User:Abyssal/Prehistory of Asia
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Introduction
Prehistoric Asia refers to events in Asia during the period of human existence prior to the invention of writing systems or the documentation of recorded history. This includes portions of the Eurasian land mass currently or traditionally considered as the continent of Asia. The continent is commonly described as the region east of the Ural Mountains, the Caucasus Mountains, the Caspian Sea, Black Sea and Red Sea, bounded by the Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. This article gives an overview of the many regions of Asia during prehistoric times. (Full article...)
Selected general articles
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Sangiran is an archaeological excavation site in Java in Indonesia. According to a UNESCO report (1995) "Sangiran is recognized by scientists to be one of the most important sites in the world for studying fossil man, ranking alongside Zhoukoudian (China), Willandra Lakes (Australia), Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania), and Sterkfontein (South Africa), and more fruitful in finds than any of these."
The area comprises about 56 km2 (7 km x 8 km). It is located in Central Java, about 15 kilometers north of Surakarta in the Solo River valley. Administratively, Sangiran area is divided between 2 regencies: Sragen (districts of Gemolong, Kalijambe, and Plupuh) and Karanganyar (district of Gondangrejo). An important feature of the site is the geology of the area. Originally a dome was created millions of years ago through tectonic uplifts. The dome was then eroded exposing beds within the dome which are rich in archeological records. (Full article...) - Image 2The Caucasus region, on the gateway between Southwest Asia, Europe and Central Asia, plays a pivotal role in the peopling of Eurasia,
possibly as early as during the Homo erectus expansion to Eurasia,
in the Upper Paleolithic peopling of Europe,
and again in the re-peopling Mesolithic Europe following the Last Glacial Maximum, and in the expansion associated with the Neolithic Revolution. (Full article...) - Image 3Xiaochangliang (simplified Chinese: 小长梁; traditional Chinese: 小長梁; pinyin: Xiǎochángliáng) is the site of some of the earliest paleolithic remains in East Asia, located in the Nihewan (泥河灣) Basin in Yangyuan County, Hebei, China, most famous for the stone tools discovered there. (Full article...)
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The Bronze Age is a historical period lasting from approximately 3300 to 1200 BC. It is characterized by the use of bronze, the use of writing in some areas, and other features of early urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of the three-age system, between the Stone and Iron Ages. This system was proposed in 1836 by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen for classifying and studying ancient societies and history. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition.
The periodisation of the Bronze Age is generally ended with the Late Bronze Age collapse, a time of widespread societal collapse between c. 1200 and 1150 BC. This collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean, including North Africa and Southeast Europe, as well as the Near East, in particular Egypt, eastern Libya, the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers, most notably ushering in the Greek Dark Ages. (Full article...) - Image 5
Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) is part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, a Neolithic culture centered in upper Mesopotamia and the Levant, dating to c. 10,800 – c. 8,500 years ago, that is, 8800–6500 BC. It was typed by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon during her archaeological excavations at Jericho in the West Bank.
Like the earlier PPNA people, the PPNB culture developed from the Mesolithic Natufian culture. However, it shows evidence of a northerly origin, possibly indicating an influx from the region of northeastern Anatolia. (Full article...) - Image 6Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) denotes the first stage of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, in early Levantine and Anatolian Neolithic culture, dating to c. 12,000 – c. 10,800 years ago, that is, 10,000–8800 BCE. Archaeological remains are located in the Levantine and Upper Mesopotamian region of the Fertile Crescent.
The time period is characterized by tiny circular mud-brick dwellings, the cultivation of crops, the hunting of wild game, and unique burial customs in which bodies were buried below the floors of dwellings. (Full article...) - Image 7The Lower Paleolithic era on the Korean Peninsula and in Manchuria began roughly half a million years ago. The earliest known Korean pottery dates to around 8000 BC, and the Neolithic period began after 6000 BC, followed by the Bronze Age by 2000 BC, and the Iron Age around 700 BC. Similarly, according to The History of Korea, the Paleolithic people are not the direct ancestors of the present Korean people, but their direct ancestors are estimated to be the Neolithic People of about 2000 BC.
According to the mythic account recounted in the Samguk Yusa (1280s), the Gojoseon kingdom was founded in northern Korea and southern Manchuria in 2334 BC. The first written historical record on Gojoseon can be found from the text Guanzi. The Jin state was formed in southern Korea by the 3rd century BC. In the late 2nd century BC, Gojoseon eventually fell to the Han dynasty of China, which led to succeeding warring states, the Proto–Three Kingdoms period. (Full article...) - Image 8
Java Man (Homo erectus erectus, formerly also Anthropopithecus erectus, Pithecanthropus erectus) is an early human fossil discovered in 1891 and 1892 on the island of Java (Indonesia). Estimated to be between 700,000 and 1,490,000 years old, it was, at the time of its discovery, the oldest hominid fossil ever found, and it remains the type specimen for Homo erectus.
Led by Eugène Dubois, the excavation team uncovered a tooth, a skullcap, and a thighbone at Trinil on the banks of the Solo River in East Java. Arguing that the fossils represented the "missing link" between apes and humans, Dubois gave the species the scientific name Anthropopithecus erectus, then later renamed it Pithecanthropus erectus. The fossil aroused much controversy. Within a decade of the discovery almost eighty books or articles had been published on Dubois's finds. Despite Dubois's argument, few accepted that Java Man was a transitional form between apes and humans. Some dismissed the fossils as apes and others as modern humans, whereas many scientists considered Java Man as a primitive side branch of evolution not related to modern humans at all. In the 1930s Dubois made the claim that Pithecanthropus was built like a "giant gibbon", a much misinterpreted attempt by Dubois to prove that it was the "missing link". Eventually, similarities between Pithecanthropus erectus (Java Man) and Sinanthropus pekinensis (Peking Man) led Ernst Mayr to rename both Homo erectus in 1950, placing them directly in the human evolutionary tree. (Full article...) - Image 9
The Khiamian culture is a Neolithic archaeological culture of Southwest Asia, dating to the earliest part of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), around 9,700 to 8,600 BC. It is primarily characterised by a distinctive type of stone arrowhead—the "El Khiam point"—first found at the type site of El Khiam. (Full article...) - Image 10This is a list of Paleolithic sites in China. They are sorted in chronological order from the earliest founding to the latest: (Full article...)
- Image 11'Ubeidiya (Arabic: العبيدية, romanized: `Ubaydiyya; Hebrew: עובידיה), some 3 km south of the Sea of Galilee, in the Jordan Rift Valley, Israel, is an archaeological site of the early Pleistocene, c. 1.5 million years ago, preserving traces of one of the earliest migrations of Homo erectus out of Africa, with (as of 2014) only the site of Dmanisi in Georgia being older. The site yielded hand axes of the Acheulean type, but very few human remains. The animal remains include a hippopotamus' femur bone, and an immensely large pair of horns belonging to a species of extinct bovid.
The site was discovered in 1959 and was first excavated between 1960 and 1974. (Full article...) - Image 12
The South Asian Stone Age covers the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods in the Indian subcontinent. Evidence for the most ancient Homo sapiens in South Asia has been found in the cave sites of Cudappah of India, Batadombalena and Belilena in Sri Lanka. In Mehrgarh, in western Pakistan, the Neolithic began c. 7000 BCE and lasted until 3300 BCE and the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age. In South India, the Mesolithic period lasted until 3000 BCE, and the Neolithic period until c. 1000 BCE, followed by a Megalithic transitional period, mostly skipping the Bronze Age. The Iron Age in India began roughly simultaneously in North and South India, around c. 1200 to 1000 BCE (Painted Grey Ware culture, Hallur, Paiyampalli). (Full article...) - Image 13The Bronze Age in the Indian subcontinent begins around 3000 BCE, and in the end gives rise to the Indus Valley Civilisation, which had its (mature) period between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE. It continues into the Rigvedic period, the early part of the Vedic period. It is succeeded by the Iron Age in India, beginning in around 1000 BCE.
South India, by contrast, remains in the Mesolithic stage until about 2500 BCE.
In the 2nd millennium BCE, there may have been cultural contact between North and South India, even though South India skips a Bronze Age proper and enters the Iron Age from the Chalcolithic stage directly. In February 2006, a school teacher in the village of Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu discovered a stone celt with an inscription estimated to be up to 3,500 years old.
Indian epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan postulated that the writing was in Indus script and called the find "the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu". (Full article...) - Image 14
The Andronovo culture is a collection of similar local Late Bronze Age cultures that flourished c. 2000–1150 BC, spanning from the southern Urals to the upper Yenisei River in central Siberia. Some researchers have preferred to term it an archaeological complex or archaeological horizon. The slightly older Sintashta culture (c. 2200–1900 BC), formerly included within the Andronovo culture, is now considered separately to Early Andronovo cultures. Andronovo culture's first stage could have begun at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, with cattle grazing, as natural fodder was by no means difficult to find in the pastures close to dwellings.
Most researchers associate the Andronovo horizon with early Indo-Iranian languages, though it may have overlapped the early Uralic-speaking area at its northern fringe and Yeniseian-speaking area to its eastern fringe. Allentoft et al. (2015) concluded from their genetic studies that the Andronovo culture and the preceding Sintashta culture should be partially derived from the Corded Ware culture, given the higher proportion of ancestry matching the earlier farmers of Europe, similar to the admixture found in the genomes of the Corded Ware population. (Full article...) - Image 15The Halaf culture is a prehistoric period which lasted between about 6100 BC and 5100 BC. The period is a continuous development out of the earlier Pottery Neolithic and is located primarily in the fertile valley of the Khabur River (Nahr al-Khabur), of south-eastern Turkey, Syria, and northern Iraq, although Halaf-influenced material is found throughout Greater Mesopotamia.
While the period is named after the site of Tell Halaf in north Syria, excavated by Max von Oppenheim between 1911 and 1927, the earliest Halaf period material was excavated by John Garstang in 1908 at the site of Sakce Gözü. Small amounts of Halaf material were also excavated in 1913 by Leonard Woolley at Carchemish, on the Turkish/Syrian border. However, the most important site for the Halaf tradition was the site of Tell Arpachiyah, now located in the suburbs of Mosul, Iraq. (Full article...) - Image 16This is a list of Neolithic cultures of China that have been unearthed by archaeologists. They are sorted in chronological order from earliest to latest and are followed by a schematic visualization of these cultures.
It would seem that the definition of Neolithic in China is undergoing changes. The discovery in 2012 of pottery about 20,000 years BC indicates that this measure alone can no longer be used to define the period. It will fall to the more difficult task of determining when cereal domestication started. (Full article...) - Image 17The categorisation of the past into discrete, quantified named blocks of time is called periodization. This is a list of such named time periods as defined in various fields of study.
These can be divided broadly into prehistorical periods and historical periods (when written records began to be kept). (Full article...) - Image 18
The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible. These settled communities permitted humans to observe and experiment with plants, learning how they grew and developed. This new knowledge led to the domestication of plants into crops.
Archaeological data indicates that the domestication of various types of plants and animals happened in separate locations worldwide, starting in the geological epoch of the Holocene 11,700 years ago, after the end of the last Ice Age. It was the world's first historically verifiable transition to agriculture. The Neolithic Revolution greatly narrowed the diversity of foods available, resulting in a decrease in the quality of human nutrition compared with that obtained previously from foraging, but because food production became more efficient, it released humans to invest their efforts in other activities and was thus "ultimately necessary to the rise of modern civilization by creating the foundation for the later process of industrialization and sustained economic growth". (Full article...) - Image 19Daimabad is a deserted village and archaeological site on the left bank of the Pravara River, a tributary of the Godavari River in Shrirampur taluka in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra state in India. This site was discovered by B. P. Bopardikar in 1958. It has been excavated three times so far by the Archaeological Survey of India teams. The first excavation in 1958-59 was carried out under the direction of M. N. Deshpande. The second excavation in 1974-75 was led by S. R. Rao. Finally, the excavations between 1975-76 and 1978-79 were carried out under the direction of S. A. Sali. Discoveries at Daimabad suggest that Late Harappan culture extended into the Deccan Plateau in India. Daimabad is famous for the recovery of many bronze goods, some of which were influenced by the Harappan culture. (Full article...)
- Image 20Trialetian is the name for an Upper Paleolithic-Epipaleolithic stone tool industry from the South Caucasus. It is tentatively dated to the period between 16,000 / 13,000 BP and 8,000 BP. (Full article...)
- Image 21Riwat (Rawat, Murree) is a Paleolithic site in Punjab, northern Pakistan. Another site, called Riwat Site 55, shows a later occupation dated to around 45,000 years ago. (Full article...)
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The Fertile Crescent (Arabic: الهلال الخصيب) is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, together with northern Kuwait, south-eastern Turkey, and western Iran. Some authors also include Cyprus and northern Egypt.
The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the first region where settled farming emerged as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished as a result. Technological advances in the region include the development of agriculture and the use of irrigation, of writing, the wheel, and glass, most emerging first in Mesopotamia. (Full article...) - Image 23
Solo Man (Homo erectus soloensis) is a subspecies of H. erectus that lived along the Solo River in Java, Indonesia, about 117,000 to 108,000 years ago in the Late Pleistocene. This population is the last known record of the species. It is known from 14 skullcaps, two tibiae, and a piece of the pelvis excavated near the village of Ngandong, and possibly three skulls from Sambungmacan and a skull from Ngawi depending on classification. The Ngandong site was first excavated from 1931 to 1933 under the direction of Willem Frederik Florus Oppenoorth, Carel ter Haar, and Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, but further study was set back by the Great Depression, World War II and the Indonesian War of Independence. In accordance with historical race concepts, Indonesian H. erectus subspecies were originally classified as the direct ancestors of Aboriginal Australians, but Solo Man is now thought to have no living descendants because the remains far predate modern human immigration into the area, which began roughly 55,000 to 50,000 years ago.
The Solo Man skull is oval-shaped in top view, with heavy brows, inflated cheekbones, and a prominent bar of bone wrapping around the back. The brain volume was quite large, ranging from 1,013 to 1,251 cubic centimetres (61.8 to 76.3 cu in), compared to an average of 1,270 cm3 (78 cu in) for present-day modern males and 1,130 cm3 (69 cu in) for present-day modern females. One potentially female specimen may have been 158 cm (5 ft 2 in) tall and weighed 51 kg (112 lb); males were probably much bigger than females. Solo Man was in many ways similar to the Java Man (H. e. erectus) that had earlier inhabited Java, but was far less archaic. (Full article...)
Things you can do
Desired articles, sorted by how frequently linked to:
- Archaeology of Asia
- Archaeology of Japan
- Archaeology of Tajikistan
- Archaeology of Brunei
- Archaeology of Iraq
- Archaeology of Cambodia
- Archaeology of Jordan
- Archaeology of Kyrgyzstan
- Archaeology of Laos
- Archaeology of Bangladesh
- Archaeology of Kuwait
- Archaeology of Christmas Island
- Archaeology of Bhutan
- Archaeology of Egypt
- Archaeology of Georgia (country)
- Archaeology of South Korea
- Archaeology of East Timor
- Archaeology of Hong Kong
- Archaeology of Sri Lanka
- Archaeology of Iran
- Archaeology of South Ossetia
- Archaeology of Saudi Arabia
- Archaeology of Macau
- Archaeology of Kazakhstan
- Archaeology of Taiwan
- Archaeology of the Palestinian territories
- Archaeology of the Republic of Artsakh
- Archaeology of Abkhazia
- Archaeology of the Maldives
- Archaeology of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands
- Archaeology of Turkmenistan
- Archaeology of Turkey
- Archaeology of Thailand
- Archaeology of Uzbekistan
- Archaeology of Vietnam
- Archaeology of the British Indian Ocean Territory
- Archaeology of Yemen
- Archaeology of Bahrain
- Archaeology of Nepal
- Archaeology of Syria
- Archaeology of Mongolia
- Archaeology of Malaysia
- Archaeology of Myanmar
- Archaeology of North Korea
- Budana
- John David Hawkins
- Gyanpura
- Kheri Lochab
- Khera Gandawala
- Rajpura, Narnaund
- Kagsar
- Nara, Hisar
- Sulchani
- Kinnar, Hisar
- Panihari village
- Gamra
- Pali, Narnaund
- Ukhaa Tolgod
- Geology of Asia
- Kurile arc
- Xinminpu Group
- Zhou Shiwu
- You Hailu
- Wang Xiaolin
- Paul Upchurch
- Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature
- Cyclopygoidea
- Diapophysis
- Changma Basin
- Ukhaa Tolgod
- Kenilworth Sandstone Formation
- He Xinlu
- Cyclopygoidea
Selected images
- Image 1The Ancient Paleo-Siberians formed from the Ancient North Eurasians and Ancient Northern East Asian ancestry, and are closely connected to the first wave of humans into the Americas. (from Prehistoric Asia)
- Image 2Dolmen from Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, India. Woodcut from the article "Indiska fornsaker" by Hans Hildebrand. (from Prehistoric Asia)
- Image 3Early Indo-European migrations from the Pontic steppes and across Central Asia, and encounter with Ancient Northeast Asian populations. (from Prehistoric Asia)
- Image 4This skull of Homo erectus georgicus from Dmanisi in modern Georgia (Caucasus) is the earliest evidence for the presence of early humans outside the African continent. (from Prehistoric Asia)
- Image 7Modern humans interbred with an archaic human species called Denisovans on the islands of Southeast Asia. (from Prehistoric Asia)
- Image 8Map of AsiaNorth AsiaCentral AsiaEast AsiaWest AsiaSouth AsiaSoutheast Asia(from Prehistoric Asia)
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Prehistory of Africa | Prehistory of North America | Prehistory of Antarctica | Asia | Prehistory of Europe |
Prehistory of Oceania | Prehistory of South America | Archaeology | Earth sciences | Paleontology |
Extinct and Endangered Species | Paleozoic | Mesozoic | Cenozoic | Dinosaurs |
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