The site of Bol’shoy Yakor’ I is one of the most intensively investigated Late Pleistocene sites in Eastern Siberia. This volume compiles and presents the outcome of more than three decades of research by the authors in English for the first time. The site, discussed in the context of the landscape that surrounds it and the wider archaeology of the region, is considered as a palimpsest of activity, built up through repeated episodes of activity. Through a detailed study of the techniques of lithic production and animal exploitation, these activities are refitted into the seasonal cycles of the prehistoric hunter-gatherers who performed them. This book represents a valuable source for regional experts, technical specialists, and students with an interest in the Upper Palaeolithic of Northern Eurasia.

Throughout prehistory the Circumpolar World was inhabited by hunter-gatherers. Pottery-making would have been extremely difficult in these cold, northern environments, and the craft should never have been able to disperse into this region. However, archaeologists are now aware that pottery traditions were adopted widely across the Northern World and went on to play a key role in subsistence and social life. This book sheds light on the human motivations that lay behind the adoption of pottery, the challenges that had to be overcome in order to produce it, and the solutions that emerged. Including essays by an international team of scholars, the volume offers a compelling portrait of the role that pottery cooking technologies played in northern lifeways, both in the prehistoric past and in more recent ethnographic times.

This volume combines details of discoveries of Palaeolithic sites in a vast region of Northeast Asia (covering mostly the northeastern part of modern Russia), and meticulous analysis of hypotheses, ideas, and concepts related to the Northeast Asian Palaeolithic.

This book highlights climate as a complex physical, chemical, biological, and geological system, in perpetual change, under astronomical, predominantly, solar control. It has been shaped to some degree through the past glaciation cycles repeated in the last three million years. The Holocene, the current interglacial epoch which started ca. 11,700 years ago, marks the transition from the Stone Age to the unprecedented cultural evolution of our civilization. Significant climate changes have been recorded in natural archives during the Holocene, including the rapid waning of ice sheets, millennial shifting of the monsoonal fringe in the northern hemisphere, and abrupt centennial events. A typical case of severe environmental change is the greening of Sahara in the Early Holocene and the gradual desertification again since the fifth millennium before present. Climate Changes in the Holocene: Impact, Adaptation, and Resilience investigates the impact of natural climate changes on humans and civilization through case studies from various places, periods, and climates. Earth and human society are approached as a complex system, thereby emphasizing the necessity to improve adaptive capacity in view of the anthropogenic global warming and ecosystem degradation. Features: Written by distinguished experts, the book presents the fundamentals of the climate system, the unparalleled progress achieved in the last decade in the fields of intensified research for improved understanding of the carbon cycle, climate components, and their interaction. Presents the application of paleoclimatology and modeling in climate reconstruction. Examines the new era of satellite-based climate monitoring and the prospects of reduced carbon dioxide emissions.

"Bonnye Matthews is America’s preeminent writer of prehistoric history." - Grace Cavelieri of The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. Manak-na's Story, 75,000 BC is book 2 in the popular Winds of Change series, a prehistoric fiction series on the peopling of the Americas. Manak-na hears of an opportunity to take a great adventure. He has raised his children and feels that his time has come to live his dream. Manak-na adventures from China/Mongolia by boat to Mexico and returns, having promised his wife he will limit his adventures to one. Can he keep his promise? The Winds of Change novel series views the peopling of the Americas primarily from research over the last 15 years. The series takes the "what if" perspective. What might it have been like if the Americas abounded in human life long before 12,000 years ago? "What author Bonnye Mathews has managed to do is to expertly craft a series of notably entertaining novels that incorporates new data into an historical fictional accounts that bring these ancient peoples alive." -Midwest Book Review

Despite the obvious geographic importance of eastern Asia in human migration, its discussion in the context of the emergence and dispersal of modern humans has been rare. Emergence and Diversity of Modern Human Behavior in Paleolithic Asia focuses long-overdue scholarly attention on this under-studied area of the world. Arising from a 2011 symposium sponsored by the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo, this book gathers the work of archaeologists from the Pacific Rim of Asia, Australia, and North America, to address the relative lack of attention given to the emergence of modern human behavior as manifested in Asia during the worldwide dispersal from Africa.

Who were the first people who came to the land bridge joining northeastern Asia to Alaska and the northwest of North America? Where did they come from? How did they organize technology, especially in the context of settlement behavior? During the Pleistocene era, the people now known as Beringians dispersed across the varied landscapes of late-glacial northeast Asia and northwest North America. The twenty chapters gathered in this volume explore, in addition to the questions posed above, how Beringians adapted in response to climate and environmental changes. They share a focus on the significance of the modern-human inhabitants of the region. By examining and analyzing lithic artifacts, geoarchaeological evidence, zooarchaeological data, and archaeological features, these studies offer important interpretations of the variability to be found in the early material culture the first Beringians. The scholars contributing to this work consider the region from Lake Baikal in the west to southern British Columbia in the east. Through a technological-organization approach, this volume permits investigation of the evolutionary process of adaptation as well as the historical processes of migration and cultural transmission. The result is a closer understanding of how humans adapted to the diverse and unique conditions of the late Pleistocene.