Early Human Occupation of the Tibetan Plateau and the Development of High Altitude Adaptations

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. P. Jeffrey Brantingham and a team of U.S. and Chinese scientists will conduct three years of archaeological and paleoenvironmental research on the northern margins of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. Genetic studies of contemporary Tibetans and stone tools found in surface archaeological settings have been used to suggest that human foragers first colonized of the Plateau environment as early as 30,000 year ago. Recent evidence collected by the research team suggests, however, that human humans first ventured into the high elevation areas, in excess of 3000m above sea level, as recently as 15,000 years BP, and possibly did not permanently occupy the Plateau until around 8000 BP. The late colonization of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau stands in sharp contrast to the early movement of people into other extreme environments such as the Gobi desert and high arctic at 40,000 BP, which researchers generally attribute to an expanded biogeographic capacity among early anatomically modern humans. The goal of the current project is to understanding the processes driving initial human colonization of the northern Qinghai Tibet Plateau and establish why the timing and characteristics of colonization differed so markedly.Dr. Brantingham hypothesizes that colonization of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau occurred in several phases and was driven by a combination of social and environmental pressures. Late Upper Paleolithic foragers first occupied the margins of the northern Plateau during the late Pleistocene (15,000-11,000 BP) only seasonally, relying on cultural adaptations developed in low elevation environments surrounding the Plateau. During the early Holocene (8200-6400 BP), competitive displacement by low-elevation sedentary farming communities forced foragers to permanently occupy high elevation areas and established conditions sufficient for the evolution of pastoralism based on mutualistic relationships with farmers in low-elevation environments. The team will test these hypotheses using a combination of field survey and excavation, anchored by an intensive geochronological dating program. A series of buried sites on the upper margins of the northeast Qinghai Tibet Plateau are known to span the critical 15,000-5,000 BP period when the basic characteristics of modern adaptations on the Plateau developed. Excavation of these sites will allow characterization of the adaptive strategies that facilitated successful colonization. Survey in the surrounding areas will allow us to characterize the accompanying land use patterns.The intellectual merit of the project will be to offer new insights into the relative roles of biogeographic constraints and competitive/mutualistic processes in driving human population movements and the emergence of radically new adaptive strategies such as pastoralism. The results will therefore be relevant to broader questions surrounding the origin and spread of modern humans and the development of complex social and economic adaptations.The research explicitly supports broader positive societal impacts by fostering long-term international scientific collaborations, delivering quality graduate educational experiences to the next generation of American and Chinese archaeologists, and expanding knowledge about our own species' broad history and adaptive capacities to public and professional audiences.