It is believed that cyclical climate changes that took place on our planet with an interval of tens of thousands of years played a significant role in the evolution and spread of all types of organisms on earth, including humans. During periods of cold weather, the habitat zones and the number of animals decreased, and during periods of warming, the number and diversity of living forms increased, and different species settled on habitable territories - from Africa to Asia and Europe. All this was confirmed by the analysis of the genomes of modern people. More and more new genetic data are gradually clarifying in more detail the picture of the settlement of people on different continents, the emergence of new human communities in different regions of the earth. The chronicle of man's conquest of our planet is gradually being restored based on numerous genetic "evidence" (primarily from snips).
Examination of mitDNA and DNA contained in the Y chromosome of a large number of people from different regions of the world led to the discovery of over two hundred polymorphic marker sites, which were ultimately used for comparison. The totality of the changes in markers reflected the "molecular history" of human migration. Ultimately, about two dozen "destinations" of the movement of migration waves were identified, which made it possible to build a genealogical tree of the human race. This was largely facilitated by the presence of unique groups of markers characteristic of certain geographically and historically isolated populations of people (such as Iceland and Japan).
In general, modern ideas about the process of migration of the human population across the Earth, obtained as a result of the analysis of numerous snips in the Y chromosome and mitDNA, are reflected in Fig. 39 on a color insert.
Figure: 39 ... Ways and times of human migration on Earth, established by genetic markers. Arrows - the direction of migration, different colors on the arrows indicate the times of migration (from an insert in the journal Nature, February 2001).
Different races and peoples arose after the division of a relatively homogeneous ancestral population. In each of the groups of people, their own mutations, very characteristic for them, independently occurred. A comparative analysis of mitDNA of different populations of living people made it possible to conclude that in the Stone Age, the ancestral population was divided into at least three groups that gave rise to the African, Mongoloid, and Caucasian races. Ethnogenetic studies indicate the absence of any genetic basis for the division of people into races. People of different races have very small differences in genomes. However, these small but highly specific differences between individual mitDNA lines may indicate Mongoloid or Caucasian origin.
According to ethnogenomics data, about 60-130 thousand years ago, there was a man's exit from Africa to Asia. The first immigrants from Africa reached the Near East and settled almost the entire Asian continent about 60,000 years ago. 40-60 thousand years ago, people have already mastered the lands of Australia, America and Europe.
Based on the frequencies of ancient types of mutations in the nucleotide sequences of mitDNA and DNA of Y-chromosomes in different European human populations, it was possible to reconstruct several waves of human migration in the Old World. It has been established that the first migrants from Asia appeared in Europe 40-50 thousand years ago in the Paleolithic era. The mitDNA lines that entered Europe with the first wave of migration now constitute a significant part of the mitDNA of people inhabiting the territories from the northwest of Europe to the Ural Mountains. It is estimated from mitDNA that 80% of Europeans had at least seven founding mothers and ten male ancestors. According to the Englishman Brian Sykes, cited in his book "The Seven Daughters of Eve", all modern Europeans are descendants of the seven daughters of the "genetic Eve". The other 27 women became the progenitors of the rest of the world's population. And one of them must be your great-great-great ... great-great-grandmother. The conclusion regarding the number of male ancestors of the European population was made by a large international team of scientists, including researchers from Russia (headed by Professor S. A. Limborskaya), as a result of a large-scale analysis of the Y chromosome. In the gene pool of most European men, only ten types of this sex chromosome were found. Thus, the bulk of Europeans (about 80%) have ancestors who migrated to Europe from Central Asia or the Middle East back in the Stone Age (that is, about 40 thousand years ago).
Of course, the statement about ten forefathers and seven forefathers of modern Europeans should not be taken literally. First, there were certainly much more of them (but it is still difficult to estimate the total number). Secondly, they probably lived in general in different eras. Scientists only argue that among all people who lived 40 thousand years ago, very few were likely to leave direct descendants who have survived to this day. Elementary statistics predict (and we have already talked about this) that the more generations pass, the less likely it is that a particular genus with a particular Y chromosome will survive. Indeed, over many generations, several boys were born in some families, and not a single one in others. The result was that one genus (and one variety of the Y chromosome) disappeared forever, and some other genus (quite by accident) gave more numerous offspring. Ultimately, a moment must inevitably come when all but one of the original surnames will disappear in a particular population. A similar process can be observed, for example, in small isolated settlements, where all residents can bear the same surname.
What else did genetics read in the Human Encyclopedia? According to modern genetic data, at the beginning of the last ice age (about 24 thousand years ago), the descendants of ancient people who came to Europe from Asia found refuge in different parts of Europe. As a result of this, three isolated evolutionary branches were formed: the first in the territory of present-day Spain, the second in the territory of Ukraine, and the third in the Balkans. Basques turned out to be the most unique in terms of genetic characteristics. Now it is believed that they are the only modern representatives of the oldest inhabitants of Europe - the Cro-Magnons. Interestingly, the conclusions of geneticists are also supported by some linguistic data indicating the uniqueness of the Basque language. Later, about 16 thousand years ago, when the ice melted, the tribes settled throughout Europe: the Spanish tribes moved to the northeast, the Ukrainian ones to Eastern Europe, and the Balkan ones remained in Central Europe. The second wave of migration of peoples to Europe corresponds to the advancement of the Neolithic agricultural peoples from the places of origin of agriculture (Mesopotamia region) to the north and west of Europe. In this, the genetic assessment coincided with the archaeological data: the process most likely took place during the Neolithic, about 7-9 thousand years ago. It was these immigrants who added the missing 20% \u200b\u200bof the gene pool to the Europeans-men (recall that 80% of the gene pool was obtained in the Stone Age). Finally, another wave of migration, which corresponds to the expansion of Greek culture, took place in the 1st millennium BC. Just before that, Moses, according to legend, led the Jewish people out of Egypt, and then for 40 years led them through the desert.
Scientists continue to study the details of migration processes that took place in the history of mankind. And gradually, many more interesting facts became clear, which could only be established through studies of human DNA. Thus, it was determined that the Polynesians most likely discovered America long before Columbus. This conclusion was reached by scientists as a result of comparing the DNA of the indigenous people of Samoa with the DNA of the Indian tribes of South America. In the genetics of people living six thousand kilometers from each other, a noticeable similarity was found. Probably around 500 AD, sailors from the South Pacific reached America by sailing ships. For a time, the Polynesians maintained trade relations with the indigenous people of the continent. This theory is supported by the following non-genetic fact: about 1000 AD, sweet potatoes appear in Polynesia, although this tuber crop was "officially" discovered only five centuries later, when Columbus visited America.
So where did people end up in America? And the first answers to this question have already been received. According to the DNA analysis of modern people, the ancestors of the first Americans are ancestors from southern Siberia. Numerous traces left on the Y-chromosome have been found, linking the American population with their distant ancestors who lived in the Baikal region. The situation with ancestors on the female line is more complicated. But one way or another, geneticists have already given a significant clue where to look for the origins of Americanism - in the territory of modern Russia. (Now the Americans have “compelling” reasons to claim our Siberia as their historical homeland!).
By examining the mutations that have invaded the DNA of the Y chromosome, scientists can estimate how far apart (in a genetic sense) men from two ethnic groups are from our common ancestor. Some of the results obtained in this way were quite surprising. For example, it turned out that the Welsh and the British are genetically almost unrelated to each other. (Maybe this is the reason for the constant contradictions between them). At the same time, only the Welsh turned out to be the true descendants of the Britons (the ancient inhabitants of Britain), and the modern British turned out to be genetically closest to the inhabitants of the Netherlands, where they presumably lived earlier.
DNA studies have yielded many other interesting results. So, it has always been believed that travel is the prerogative of the male sex. However, as analyzes of mitDNA and DNA of Y-chromosomes showed, women in those distant times migrated much more intensively than men. This fact can be explained, apparently, by the fact that the majority of various human communities have always been characterized by the departure of women after marriage to the husband's house. Thus, the migration of women associated with marriage probably left in the genome of humanity no less, and perhaps more noticeable, than, say, the exodus of Jews from Egypt or all the military campaigns of Alexander the Great.
So, without any archaeological finds and historical sources, but only based on the DNA texts contained in the nuclear and mitochondrial genome of modern people, geneticists manage to restore the history of the appearance of the first people on Earth, describe the ways of their migration, trace deep kinship ties between different races, peoples and nations. An important conclusion follows from this: nature has preserved in our DNA the only reliable co-age chronicle text .
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History with geography recorded in our genome (ethnogenomics)Genetic landscapes (genogeography)
The World History. Volume 1
The development of the primitive communal system. Late Stone Age
Resettlement of Paleolithic hunters
The reasons for the oldest migration
What was the reason for the complex movements of the population of the Ancient Stone Age, which sometimes covered entire continents? What force forced people of the Paleolithic period to leave their homes in some cases? These reasons should be sought in the material living conditions of Paleolithic hunters, in their economy, in their social life.
As ethnography shows, the continuous and irrepressible process of settlement is a normal and natural phenomenon in the life of hunting and fishing tribes. With a low level of development of productive forces and the need for large areas of land necessary in order to feed hunters, gatherers and fishermen of the Stone Age, the natural increase in population in certain areas most favorable for this inevitably led to the search for new lands and to the resettlement of people in new area.
This resettlement was not accidental, but strictly logical, since it proceeded in the form of a continuous dismemberment of ancient communities. About its reasons gives us an idea of \u200b\u200bthe resettlement of Indian clans and tribes of North America in modern times, described by the American ethnographer L. Morgan.
According to Morgan's description, new tribes and new genera were constantly formed by natural growth; this process was greatly accelerated due to the great extent of the American continent. From some overpopulated geographic center that had special advantages in terms of earning a livelihood, there was a gradual ebb. As this continued from year to year, a considerable population grew at some distance from the original seat of the tribes; over time, the settlers developed special interests, they became alien to their tribe, and differences in language appeared. This was repeated from century to century, both in the newly "occupied" and in the old areas. When population growth caused a lack of livelihoods, the surplus part of the population left for a new place.
These were not, therefore, waves of peoples moving across entire continents, nor were they rapid and catastrophic movements of large ethnic masses. Such movements date back to much later times, when large tribal unions, prepared by a long preceding historical development, became commonplace. In the Paleolithic, a completely different pace and character, a slow and spontaneous process of seepage of individual small groups took place. Then there was a movement of small groups of Paleolithic people from one region to another, often complicated by the reverse movement; quite often, it must be assumed, this kind of movement was, as it were, zigzag and intermittent, as we see in the Moravany Dlga and Kostenki.
The settlement of the ancient hunting tribes became especially widespread in the Upper Paleolithic. Further improvement of hunting technology in comparison with the Mousterian time contributed to the growth of the population, which led, at the same time, to a decrease in the number of game in the territories adjacent to the old settlements.
The inevitable consequence, apparently, was the outflow of the population from the most populated and previously developed areas to the previously deserted areas of northern Europe and especially Asia. This dispersal was all the more natural because all these events took place at the end of the Ice Age, during the period when a colossal land area was freed from ice.
At the same time, the development of new territories in the North became possible because now there was already much more developed than before, special hunting equipment, various means for catching animals appeared (spear thrower, bone spearheads and throwing darts, trapping pits, nets, etc. hedges). Various methods of artificially producing fire were already known. People have learned to build both durable permanent dwellings for the winter, and portable lightweight hides. Fur clothing, sewn with tendon threads, appeared.
All this, taken together, made it possible for a person to overcome the difficulties that the harsh natural conditions set before him, which did not allow him to go far beyond the boundaries of regions with a temperate and warm climate.
At the end of November last year, the All-Russian Scientific Conference "Ways of Evolutionary Geography" was held in Moscow, dedicated to the memory of Professor Andrei Alekseevich Velichko, the founder of the scientific school of evolutionary geography and paleoclimatology. The conference was of an interdisciplinary nature, many reports were devoted to the study of the geographical factors of human settlement around the planet, its adaptation to various natural conditions, the influence of these conditions on the nature of settlements and the migration routes of ancient people. We present a brief overview of some of these interdisciplinary reports.
The role of the Caucasus in human settlement
Report by Corresponding Member RAS Kh.A. Amirkhanova (Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences) was devoted to the archaeological sites of the North Caucasus in the context of the problem of the initial human settlement (long before the appearance of Homo sapiens and their exit from Africa). For a long time in the Caucasus, there were two monuments of the Oldovan type, one of them - the Dmanisi site (1 million 800 thousand years) in Georgia, became widely known. 10-15 years ago, 15 monuments were discovered in the Caucasus, the Stavropol Upland and in the southern Azov region, which are attributed to the same time - the early Pleistocene. This is the largest concentration of monuments of Oldowan culture. Now the North Caucasian monuments of this type are confined to the plateau and middle mountains, but during the time people lived there they were on the sea coast.
Monuments of the Oldowan Caucasus and Ciscaucasia. 1 - monuments of the Armenian Highlands (Kurtan: points near the Nurnus paleolake; 2 - Dmanisi; 3 - monuments of Central Dagestan (Ainikab, Mukhai, Gegalashur); 4 - Zhukovskoe; 5 - monuments of the southern Azov region (Bogatyrs, Rodniki, Kermek). From presentation X . A. Amirkhanova.
The North Caucasian early Pleistocene monuments are directly related to the problem of time and ways of the initial human settlement in Eurasia. Their study made it possible to obtain unique materials (archaeological, geological, paleobotanical, paleontological) and draw the following conclusions:
1 - The initial settlement of the North Caucasus took place about 2.3 - 2.1 million years ago;
2 - The picture of the ways of human settlement in the space of Eurasia has been supplemented by a new direction - along the western coast of the Caspian Sea.
Ways of initial human settlement. Solid lines represent migration routes confirmed by uncovered monuments; dashed lines - supposed migration routes. From the presentation of Kh.A. Amirkhanov.
About settling America
Doctor history. sciences S.A. Vasiliev (Institute for the History of Material Culture, RAS) in his speech presented a picture of the settlement of North America, based on the latest paleogeographic and archaeological data.
During the Late Pleistocene epoch, the Beringian dry land existed in the interval from 27 to 14.0-13.8 thousand years. In Beringia, people were attracted by the commercial fauna, noted S.A. Vasiliev, although people did not find the mammoth here, he hunted bison, reindeer and red deer. It is believed that humans remained on the territory of Beringia for several tens of thousands of years; at the end of the Pleistocene, groups settled to the east and a rapid increase in their numbers. The oldest reliable traces of human habitation in the American part of Beringia date back to about 14.8-14.7 thousand years (the lower cultural layer of the Swan Point site). The microplate industry of the site reflects the first migration wave. There were three different groups of cultures in Alaska - the Denali complex belonging to the Beringia province, the Nenana complex, and the Paleo-Indian cultures with different types of arrowheads. The Nenana complex includes the Little John site on the Alaska-Yukon border. Monuments of the Denali type are similar to the monuments of the Duktai culture in Yakutia, but they are not copies of it: rather, we are talking about a common microplate industry that covered eastern Asia and the American part of Beringia. Finds with grooved tips are very interesting.
Two migration paths that archaeological and paleoclimatic data indicate are the Mackenzie interglacial corridor and the ice-free path along the Pacific coast. However, some facts, for example, the finds of grooved points in Alaska, indicate that, apparently, at the end of the Pleistocene there was a reverse migration - not from the northwest to the southeast, but on the contrary - along the Mackenzie corridor in the opposite direction; it was associated with the migration of the bison to the north, followed by the Paleo-Indians.
Unfortunately, the Pacific route was flooded by postglacial sea level rise, and most of the sites are now on the seabed. Archaeologists only have more recent data: shell heaps, traces of fishing and stem tips were found on the Channel Islands off the coast of California.
The Mackenzie corridor, which becomes accessible after the partial melting of the ice sheets, 14 thousand years ago, according to new data, was more favorable for habitation than previously thought. Unfortunately, traces of human activity were found only in the southern part of the corridor, dating back 11 thousand years, these are traces of the Clovis culture.
The discoveries of recent years have found in different parts of North America monuments older than the Clovis culture, most of them are concentrated in the east and south of the continent. One of the main ones is Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania - a set of arrowheads dating from 14 thousand years ago. In particular, there are points in the Great Lakes region, where skeletal remains of a mammoth, accompanied by stone tools, are found. In the west, the discovery of the Paisley Caves became a sensation, where a petiole-arrowhead culture predating the Clovis was found; later these cultures coexisted. At the Manis site, a mastodon rib with a stuck bone tip was found, about 14 thousand years old. Thus, it has been shown that Clovis is not the first crop to appear in North America.
But Clovis is the first culture to demonstrate complete human settlement of the continent. In the west, it dates from a very short interval for the Paleolithic culture, from 13,400 to 12,700 years ago, and in the east it existed until 11,900 years ago. The Clovis culture is characterized by grooved tips that have no analogy among the artifacts of the Old World. The Clovis industry is based on the use of high quality sources of raw materials -. flint was transported over distances of hundreds of kilometers in the form of bifaces, which were later used for the production of arrowheads. And the sites, mainly in the west, are connected not with rivers, but with ponds and shallow bodies of water, while in the Old World the Paleolithic is most often confined to river valleys.
Summing up, S.A. Vasiliev outlined a more complex picture of the settlement of North America than it seemed until recently. Instead of a single migration wave from Beringia, directed from the northwest to the southeast, along the Mackenzie corridor, there were most likely several migrations of different times and directions. Apparently, the first wave of migration from Beringia went along the Pacific coast, and then there was a settlement to the east. The movement along the Mackenzie Corridor probably took place at a later time, and this corridor was a "two-way street" - some groups came from the north, others from the south. In the southeastern United States, the Clovis culture emerged, which then spread north and west across the continent. Finally, the end of the Pleistocene was marked by the "reverse" migration of a group of Paleo-Indians to the north, along the Mackenzie corridor, to Beringia. However, all these ideas, emphasized S.A. Vasiliev, are based on extremely limited material, incomparable with what is available in Eurasia.
1 - migration route from Beringia along the Pacific coast; 2 - migration route to the southeast along the Mackenzie corridor; 3 - the spread of the Clovis culture in North America; 4 - the spread of ancient people to South America; 5 - return migrations to Beringia. Source: S.A. Vasiliev, Yu.E. Berezkin, A.G. Kozintsev, I.I. Peyros, S.B. Slobodin, A.V. Tabarev. Human settlement of the New World: an experience of interdisciplinary research. SPb .: Nestor-istoriya, 2015.S. 561, insert.
He was not afraid to take the first step
E.I. Kurenkova (Candidate of Geographic Sciences, Leading Researcher of the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke about the problem of interaction between nature and human society in the works of A.A. Velichko - a problem that, in her words, was his "first love" in paleogeography. As E.I. Kurenkov, now some things seem obvious to archaeologists and paleogeographers, but someone always said this first, and in many issues it was Andrei Alekseevich, who was not afraid and knew how to take the first step.
So, in the 50s of the last century, while still a graduate student, he questioned the then prevailing idea of \u200b\u200ban earlier age of the Upper Paleolithic in Eastern Europe. He sharply rejuvenated the Upper Paleolithic, suggested that it corresponds to the time of the Valdai (Wyrm) glaciation. This conclusion was made on the basis of a detailed study of the Paleolithic sites of the East European Plain. He refuted the authoritative opinion about the famous "dugouts" of the Kostenkovo \u200b\u200bsite - a detailed analysis showed that these are permafrost wedges - natural traces of permafrost that drag in cultural layers with finds.
A.A. Velichko was one of the first to attempt to determine the role of natural changes in human dispersal across the planet. He emphasized that man was the only creature who could leave the ecological niche where he appeared and master completely different environmental conditions. He tried to understand the motivation of human collectives, changing the usual living conditions to the opposite. And the wide adaptive capabilities of man, which allowed him to settle down to the Arctic. A.A. Velichko initiated the study of human settlement at high latitudes - the goal of this project was to create a holistic picture of the history of the penetration of people to the North, their incentives and motivation, to identify the possibilities of the Paleolithic society to explore the circumpolar spaces. According to E. I. Kurenkova, he became the soul of the collective Atlas-monograph “The initial settlement of the Arctic by humans in a changing natural environment” (Moscow, GEOS, 2014).
In recent years, A.A. Velichko wrote about the anthroposphere, which was formed and separated from the biosphere, has its own mechanisms of development and in the twentieth century gets out of the control of the biosphere. Writes about the collision of two trends - the general trend towards cooling and anthropogenic global warming. He stressed that we do not understand enough the mechanisms of this interaction, so we need to be on our guard. One of the first A.A. Velichko began to cooperate with geneticists, while now the interaction of paleogeographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, geneticists has become absolutely necessary. A.A. Velichko was also one of the first to establish international contacts: he organized the Soviet-French long-term work on the interaction of man and nature. This was very important and rare for those years in terms of scale international cooperation (and even with a capitalist country).
His position in science - noted E.I. Kurenkova - was sometimes controversial, but it was never uninteresting, never was not advanced.
Way to the North
The report of Dr. Geogr. sciences A.L. Chepalygi (Institute of Geography RAS) entitled "The Way to the North: the Ancient Migration of the Oldowan Culture and the Primary Settlement of Europe through the South of Russia." The way to the North - this is how A.A. Velichko called the process of human development of the space of Eurasia. The exit from Africa was the path to the north, and then this path continued in the vastness of Eurasia. It allows us to trace the latest discoveries of the sites of the Oldovan culture: in the North Caucasus, in the Transcaucasus, in the Crimea, along the Dniester, along the Danube.
A.L. Chepalyga focused on the studies of terraces on the southern coast of Crimea, between Sudak and Karadag, which were previously considered continental, but after a thorough survey were recognized as marine. Multi-layered human sites with artifacts of the Oldovan type were discovered, confined to these Eopleistocene terraces. Their age was determined and a relationship with climatic cycles and fluctuations in the Black Sea basin was shown. This indicates the littoral, coastal-marine adaptation of the Oldovan man.
Archaeological and geomorphological materials have made it possible to reconstruct human migration during its initial exit from Africa, which dates back about 2 million years ago. After resettlement to the Middle East, the person's path followed strictly northward through Arabia, Central Asia and the Caucasus up to 45 o N. (Manych Strait). At this latitude, a sharp turn of migration to the west is recorded - this is the North Black Sea passage, a migration corridor to Europe. It ended on the territory of modern Spain and France, almost reaching the Atlantic Ocean. The reason for this turn is not clear, there are only working hypotheses, A.L. Chepalyga.
Source: "Ways of Evolutionary Geography", Materials of the All-Russian Scientific Conference dedicated to the memory of Professor A.A. Velichko, Moscow, November 23-25, 2016.
Human settlement in the Siberian Arctic
The report was devoted to the study of the first wave of Paleolithic human settlement in the north E.Yu. Pavlova(Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, St. Petersburg) and Ph.D. ist. sciences V.V. Pitulko(Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg). This dispersal could have begun about 45 thousand years ago, when the entire territory of northeastern Europe was free of glaciers. The most attractive for human habitation were areas with a mosaic landscape - low mountains, foothills, plains and rivers - such a landscape is typical for the Urals, it provides an abundance of stone raw materials. For a long time, the population remained low, then began to increase, as evidenced by the monuments of the Upper and Late Paleolithic, discovered in recent years on the Yano-Indigirskaya lowland.
The report presented the results of the study of the Yanskaya Paleolithic site - this is the oldest complex of archaeological sites that documents the early settlement of humans in the Arctic. Its dating is 28.5-27 thousand years ago. Three categories of artifacts were found in the cultural layers of the Yanskaya site: stone macro-tools (side-scrapers, pikes, bifaces) and micro-tools; utilitarian items made of horn and bone (weapons, promises, needles, awls) and non-utilitarian items (tiaras, bracelets, jewelry, beads, etc.). Nearby is the largest Yanskoye mammoth cemetery, dating from 37,000 to 8,000 years ago.
To reconstruct the living conditions of ancient humans in the Arctic at the Yanskaya site, studies were carried out on carbon dating, spore-pollen analysis and analysis of plant macro-residues of Quaternary sediments for a period of 37 - 10 thousand years ago. It was possible to carry out a paleoclimatic reconstruction, which showed a change in periods of warming and cooling in the area of \u200b\u200bthe Yano-Indigirskaya lowland. A sharp transition to cooling occurred 25 thousand years ago, marking the onset of the Sartan cryochron, the maximum cooling was noted 21-19 thousand years ago, and then warming began. 15 thousand years ago, the average temperatures reached modern values \u200b\u200band even exceeded them, and 13.5 thousand years ago - returned to the maximum cooling. 12.6-12.1 thousand years ago, there was a noticeable warming, reflected in the spore-pollen spectra; the cooling of the Middle Dryas 12.1-11.9 thousand years ago was short and 11.9 thousand years ago was replaced by warming; this was followed by a cooling of the Late Dryas - 11.0-10.5 thousand years ago and a warming about 10 thousand years ago.
The authors of the study conclude that, in general, the natural and climatic conditions in the Yano-Indigirskaya lowland, as well as in the entire Siberian Arctic, were acceptable for human settlement and habitation. Probably, after the first wave of settlement, after the cooling, depopulation began, since in the period from 27 to 18 thousand years ago, there are no archaeological sites on this territory. But the second wave of settlement - about 18 thousand years ago, was successful. 18 thousand years ago, a permanent population appeared in the Urals, which then, as the glacier retreated, moved to the northwest. Interestingly, in general, the second wave of colonization took place in a colder climate. But the person has increased the level of adaptation, which allowed him to survive in harsh conditions.
Unique Paleolithic complex Kostenki
A separate section at the conference was devoted to studies of one of the most famous complexes of the Paleolithic sites in Kostenki (on the Don River, Voronezh region). A.A. Velichko began working in Kostenki in 1952, and the result of his participation was the replacement of the stage concept with the concept of archaeological cultures. Cand. history of sciences A.A. Sinitsyn (Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg) characterized the Kostenki-14 site (Markina Gora) as a reference section of the cultural variability of the Paleolithic of Eastern Europe against the background of climatic variability. The section contains 8 cultural layers and 3 paleontological ones.
The first cultural layer (27.0-28.0 thousand years ago) contains typical arrowheads of the Kostenkovo-Avdeevka culture and "Kostenkovo-type knives", as well as a powerful accumulation of mammoth bones. The II cultural layer (33.0-34.0 thousand years ago) contains artifacts of the Gorodtsy archaeological culture (tools of the Mousterian type). The belonging of the third cultural layer (33.8-35.2 thousand years ago) remains controversial due to the lack of specific items of belonging to the culture. Under the III cultural layer in 1954, a burial was discovered, which is currently the most ancient burial of a modern man (36.9-38.8 thousand years ago, according to calibrated dating).
Why did the ancient people settle around the planet and how did they end up in the most distant points of it? The appearance of man in the tropics and the peculiarities of our physiology. Why did people go north? Desire to have a new living space with resources. The property of all living things to occupy free territory. Why did animals settle faster than Homo erectus? Natural restrictions on migration: oceans, mountain ranges and rivers. Settlement along convenient routes along the sea coasts. What are the most distant traces of the first hominids and sapiens known to scientists? Homo sapiens colonized the entire planet by about 10,000 years ago. Stanislav Drobyshevsky, an anthropologist, candidate of biological sciences, associate professor of the anthropology department of the biological faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University, will tell us about this and many other things.
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Stanislav Drobyshevsky
How did ancient people get to distant lands? Can a hunter-gatherer walk anywhere on land? Sailing. Three ways from Africa. The road to Indonesia. The distances that Homo erectus could travel on water and our understanding of their mental and physical abilities. Why do we underestimate the capabilities of our ancestors, Cro-Magnons, and parallel humanity - Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores man? What kind of swimming facilities are capable of making modern primitive tribes? Coaster sailing and sailing in the open sea and ocean. Exchange of obsidian between the inhabitants of the islands of Melanesia, separated by hundreds of kilometers. Way to Australia. Human desire to explore a new space. Anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky will tell us about this.
Stanislav Drobyshevsky
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Stanislav Drobyshevsky
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Stanislav Drobyshevsky
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What do we know about the time of the beginning of the use of fire by ancient man? Scientifically unsubstantiated myths about Australopithecus fire keeping. Where was the ancient fire found? Parallel existence of sites with traces of the use of fire and without them, starting with ancient Homo 1,700,000 years ago and up to the Neanderthals 30,000 years ago. How did the ancient people manage without fire even in the most severe conditions? When and with the help of what methods did you learn how to make a primitive fire on your own? How did Homo sapiens become completely dependent on him?
Stanislav Drobyshevsky
What is neoteny? Examples of this phenomenon in the animal kingdom. Is it really and how can neoteny manifest itself in a person? Is it true that the adult Homo sapiens is the neotenic larva of Australopithecus or the older Homo? Is this hypothesis scientific and does it have a right to exist? What traits of an adult cannot be considered childish and why? What does science say about finding such traits? Are there "childish" and "senile" signs in modern races? Anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky tells about this.
Stanislav Drobyshevsky
What were the reasons for the emergence of morality in primates? Is it only Homo Sapiens who care about others? How did altruism and aggression manifest themselves in other types of people? Stanislav Drobyshevsky, anthropologist, candidate of biological sciences, associate professor of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University talks about the path of the formation of human morality, how morality and human behavior were connected throughout history, what archaeological finds testify to this, and what can happen to human morality in the near future.
Stanislav Drobyshevsky
What was the food of ancient man? What did our ancestors eat? Anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky will tell us about the food of the ancient people, what they preferred, whom they hunted and what they were content with sitting by the fire. You will find out what the food of primitive man was like and how it influenced our history and our development.
Just 80,000 years ago, all people were black-skinned, and there were no races. We wanted to know how a small group of blacks from East Africa settled the rest of the world and became Chinese, Indians, Chukchi and our direct ancestors. We talked about this with the anthropologist, editor of the antropogenez.ru portal Stanislav Drobyshevsky.
Some theory about anthropogenesis
For many reasons, theoretical developments in evolutionary anthropology are consistently ahead of their current level of evidence. Having formed in the XIX century. under the direct influence of the evolutionist theory of Darwin and finally taking shape in the first half of the 20th century, the stage theory of anthropogenesis reigned supreme for a long time. Its essence boils down to the following: in his biological development, man has gone through several stages, separated from each other by evolutionary leaps.
- first stage - archanthropus (Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, Atlanthropus),
- second stage - paleanthropes (Neanderthals, whose name comes from the first find near the city of Neandertal),
- third stage - neoanthrope (modern humans), or Cro-Magnon (named after the site of the first fossil modern humans, made in the Cro-Magnon grotto).
It should be noted that this is not a biological classification, but a stage-by-stage scheme, which did not contain the entire morphological diversity of paleoanthropological findings already in the 50s. XX century Note that the classification scheme of the hominid family is still an area of \u200b\u200bintense scientific debate.
The last half century, and especially the last decade of research, have brought a large number of findings that have qualitatively changed the general approach to solving the problem of human immediate ancestors, understanding the nature and paths of the sapientation process.
According to modern concepts, evolution is not a linear process accompanied by several jumps, but a continuous, multi-level process, the essence of which can be graphically represented not as a tree with a single trunk, but as a bush. Thus, we are talking about network evolution, the essence of which is. that evolutionarily unequal human beings could exist and interact at the same time, which in morphological and cultural terms stood at different levels of sapientation.
Displacement of Homo erectus and Neanderthals
Distribution map of Homo erectus in the Olduvian and Acheulean eras.
Africa, most likely, is the only region in which the representatives of the species lived in the first half a million years of its existence, although, undoubtedly, in the process of migrations, they could also visit neighboring regions - Arabia, the Middle East and even the Caucasus. Paleoanthropological finds in Israel (Ubeidiya site), in the Central Caucasus (Dmanisi site) allow us to speak about this with confidence. As for the territories of Southeast and East Asia, as well as southern Europe, the appearance there of representatives of the genus Homo erectus refers no earlier than the interval 1.1-0.8 million years ago, and any significant dispersal of them can be attributed to the end of the Lower Pleistocene, i.e. about 500 thousand years ago.
At the later stages of its history (about 300 thousand years ago), Homo erectus (archanthropus) settled all over Africa, southern Europe and began to spread widely across Asia. Despite the fact that their populations could be separated by natural barriers, morphologically, they were a relatively homogeneous group.
The era of the existence of "archanthropus" was replaced by the appearance about half a million years ago of another group of hominids, which are often, in accordance with the previous scheme, called paleoanthropes and whose early species, regardless of the location of the bone remains, are referred to in the modern scheme as Homo Heidelbergensis (Heidelberg man). This species existed from about 600 to 150 thousand years ago.
In Europe and Western Asia, the descendants of H. Heidelbergensis were the so-called "classical" Neanderthals, which appeared no later than 130 thousand years ago and existed for at least 100 thousand years. Their last representatives lived in the mountainous regions of Eurasia 30 thousand years ago, if not longer.
Resettlement of modern humans
The debate about the origin of Homo sapiens is still very sharp, modern solutions are very different from the views of even twenty years ago. In modern science, two opposing points of view are clearly distinguished - polycentric and monocentric. According to the first, the evolutionary transformation of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens took place everywhere - in Africa, Asia, Europe, with a continuous, continuous exchange of genetic material between the populations of these territories. According to another, the place of formation of neoanthropes was a well-defined region from where their settlement took place, coupled with the destruction or assimilation of autochthonous populations of hominids. Such a region, according to scientists, is South and East Africa, where the remains of Homo sapiens are of the greatest antiquity (the skull of Omo 1, discovered near the northern coast of Lake Turkan in Ethiopia and dating back about 130 thousand years, the remains of neoanthropes from the caves of Klasies and Beder on southern Africa, dating back to about 100 thousand years). In addition, at a number of other East African sites there are finds comparable to the above-mentioned in age. In the north of Africa, such early remains of neoanthropines have not yet been found, although there are a number of finds of individuals very advanced in the anthropological sense, which date back to well over 50 thousand years.
Outside Africa, finds of Homo sapiens, similar in age to finds from South and East Africa, were found in the Middle East, they come from the Israeli caves of Skhul and Kafzeh and date back to 70 to 100 thousand years ago.
Finds of Homo sapiens older than 40-36 thousand years are still unknown in other regions of the world. There is a number of reports of earlier finds in China, Indonesia, and Australia, but all of them either lack reliable dates or come from poorly stratified sites.
Thus, today the hypothesis of the African ancestral home of our species seems to be the most probable, because it is there that there is the maximum number of finds that allow us to trace in sufficient detail the transformation of local archanthropics into paleoanthropines, and the latter into neoanthropines. Genetic studies and molecular biology data, according to most researchers, also point to Africa as the original center of the emergence of Homo sapiens. Calculations of geneticists, aimed at determining the probable time of appearance of our species, say that this event could have occurred in the period from 90 to 160 thousand years ago, although sometimes earlier dates appear.
If we leave the controversy aside about the exact time of the appearance of people of the modern type, then it should be said that the wide spread outside Africa and the Middle East began, judging by anthropological data, not earlier than 50-60 thousand years ago, when they mastered the southern regions of Asia and Australia. People of the modern type entered Europe 35-40 thousand years ago, where then for almost 10 thousand years they coexisted with the Neanderthals. In the process of their settlement by different populations of Homo sapiens, they had to adapt to a variety of natural conditions, the result of which was the accumulation of more or less clear biological differences between them, which led to the formation of modern races. It cannot be ruled out that contacts with the local population of the regions being developed, which, apparently, were quite motley in anthropological terms, could have a certain influence on the last process.