Publication Date:
2015-01-17
Description:
Our understanding of when and how humans adapted to living on the Tibetan Plateau at altitudes above 2000 to 3000 meters has been constrained by a paucity of archaeological data. Here we report data sets from the northeastern Tibetan Plateau indicating that the first villages were established only by 5200 calendar years before the present (cal yr B.P.). Using these data, we tested the hypothesis that a novel agropastoral economy facilitated year-round living at higher altitudes since 3600 cal yr B.P. This successful subsistence strategy facilitated the adaptation of farmers-herders to the challenges of global temperature decline during the late Holocene.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Chen, F H -- Dong, G H -- Zhang, D J -- Liu, X Y -- Jia, X -- An, C B -- Ma, M M -- Xie, Y W -- Barton, L -- Ren, X Y -- Zhao, Z J -- Wu, X H -- Jones, M K -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2015 Jan 16;347(6219):248-50. doi: 10.1126/science.1259172. Epub 2014 Nov 20.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Key Laboratory of Western China's Environmental Systems (Ministry of Education), Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China. fhchen@lzu.edu.cn ghdong@lzu.edu.cn. ; Key Laboratory of Western China's Environmental Systems (Ministry of Education), Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China. ; Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130-48, USA. ; Center for Comparative Archaeology, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. ; Qinghai Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Xining 810007, China. ; Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 100710, China. ; School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. ; McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25593179" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Acclimatization
;
Agriculture/*history
;
*Altitude
;
Archaeology
;
Climate
;
History, Ancient
;
Humans
;
Radiometric Dating
;
Temperature
;
Tibet
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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