Into the Woods Early Homo sapiens and Tropical Forest Colonization

Popular philosophical associations of tropical forests, and forests in general, with an inherent ancestral state, away from the stresses, pollution, and technosphere of modern life, are nicely summarized by Murakami’s quote above (2002). Given the probable origins of the hominin clade in tropical forests, this quote is also apt from an evolutionary standpoint. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, tropical forests have frequently been considered impenetrable barriers to the global migration of Homo sapiens (Gamble, 1993; Finlayson, 2014). As was the case with the focus on ‘savannastan’ in facilitating the Early Pleistocene expansion of Homo erectus discussed in Chapter 3 (Dennell and Roebroeks, 2005), the movement of H. sapiens into tropical regions such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia has tended to be linked to Late Pleistocene periods when forests contracted and grasslands expanded (Bird et al., 2005; Boivin et al., 2013). Alternative narratives have focused on the importance of coastal adaptations as providing a rich source of protein and driving cultural and technological complexity, as well as mobility, in human populations during the Middle and Late Pleistocene (Mellars, 2006; Marean, 2016). The evidence of early art and symbolism at coastal cave sites such as Blombos in South Africa (Henshilwood et al., 2002, 2011; Vanhaeren et al., 2013) and Taforalt in North Africa (Bouzouggar et al., 2007) is often used to emphasize the role of marine habitats in the earliest cultural emergence of our species. Indeed, for the last decade, the pursuit of rich marine resources (Mellars, 2005, 2006) has been a popular explanation for the supposed rapidity of the ‘southern dispersal route’, whereby humans left Africa 60 ka, based on genetic information (e.g., Macaulay et al., 2005), to reach the Pleistocene landmass that connected Australia and New Guinea (Sahul) by c. 65 ka (Clarkson et al., 2017). In both of these cases, the coast or expanses of grassland have been seen as homogeneous corridors, facilitating rapid expansion without novel adaptation.

Archaeology · Biology · Cave · Geography · Homo erectus · Homo sapiens · Pleistocene · Ecology · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Primate Behavior and Ecology