Front cover image for Southern Asia, Australia and the search for human origins

Southern Asia, Australia and the search for human origins

"This is the first book to focus on the role of Southern Asia and Australia in our understanding of modern human origins and the expansion of Homo sapiens between East Africa and Australia before 30,000 years ago. With contributions from leading experts that take into account the latest archaeological evidence from India and Southeast Asia, this volume critically reviews current models of the timing and character of the spread of modern humans out of Africa. It also demonstrates that the evidence from Australasia should receive much wider and more serious consideration in its own right if we want to understand how our species achieved its global distribution. Critically examining the 'Out of Africa' model, this book emphasizes the context and variability of the global evidence in the search for human origins"-- Provided by publisher
Print Book, English, 2013
Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013
xvi, 331 pages : illustrations, maps ; 26 cm
9781107017856, 1107017858
841515684
1. The past and present of human origins in Southern Asia and Australia / Robin Dennell and Martin Porr
2. East Asia and human evolution : from cradle of mankind to cul-de-sac / Robin Dennell
3. "Rattling the bones" : the changing contribution of the Australian archaeological record to ideas about human evolution / Sandra Bowdler
4. Smoke and mirrors : the fossil record for Homo sapiens between Arabia and Australia / Robin Dennell
5. An Arabian perspective on the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa / Huw S. Groucutt and Michael D. Petraglia
6. Assessing models for the dispersal of modern humans to South Asia / James Blinkhorn and Michael D. Petraglia
7. East of Eden : founder effects and the archaeological signature of modern human dispersal / Christopher Clarkson
8. Missing links, cultural modernity and the dead : anatomically modern humans in the Great Cave of Niah (Sarawak, Borneo) / Chris Hunt and Graeme Barker
9. Faunal biogeography in island Southeast Asia : implications for early hominin and modern human dispersals / M.J. Morwood
10. Late Pleistocene subsistence strategies in island Southeast Asia and their implications for understanding the development of modern human behaviour / Philip J. Piper and Ryan J. Rabett
11. Modern humans in the Philippines : colonization, subsistence and new insights into behavioural complexity / Alfred F. Pawlik, Philip J. Piper and Armand Salvador B. Mijares
12. Views from across the ocean : a demographic, social and symbolic framework for the appearance of modern human behaviour / Philip J. Habgood and Natalie R. Franklin
13. Early modern humans in island Southeast Asia and Sahul : adaptive and creative societies with simple lithic industries / Jane Balme and Sue O'Connor
14. Tasmanian archaeology and reflections on modern human behaviour / Richard Cosgrove, Anne Pike-Tay and Wil Roebroeks
15. Clothing and modern human behaviour : the challenge from Tasmania / Ian Gilligan
16. Patterns of modernity : taphonomy, sampling and the Pleistocene archaeological record of Sahul / Michelle C. Langley
17. Late Pleistocene colonisation and adaptation in New Guinea : implications for modelling modern human behaviour / Glenn R. Summerhayes and Anne Ford
18. Modern humans spread from Aden to the Antipodes : with passengers and when? / Stephen Oppenheimer
19. It's the thought that counts : unpacking the package of behaviour of the first people of Australia and its adjacent islands Iain Davidson
20. Essential questions : modern humans and the capacity for modernity / Martin Porr