory. Seafaring was most probably practiced since this time, as supported by the movement of obsidian across wide (20–40 km) open sea.
This paper examines patterns of human–environmental interactions across northern Asia during the Holocene, in order to summarize current knowledge and identify key areas for future research. To ...achieve these goals, currently available chronological, cultural, and paleoenvironmental datasets from the east Russian Arctic for the last 10,000 14C years were integrated. Study regions include the Taymyr Peninsula, Lena River basin (except its southern part), northeastern Siberia, and Kamchatka Peninsula. Several broad-scale correlations between climatic fluctuations and cultural responses (e.g., subsistence strategies and occupation densities) were identified; however, these are not straightforward. For example, the increase of occupations during the warm periods in the Early–Middle Holocene are notable while the most pronounced rises coincide with a cooling trend in the Late Holocene. This shows that the human–environmental relationships in the Holocene were not linear; more interdisciplinary research will be needed to construct higher resolution data for understanding prehistoric cultural responses to past environmental changes in the Asian Arctic.
We present the high-quality genome sequence of a ∼45,000-year-old modern human male from Siberia. This individual derives from a population that lived before-or simultaneously with-the separation of ...the populations in western and eastern Eurasia and carries a similar amount of Neanderthal ancestry as present-day Eurasians. However, the genomic segments of Neanderthal ancestry are substantially longer than those observed in present-day individuals, indicating that Neanderthal gene flow into the ancestors of this individual occurred 7,000-13,000 years before he lived. We estimate an autosomal mutation rate of 0.4 × 10(-9) to 0.6 × 10(-9) per site per year, a Y chromosomal mutation rate of 0.7 × 10(-9) to 0.9 × 10(-9) per site per year based on the additional substitutions that have occurred in present-day non-Africans compared to this genome, and a mitochondrial mutation rate of 1.8 × 10(-8) to 3.2 × 10(-8) per site per year based on the age of the bone.
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