3. Reindeer to Rice:
The Peopling of North and East Asia

After the initial colonisation of the southern and eastern coasts of Asia (not shown on this map), Asian genes (mitochondrial and Y chromosome) reveal colonisers spreading up the rivers, making their way north of the Himalayas and reaching Siberia.

Trekking Inland: Routes into Central Asia

The southern route out of Africa scattered people along the coast from India to South-East Asia and Australia. But what about the rest of Asia? There was a vast expanse of land to the north and east. Today that land is mainly occupied by two vast countries: Russia and China. But in the Palaeolithic it was one great wilderness, teeming with wildlife: prime hunter-gatherer territory.

I was on the search for the first Russians and Chinese. How did they penetrate the continent and just how far north would Palaeolithic technology let them venture? I was also interested in faces, and the origins of characteristic East Asian features, and this enquiry would take me back to that debate about replacement versus regional continuity, a recent African origin of modern humans or multiregional evolution.

Analysis of mitochondrial DNA in northern Asia has shown that all the lineages can be traced back to M and N in southern Asia (see page 101). This means we can be sure that people moved out of Africa, along that southern, beachcombing route, and then flowed northwards to populate northern Asia.¹ Populations spreading northwards from the South Asian coast could have followed rivers inland – but a massive barrier stood between South and Central Asia, stretching all the way from Afghanistan in the west to China in the east: the Himalayas.

In Out of Eden, Oppenheimer² described potential routes around and through this mountainous barrier, allowing access to Central Asia, following rivers inland. The Indus may have led colonisers up to the Khyber Pass, skirting the Himalayas in the west. Colonisers could have tracked northwards along the rivers of South-East Asia. If the beachcombers had continued up and along what is now the Chinese coast, they could have then moved westwards, along what would become the Silk Road, just north of the Himalayas. People could have also spread in from the west, from the Russian Altai.

Once populations were established north of the Himalayas, the vast expanse of Central Asia and Siberia lay open to colonisation. Siberia itself is huge, covering about 10 million km² and stretching from the Altai and Saian mountains in the south, to the shore of the Arctic Ocean in the north; from the Ural Mountains in the west, to the Pacific in the east. The environment here was about as different from the tropics, where early modern humans had flourished, as it could possibly have been. There would have been many new challenges facing the early pioneers: a lack of plants to eat, extreme cold and sometimes even a scarcity of wood for building shelters or burning for warmth. Colonising Siberia would have required new adaptations, new ways of hunting: a whole new suite of survival skills.

Mitochondrial DNA from populations across modern Siberia contains a record of a complex process of colonisation, with a mixture of lineages from European and Asian branches, presumably relating to incursions from both the west and the south, from modern-day Mongolia. Genetic diversity is greatest among Altaians, suggesting that modern humans have been in that region the longest. Unlike the long, thin, rake-like distribution of mitochondrial DNA branches in South-East Asia, which maps so well on to coastal dispersal from west to east, the branching bush of mtDNA in Siberia gives us less insight into the actual routes into the icy north.³

Considering that Central Asia is so huge, the archaeological evidence for early modern human colonisation north of the Himalayas is scarce. The earliest archaeological evidence comes from a site far north of the Himalayas: Kara-Bom in the Russian Altai. Kara-Bom is an open-air site, situated at the foot of a steep cliff, close to tributaries of the Ursul River. The site was excavated during the 1980s and early 1990s. Digging down through five metres of sediments at the foot of a slope, the archaeologists found evidence for three phases of occupation. The deepest layer contained Middle Palaeolithic, Mousterian tools, including Levallois cores and flakes as well as finished tools including points, side-scrapers and knives: it looked like a fairly standard Neanderthal toolkit.⁴ In the next layer up at Kara-Bom, the archaeologists found the clear signature of modern humans: early Upper Palaeolithic tools, including prismatic cores left over from blade manufacture, and plenty of blades, retouched on one or both sides, as well as end-scrapers, side-scrapers and burins. Above that again were late Upper Palaeolithic tools including microblades.

In the 1980s, archaeologists used conventional radiocarbon dating to age the Upper Palaeolithic layer at Kara-Bom, and reported a date of about 32,000 years old. In the 1990s the archaeologists used the new, more reliable method of AMS radiocarbon dating, on charcoal from the microblade layer, and obtained a date of about 42,000 years old.^{5, 4}

The animal bones also excavated from Kara-Bom provide us with a good idea of how rich the area was in terms of animal life: there were bones of horse, woolly rhino, bison, yak, antelope, sheep, cave hyena, grey wolf, marmot and hare; it sounded as if it would have been a good place for the Palaeolithic hunters.

In fact, there is a scattering of Upper Palaeolithic sites in southern Siberia, stretching as far east as Lake Baikal, as well as a couple further south, in Mongolia.⁶ So far, Kara-Bom has produced the oldest date for modern humans in Central Asia, but several other sites in southern Siberia are nearly as ancient, dating to between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. Although some are cave sites, most are open-air camps, like Kara-Bom. These Upper Palaeolithic sites have characteristic stone tools, but also artefacts made from bone, ivory and antler, as well as deer-tooth pendants. In terms of evidence for art, there’s really not much from the Siberian Upper Palaeolithic. Just a few sites have produced objects that could be construed as artistic artefacts: a stone disc coloured with red ochre, a possible carving of a bear’s head on a woolly rhinoceros vertebra and an ivory sphere.

Judging by tools in deeper layers, quite a few of the sites seem to have been used by archaic humans, perhaps Neanderthals, long before moderns got there. Ted Goebel places the colonisation of southern Siberia by archaic humans in the Middle Pleistocene, somewhere between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with modern humans moving in to occupy the area between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago. Could Neanderthals have still been living in Siberia when modern humans arrived? Dates and ancient DNA results from Okladnikov Cave in the Siberian Altai suggest that this may have been a possibility. Mousterian tools were found in the cave, but of course those could have been made by modern humans or Neanderthals. Some researchers suggested that teeth found in Okladnikov Cave, dating to around 40,000 years ago, were Neanderthal, but others disagreed. There were also some fragments of bone, too smashed up for us to be sure what species they belonged to. But geneticists recently managed to extract ancient DNA from those bits of bone – and they did indeed turn out to be Neanderthal. This is extraordinary because it suggests that the Neanderthals penetrated a lot further into Asia than previously thought, and that there may well have been overlap with modern humans, as in Europe.⁷ (We don’t know if those Neanderthals and modern humans ever met each other, though, and this is a question that will be pursued in the next part, The Wild West: The Colonisation of Europe.)

Although it is clear that archaic humans, including Neanderthals, lived in the mountainous regions of southern Siberia, they did not seem to get any further north, into the subarctic and Arctic regions. And the first modern humans to live in the area were also limited to southern Siberia. It appears that these first colonisers were, as Goebel puts it, ‘tethered to places on the landscape’, where there was suitable stone for making tools and plenty of animals to hunt. There’s no evidence of long-distance trade networks: tools were made from local stone. In this respect, it’s a similar picture to Europe in the early Upper Palaeolithic. But there is a distinct difference in the types of tools being made. The stone tools from the early Upper Palaeolithic of Siberia, and from China, too, are a bit of a strange ‘mixed bag’ when compared with the European toolkits. There are ‘modern-looking’, light-duty tools like small end-scrapers, borers, points and burins, but there are also very old-fashioned looking tools like side-scrapers, Mousterian-like points and sometimes even hand-axe type tools. Some archaeologists have argued that this shows a lack of technological development in isolated large populations, but others have said it can be explained functionally: the toolkits reflect different patterns of hunter-gatherer subsistence in particular environments. This functional and ecological interpretation also gets us away from the idea that humans were always on a quest to make ‘better’ tools. Instead, they were making what they needed to survive in particular place.⁸

On the Trail of Ice Age Siberians: St Petersburg, Russia

I travelled to St Petersburg to find out more about Ice Age Siberia. It was mid-spring and the River Neva (‘Nyeva’) had almost completely broken free from winter ice. Just a few plates of ice clung to its edges and floated like diminutive icebergs under its bridges.

In a restaurant in St Petersburg I met up with Russian archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko to find out about an exciting site in the far north-east of Siberia. Until just a few years ago, it was thought that modern humans hadn’t got as far as the Arctic Circle until after the LGM, around 18,000 years ago. But Pitulko had been excavating a site which suggested that the early modern human colonisers had adapted to the extreme conditions, and spread further north than any archaic humans had managed, right into subarctic and arctic Siberia, well before the LGM. The site was called Yana: it was an Upper Palaeolithic site frozen into the permafrost.

In 1993, geologist Mikhail Dashtzeren found a foreshaft, or spear end, made from woolly rhino horn, in the Yana Valley. (Foreshafts allow speedy replacement of broken spear points, thought to be a great advantage when hunting large game.) The artefact was the first sign of a Palaeolithic site eroding out of the permafrost – a site to become known in full as Yana RHS (Rhinoceros Horn Site). Excavations began some years later, in 2002. The archaeologists found stone tools made from flinty slate, including side-scrapers and end-scrapers. These are all based on flakes: there is no sign of blade manufacture from Yana. There were vast quantities of animal bones, mainly reindeer, but there were also mammoth, horse, bison, hare and bird bones. Nearly all the bones showed signs of scraping. Two further foreshafts were found, made from mammoth ivory, and a bone punch, or awl. The finds were radiocarbon dated to around 30,000 years ago.¹

The date of Yana places it just on the transition between a ‘warmer’ period, when larch and birch forests would have covered northern Siberia, and a cold phase, when the landscape became treeless tundra. The average temperature would have been colder than today.^{1, 2}

The date and location of Yana are significant: modern humans were in the Arctic well before the LGM. And the stone tools and ivory foreshafts preshadow some of the earliest implements found in the Bering land bridge region – and the Americas.¹

Pitulko was returning to dig at Yana that summer, and I made arrangements to fly out and meet him there. But it wasn’t to happen. In the end, the vagaries of Russian airline schedules thwarted my plans, and my chance of seeing the evidence for the Ice Age inhabitants of the far north was to be cruelly denied.

Between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago, the world was cooling towards the Last Glacial Maximum (or ‘LGM’). In northern Europe this meant the advance of ice sheets. In Siberia, the drying climate created a vast, almost unimaginably arid plain: the ‘mammoth steppe’.³ The steppe was so dry that many plants and animals were driven to local extinction in the north. Flora and fauna that survive today in the Arctic tundra, including humans, gradually retreated thousands of miles to the south, or to the far north-east, to the land exposed between Asia and North America: Beringia.³ Although the Upper Palaeolithic people of Siberia had become experts in surviving in extreme conditions, colonising the Arctic, they were now put under immense pressure. The number of archaeological sites dwindles as the Ice Age was reaching its climax around 19,000 years ago.⁴

Most of Siberia would have been locked in permafrost, but areas of southern Siberia, around the Transbaikal and Yenisei rivers, would have been slightly milder. Human and animal populations may have survived in these refugia while most of Siberia was an Arctic waste. The Siberian environment around the LGM is hard for us to imagine: it was very different from anything in existence now. There were combinations of plants and animals living on the mammoth steppe that we just don’t see today. Imagine this vast, treeless plain. All the vegetation was low-level, mostly grasses and sedges, no trees. And in it there were some animals which we recognise as cold-loving creatures such as reindeer and Arctic foxes, but alongside them were others that we’d associate with much warmer environments today, like cheetahs, hyenas and leopards. Ice Age Siberia was a place of extremes, with colder winters but warmer summers than today.³

Around this time there was also a change in culture in Siberia, typified by a site called Mal’ta, about 80km north of Irkutsk.⁵ The site was discovered in 1928, by local peasants, who found some bones along the road to Moscow. When archaeologists arrived to dig the site, they uncovered the remains of a Palaeolithic camp with substantial, semi-subterranean houses. They retrieved more than 44,000 stone tools, and over five hundred artefacts made from bone, ivory and antler. Among these were spectacular pieces of art, including some thirty human figurines and fifty carvings of birds, in mammoth ivory.⁶ New radiocarbon dates from Mal’ta place the site at around 21,000 years ago – practically right on the LGM.⁵

The artefacts from Ice Age Mal’ta are now kept in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and this was another reason for my visit to that beautiful city in European Russia. I entered the magnificent building on the banks of the Neva through a back door, then navigated my way through galleries full of much more recent, spectacular artwork. At the end of a long corridor I approached a large wooden door and waited to be admitted. I was met by a curator, an extremely smart and petite Russian woman named Svetlana Demeshchenko.

Behind the first door was another door. I followed Svetlana through it, and then up a spiral staircase until we reached the upper level and the door into the archaeological offices and stores. This was a different world from the grand state rooms of the Hermitage, with their polished floors, neoclassical sculptures and gilded pillars. There were corridors flanking by tall wooden cupboards, faded posters of archaeological exhibitions, and I caught glimpses of offices, in one of which were archaeologists poring over papers, surrounded by piles of dusty books and a jungle of houseplants.

Svetlana led me into a room lined with shallow wooden drawers and cupboards, and she started unpacking artefacts. She took a velvet-covered board and laid out a beautiful bone necklace that had been found with a child’s skeleton. There was an oblong of mammoth ivory inscribed with a stippled spiral pattern on one side, and with three snake-like lines on the other. Svetlana said that it had been proposed to be some kind of shamanic map, with the central hole in it representing a connection between worlds above and below the physical realm of existence. It was certainly a mysterious object, but it is surely impossible to know whether the design was anything more than decoration.^{6, 7}

Nestling in tissue paper in boxes were miniature figurines, like small ivory dolls. Some were thin and rangy, whereas a couple were a bit more buxom, and reminiscent of the European ‘Venus’ figures. Some were naked, with carved breasts, but others appeared to be clothed. One was clearly wearing a hat, and her body was scratched, textured, suggesting fur clothes perhaps. Bone awls and needles have been found at several sites from this period, indications that the technology to make clothes was in place. In fact, there are eyed needles dating to about 30,000–35,000 years old from Kostenki, in Ukraine, and Tolbaga, to the south of Lake Baikal. A needle from Denisova Cave in the Altai has been reported as being even older, perhaps as much as 40,000 years old, although this may be an overestimate.⁸ But even without any of this material evidence (forgive the pun), the technology to make clothes could have been inferred: it would have been impossible for the Ice Age Siberians to have survived without substantial fur clothing.

The feet of several figurines were pierced through, as if they had been intended to be worn as pendants – though they would hang upside-down. And then there were two ivory, bird-like figures, only about 6cm long, with outstretched necks and stubby wings. Were they geese? Or swans? I imagined those ancient Siberians, huddled in tents against the growing cold of the Ice Age, carving these objects by the firelight. Was it just something to do on those long, cold evenings, or did these female figures and birds hold some meaning for those people? Could they have been mythological or shamanic emblems? Some anthropologists, arguing from analogy with recent ethnographic studies, have suggested that the pierced figurines and birds represented spirit helpers that were designed to be attached to a shaman’s costume.^{6, 7} Their meaning has long since been lost, but they are very beautiful objects.

Mal’ta and the other sites from Siberia between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago show us that the hunter-gatherers in this region were surviving, and, given the artistic outpouring in Mal’ta, even flourishing, as glacial conditions set in. And the similarity between tools and art produced in Siberia and Europe at this time suggests that there were communication networks linking communities across a vast area. People seem to have been moving around the landscape, using large base camps, with smaller hunting camps like satellites around them. The base camps were often a long way from any outcrops of rock ideally suited to making tools – presumably their location was determined more by the proximity of animals to hunt. But this meant that stone tools either had to be made from less than ideal, coarse rocks, or that finer stone had to be carried long distances. Many of the stone tools at Mal’ta were small blades, or ‘bladelets’, made from correspondingly miniature cores. Perhaps it was a need to economise, to make the most of scarce supplies of decent stone, that drove the toolmakers to make smaller and smaller blades?⁴

The animal bones from Mal’ta show that these Ice Age Siberians were hunting a wide range of animals: woolly rhinoceros, mammoth, bison, reindeer, horse and red deer, as well as hares, Arctic foxes and wolverine, and geese, gulls, grouse and ptarmigan. There were a great many reindeer antlers at Mal’ta, but these might have been scavenged for use in house-building, as reindeer naturally lose their antlers each year. At numerous places on the Russian plain, around and immediately following the LGM, and including the famous site of Mezhirich, mammoth tusks were used in the construction of huts.

Leaving the Hermitage, I crossed over the River Neva and made my way to the back door of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Another museum, another back door, and another corridor with store rooms full of bones. The Institute is famous for its mammoths. In the exhibition hall upstairs there were stuffed mammoths, towering over dioramas of more reasonably sized mammals. There were even mummified mammoths, which had survived, frozen in permafrost, to the present day. Downstairs in the store rooms there were stacks of enormous bones, huge skulls, and piles and piles of tusks. I stood next to a femur, and the mammoth thigh bone reached up to my chest. The animal it came from would have dwarfed me. Mammoths would have been formidable prey for those ancient hunters on the steppe.

Mammoth remains, from the Pleistocene, have been found all over Central Asia, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to Mongolia in the south. Collections of mammoth bones often turn up in riverbanks, from animals or skeletons that have been swept up by rivers and redeposited. But mammoth bones and tusks have also been found at archaeological sites, alongside evidence of human activity and occupation.⁹

The interaction between humans and mammoths on the plains of Siberia, in Europe and in North America, has been widely debated. Certainly in Siberia it seems that humans were using mammoths, presumably eating their meat, and using their bones and tusks to build houses, carve tools and make art.⁵ In western Siberia, there are a few sites with evidence of ‘mammoth processing’, where practically complete skeletons have been found along with stone tools and traces of fire. But it is impossible to tell if these mammoths had been hunted or had been collected as frozen carcasses. Other sites suggest that the ancient Siberians were choosing to camp near collections of old bones and tusks, which they could then gather to use. Such collections in the banks of lakes and rivers represented mammoths which may have died hundreds or thousands of years earlier, maybe by falling through the ice.⁹

The last mammoths appear to have inhabited the far north of Siberia up until around 10,000 years ago. So what finished them off? For some researchers, the answer is obvious: humans. But this really does depend on humans having actively hunted mammoths in Siberia. From research that has tried to assess fluctuations in mammoth and human populations, it seems that people made very little impact on mammoth populations, at least until well after the LGM. During the Pleistocene, human population sizes were small, and were concentrated south of the main ranges of the mammoths. Mammoth populations actually appear to have expanded after the LGM, during the cold snap called the Younger Dryas, but at around 13,000 years ago their numbers started to dwindle, and by 11,500 years ago they had all disappeared. Now, this does coincide with the continued expansion of human populations; perhaps, for an already shrinking and stressed mammoth population, a modest amount of hunting by humans might have been enough to tip the balance towards extinction.¹⁰

There were major changes in the climate and environment at this time: the world was warming up and the mammoth steppe was disappearing, and for some researchers this is enough to explain the extinction of woolly mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna.^{11, 12} As far as archaeological evidence from Siberian middle Upper Palaeolithic sites is concerned, there is often no way to tell if mammoth remains have come from hunted or scavenged animals.⁵ In fact, there is no definite evidence of mammoth-hunting in Siberia, but there is plenty of evidence of humans collecting bones and tusks from already ancient mammoth ‘death sites’.

The idea of those Ice Age hunters as big game specialists, or exclusive ‘mammoth hunters’, does not stand up to scrutiny. The hunters appear to have been generalists; large mammals like woolly rhino, mammoth and bison are actually rare in archaeological sites. Medium-sized animals such as reindeer, red deer and horse are much more common. And the hunters were also bringing back small game like fox and wolverine, as well as birds like geese, gulls, grouse and ptarmigan.^{5, 12} Wolf bones are also common – but this may be domestication rather than predation: perhaps first evidence of man’s best friend.¹²

So, for the time being the question of whether it was climate change, overkill by humans or a mixture of the two that eventually did in the mammoths is far from settled.^{13, 14}

After the worst of the Ice Age, while megafauna like the mammoths had disappeared for good, other plants, animals and humans started to spread northwards again as the climate warmed. But using a word like ‘warm’ to describe Siberia is somewhat misleading, as I was about to find out: I was going to stay with the reindeer hunters of the north.

Meeting with the Reindeer Herders of the North: Olenek, Siberia

I was heading for the coldest inhabited place on earth: northern Siberia. Winter temperatures there can fall to below –70 degrees. First, I flew to Yakutsk, where, as I stepped off the plane and inhaled the icy air, I felt my bronchi constricting in protest. It was about –20 degrees. At the airport, I met my guide, anthropologist Anatoly Alekseyev. From the airport we drove through snowy streets, past ramshackle houses that were visibly subsiding into the permafrost, and past a huge statue of Lenin in the square, his right hand outstretched. Although I’d heard Yakutsk described as a modern Klondike run by diamond merchants, there was little outward evidence of this wealth. There were lots of new bars and casinos, and very smart women in chic fur hats and high-heeled boots, but the whole place still felt very run down. Arriving at the hotel, and stepping from the icy cold into an overheated foyer, I was clearly entering a different culture from European Russia. There were woven panels of horse hair depicting long-bearded old men and reindeer. People’s faces – including Anatoly’s – were also very different here from those in St Petersburg or Moscow. Gone were the large noses and long faces. The majority of people were now much more oriental-looking, with broad cheeks, narrow eyes and small noses.

The following day we caught another, smaller prop plane and flew further north, from Yakutsk to the village of Olenek. We were sharing the aircraft with a crowd of very smart-looking Siberians: men in suits and women in exquisite long fur coats and hats. The flight took us over a snowy landscape sparsely covered in larch forest. We followed the meandering River Lena, icebound and covered in snow, northwards, then peeled away to the west.

The plane landed at Olenek, and from my seat just behind the wing I could see the wheel make contact with the runway, kicking up an impressive plume of snow. And as we slowed to a halt we could see a welcome party assembled on the runway: a group of women dressed once again in long fur coats, one in a crimson coat lined with white fur, like a female Santa Claus, and a circle of dancers dressed in traditional fur outfits that looked almost Native American. One woman held out a round loaf with a small pot of salt embedded in the middle of it; I tore off a piece of bread, dipped it in the salt, and ate it. Children ran up with necklaces made of reindeer antler and hung them around our necks. I had arrived in Olenek on the eve of their annual reindeer festival, as had many others from the region, including diamond-mine owners and politicians – ‘Big Fircones’, as the Russian phrase puts it.

Anatoly and I somehow got swept along with the diamond oligarchs, and ushered into the Regional Administrators’ office, where we were treated to a discourse on the progressive changes being made in the village. Although I had never been to Russia before this trip, the whole meeting felt rich with Soviet overtones. When the meeting drew to a close, I was given a key-ring emblazoned with a badge of the Reindeer Festival. Then Anatoly and I took a rugged little Toyota van across the frozen River Olenek to our lodging on the opposite bank.

We were staying in Marina Stepanova’s single-storey wooden house, with a woodshed and an outside toilet near the fence, flanking the driveway. There were steps up the porch and a heavy, felt-edged front door (which had to be shut quickly as you passed through so as not to let the heat out of the house). Inside, a small hallway, with hooks for coats, led straight into a room with a tiny kitchen on the right and a dining area on the left. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house. The house was toasty warm: a central wood-burning stove was kept alight during the day, to melt ice for water as well as providing heat, and at night hot water flowed into radiators in each room from a remote boilerhouse. Marina was staying with family, though popping in to cook us meals – very generously letting us take over her house for a while.

As Anatoly and I settled in, Piers Vitebsky appeared: a great bear of a man, he would help me understand Evenki culture as I experienced it over the coming days. Piers was an anthropologist who had specialised in shamanism, spending time with tribes in India and northern Siberia. He headed up Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, and it was through Piers that Anatoly had developed his interest in anthropology and become a historian of his own people.

Marina’s dinners were generous and unchanging. There were hunks of white bread, biscuits and sweets, arranged on a cake stand in the centre of the table. We had cups of tea made with hot water from electric urns, and cranberry juice. There were small bowls of carrot and cabbage salad, and, when we sat down, huge steaming dishes of potatoes and reindeer meat would appear. Essentially, every time we left the house for any length of time, when we returned this spread would be awaiting us. I was reading Piers’ book on his experiences living with the Eveny reindeer herders (Anatoly’s people), where the camp cook would always have dinner ready in the tent for the herders returning from working in the cold. Marina was maintaining the custom in the village.

Later that day we crossed back over the frozen river to visit the museum in Olenek, where Piers gave me a guided tour of local Neolithic pot and stone tools, scale models of Evenki ‘sky burials’ with coffins on stilts, items of clothing stitched together from reindeer skin, and shamanic paraphernalia – including a shaman’s coat adorned with iron animals and complete with reindeer-hide ‘tail’. The shaman’s assistant would apparently hold this two-metre-long tail to anchor the shaman and pull him back to earth after he had been flying in a trance. I had hoped to see a shaman, but the Soviet regime had made them particularly rare and shy. That night, though, we went along to a concert in the village hall, where, along with folk rock and pop, we were treated to full-on shamanic kitsch with a folk singer dressed in a quasi-traditional costume, beating a skin drum, accompanied by reindeer dancers. This was the opening night of the Reindeer Festival.

The following day, I went to the festival itself, held on the frozen river. Two ‘chums’, tepee-like tents, had been erected within an arena framed with coloured flags. People were out in their best furs: little girls dressed cutely, head to toe in white fur, women in long fur coats, men in fur jackets. Teams of reindeer waited patiently inside the enclosure, tethered to their sleighs ready for the races and some of the animals were wearing beautiful bead-embroidered headdresses and trappings. I don’t think I’d ever seen a real, live reindeer before arriving in Siberia. Now there were reindeer everywhere, looking like mythical creatures in the bright snow and sunshine. Throughout the day there were various reindeer races: children riding reindeer, women racing single-reindeer sleighs, men racing double-reindeer sleighs on 3 to 8km tracks up and down the frozen river. People had come to the festival from all over Yakutia and the neighbouring district of Zhigansky, a geographically enormous area, something like the size of Britain and France combined. Some of the reindeer had literally flown in – by helicopter. It was still, as these festivals would have been when all the reindeer herders were truly nomadic, an opportunity for a scattered population to come together, and, in particular, for young men and women to meet up.

I went up to the river cliffs above the festival to get a panoramic view of the sleighs as they approached the finishing line, the arena and the chums. Then we headed back to Marina’s where dinner was waiting for us. But we weren’t stopping long. The time had come for the next leg of my journey, to an even more remote place. All around Olenek, reindeer herders lived in mobile camps – and I was going to one of them, some 70km from the village.

I packed up my gear in a kitbag and wrapped myself up in layers and layers of merino wool thermals, fleeces, a jacket and, finally, a reindeer fur coat. My feet had got cold in the afternoon, walking around in my Baffin boots. Marina looked at them with disdain and produced a pair of reindeer boots, so I stuffed my feet into two pairs of thick woollen socks and then into the furry-inside-and-out boots. On my head: a black woollen hat, two buffs around my neck, pulled up over my nose, and sealed with a pair of ski goggles so that no skin showed. I tugged a hood trimmed with wolf fur firmly down and around my well-wrapped face, and pulled on two pairs of gloves: an inner silk pair and an outer, fleece-lined, wind-proof pair. Then I walked stiffly out of the house and down the steps of the porch to where some of the men we’d seen racing earlier in the day were loading our gear on to sledges behind snowmobiles.

We had planned to leave for this journey at six o’clock. Piers had warned us about the difference between ‘intentional time’ and ‘real time’ in northern Siberia. It was gone nine o’clock when we left and the orange sun was resting on the horizon. Piers, Anatoly and I were each to travel with a reindeer herder, on separate snowmobiles pulling sledges. I jumped on to a sledge, sitting with my back against a pile of bags. Then we set off – bumpily – along the snowy road, heading west into the setting sun. My goggles started to ice up almost immediately; all I could see were occasional glimpses of trees in the upper margins of the goggles, but most of my field of vision was a uniform yellow-grey. We hurtled along, with the sledge riding up over the bumps and crashing down on the other side.

It wasn’t long before we started to spread out, travelling far apart, as the air darkened and cooled around us. It was like a strange exercise in selective sensory deprivation: all I could see now was dark grey, and my ears filled with the chainsaw-like drone of the snowmobile. As tempting as it was to sleep, I had to be an active passenger: as we veered, rolled, pitched and jolted along, I concentrated on hanging on to a thin rope binding down the tarp under me. Failure to hang on would mean coming off at the next bend or bump. And as I was effectively blind, I could not anticipate when the sledge would try to buck me.

The cold gradually seeped in through all the layers of thermals and fur. My feet were distinctly chilly and my toes started to feel numb, so I had to focus on keeping all my toes moving as well as hanging on, and every now and then I thrashed my legs up and down on the tarpaulin-covered sleigh, to encourage warm blood to flow down to my extremities.

After a few hours, the snowmobile stopped and I raised my goggles again. Darkness had properly fallen by now, and we were in a long, snowy valley with larch forest on each side. I drank some hot water from my thermos. After a few minutes, Piers and his reindeer herder arrived and stopped to check that I was all right. The air was thick with alcohol fumes: Piers’ driver seemed to be keeping himself going on the long, cold journey with the help of a couple of bottles of vodka. I got off the sledge and sat on the back of the snowmobile instead, and prepared myself for the final leg, even though we were still apparently at least two hours away from the camp. I had taken my gloves off for about two minutes to find things in my stiff, frozen rucksack, and my fingers were already hurting. I wriggled them inside my mitts, where I had also stuffed a small bag of hand-warmer granules, and my fingers started to sting and warm up.

Back in that dark grey space behind the iced-up goggles, I felt myself drifting into a strange internal world, as though one part of my brain was looking after the physical challenge of holding on while another part let me revisit earlier parts of my journey. In my head I was examining enormous, dusty bones in the vaults of the mammoth museum in St Petersburg, and drifting around rooms of French Impressionist, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings in the Hermitage. I thought about family and friends back home, and my garden where daffodils and primroses were coming into flower. I felt a very, very long way away.

We seemed to be going up and down over hills and very bumpy ground. Other snowmobiles – carrying more herders returning from the festival – would catch up and then overtake us; their headlights would turn my world a lighter grey as they approached, then it would go dark again when they passed. A couple more hours and we stopped. I hoped we had reached the camp, but when I pushed up my goggles we were still in the snowy woods. My driver had stopped for a cigarette. My hands and feet were very, very cold by now. I swapped my gloves for enormous boxing-glove-like down mittens. It would be harder to hold on, but my fingers would be less cold. Before we set off again, I looked up at the sky and saw skeins of bright light flowing and dancing across the backdrop of the stars. It was stunningly beautiful.

The last half-hour of that journey was the longest I have ever experienced, and in that time I started to despair. It was too cold, too far, and there was no way out of this situation. I couldn’t put my hand up and say, ‘All right, I’ve had enough now – take me home.’ I was very tired and very cold and my entire being was simply focused on getting through, minute by minute. My fingers and toes were numb, and I had started to shiver. I had reached the limit of my protection against the elements. There was nothing else I could put on. A polar expert had once advised me never to go further than one kilometre away from ‘base’ in the Arctic without some means of warming up: at the very least a sleeping bag, ideally a tent and stove. I had none of these, and I was effectively alone in the darkness; I couldn’t talk to my driver, and I was separated from Piers and Anatoly. I just had to hold on to the hope that we would arrive at the camp very soon.

We came to a sudden halt in darkness and silence. I pushed my goggles up: we had reached the camp. I stumbled into a tent where a recently lit stove was emitting a very dim light and a little heat. I had just endured the most extreme experience of my life. I understood the fragility of existence in such a harsh environment. I had never been so grateful for shelter and warmth.

The journey had taken six hours. For another two hours it was difficult to find out where I was meant to be sleeping – and then another Marina arrived: Marina Nikolaeva. This formidable woman ran the reindeer herders around Olenek. People suddenly started scuttling around to sort things out, then Marina found a tent for me, made sure a stove was lit, and I gratefully went off to bed, huddling into my down sleeping bag. The stove went out in the night, and I awoke a few times with ice on my eyelashes, and around the edges of my sleeping bag where the moisture in my breath had condensed and frozen. Each time, I pulled the cords of my sleeping bag tighter and snuggled further down.

I woke up in an orange tent, glowing with the sunshine outside but icy cold. Marina’s husband came in to light the stove, and I pulled on layers in preparation for emerging into the outdoors. When I did, the nightmarish dark wood of the night had gone and I was in a clearing in a sparse larch forest, in bright snow and brilliant sunshine. It was still less than –20 degrees, but the sun felt warm on my bare face. A thousand-strong herd of reindeer moved around in the forest close to the camp. Several reindeer for riding – uchakhs – were tied up in the camp itself. Men were sawing wood for fires and tinkering with sledges and snowmobiles; children were riding reindeer round the camp.

That afternoon I rode on a sledge pulled by two reindeer, with the camp leader, or brigadier, Vasily Stepanov. He had loaded his rifle and wedged it under a reindeer skin on the back of the sledge, and I perched quite nervously on top of it. We moved off down the hill from the camp, at the front of a small caravan of reindeer sledges, and went looking for traces of wild reindeer. Before long, Vasily halted the caravan and pointed out the mashed-up snow where wild reindeer had passed. As wild and domestic reindeer are essentially the same animals, I presumed he knew that these were wild tracks simply because we were far from the camp and his own herd. There were other tracks in the snow as well: Arctic hare and larger prints that may have been wolverine, as well as trails of birds’ feet, only just sunk into the top of the snow. (Stepping off the sledge, which formed a track about a foot deep in the snow, I plunged down to three or four feet.) A small flock of five white ptarmigan had flown off up the hill as we had stopped.

There were elements of the Evenki lifestyle that were still close to those of their hunter-gathering ancestors: they were still nomadic, and still hunting. But there were also modifications, some very recent. The Evenki were not just hunters of reindeer; they were reindeer herders as well. It is thought that domestication of reindeer happened relatively recently, perhaps in the last 3000 years.¹ So why continue hunting reindeer if you already have domestic animals? The answer to this question seemed to lie in the fact that the impetus driving the domestication of reindeer was not to secure a food source, but rather to obtain a more efficient way of hunting food: the ancestors of the reindeer herders domesticated reindeer to ride them, in order to hunt wild reindeer. Piers thought this was probably the only example of a species being domesticated in order to hunt wild members of the same species.

Siberia became part of Russia in the seventeenth century. The Russians had moved in along the great rivers, building wooden forts as they went, suppressing the indigenous tribes and taking the whole of Siberia within a generation. Traditionally, domestic reindeer had been used for transport, milk, and as decoys to attract wild reindeer into ambushes,² but now the herds were also used as livestock, although hunting of wild reindeer persisted.

The herding and hunting tradition went through the mill of Sovietisation in the twentieth century, when northern Siberia was seen as a huge meat farm. Indigenous reindeer herders were compelled to become large-scale meat producers: herds were expanded and clusters of nomadic ranges were incorporated into enormous ‘farms’ producing reindeer meat for industrial mining towns in the far north. Starting in the 1930s, villages, like Olenek, were set up to process the meat and to house the women and children. The reindeer herders had operated in family groups, but these were broken up according to Soviet principles: the men, as Soviet workers, would run the camps, as working collectives, or ‘brigades’ (of which there were three around Olenek), while women and children would live in the village. Some families had always tried to stay together, though that still meant that the women and children would be out in the camps during the school holidays and back in the village for the winter. I was fortunate to visit the Evenki camp in spring holiday time, when the camp felt very family orientated. The main family in our camp was the Stepanov family, of whom Vasily was the patriarch and brigadier.

In the post-Soviet era the need for reindeer meat had diminished as the industrial towns closed down and demand dissipated, but now Siberia was being mined for another commodity: diamonds. Diamond money meant new schools and community works in Olenek, and a renewed demand for reindeer meat on a commercial scale. The Stepanovs’ thousand-strong herd of reindeer was there to provide meat for sale and reindeer for riding, but reindeer meat for the camp itself was still mostly obtained from hunting wild reindeer. In fact, there had been a local decline in domestic reindeer numbers so that hunting of wild reindeer was actually on the increase. The balance between pastoralism and hunting had shifted back a little, but wild reindeer were a force to be reckoned with: the population was booming, with a huge wild herd building up on the Taimyr Peninsula to the east. Wild herds would occasionally sweep in and ‘abduct’ domestic reindeer. Spending time around the reindeer in the Stepanov herd, this was entirely understandable; the deer for riding were quite tame, but most of the herd seemed very much like wild animals, as though they could quite easily revert to that state in fullness, at any time.

Piers had spent the last twenty years studying Anatoly’s people, the Eveny, a sister group to the Evenki, both indigenous tribes of Siberia and the Altai. All of these tribes in northern Asia shared a common pattern of subsistence, being nomadic or semi-nomadic hunters and herders. Some of the tribes, like the neighbouring Yakuts, were traditionally semi-nomadic horse and cattle breeders and spoke a Turkic language. The Yakuts, with their southern Siberian cattle-breeding style of subsistence and Turkic language, are probably the remnants of a recent northwards migration of a southern Siberian steppe population, impelled to move north as the Mongol empire expanded in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries ad.^{3, 4}

The Eveny and Evenki people traditionally spoke Tungusic languages (although most we spoke to were now using the more widespread Yakut language), and were herders and hunters of reindeer. Genetic analyses have shown that indigenous Asian and American populations are a separate branch from European and African populations, and, furthermore, that the Asian population has two main branches: one grouping Siberian populations (including the Evenki) with indigenous Americans, and the other relating to people in Central and South-East Asia. These two branches seem to have diverged between 21,000 and 24,000 years ago, although this seems too late to reflect the earliest colonisation of north and Central Asia.⁵

Having spent so much time living with reindeer herders in Siberia, Piers was able to tell me that I shouldn’t ask Vasily about his hopes for the hunt. And in the end it seemed that the wild reindeer were too far away, and we were too late to be able to catch up with them that day, so we all returned to camp.

When a hunt was unsuccessful, meat could be obtained from the domestic herd. I found this quite difficult. There was an incredible sense of life and death in this place. The reindeer were such beautiful creatures that it seemed awful to consider killing them. But of course I knew that was exactly what the Evenki depended on for survival in this climate. This dreadful battle between surviving and dying, respect and killing, was deeply embedded in their culture. The Evenki revered reindeer, especially wild ones. Later that evening, Vasily described to me some of the rituals associated with the hunt.

‘Before going on a hunt, I always feed the fire and feed the spirit of the locality, before setting out. When a hunt has been successful, I give some of the meat to the spirits and after we finish the deer, all the bones, and the head and the antlers go up on a platform.’

The bones would be placed up high, facing east to ensure reincarnation, like a smaller version of the sky burial for dead humans.

‘The animals should be reborn again and again, so that our children and grandchildren have enough to eat.’

The ethics and morals attached to hunting extended to other members of the group, as well as to the animals being hunted. There was an element of karma, of ‘what goes around, comes around’ as well. Marina said, ‘You must be respectful to nature, or you won’t be successful next time. You should also always share your catch with people close to you, or people who don’t have much. Whoever does this is guaranteed success [in the hunt].’

I was well aware that my survival on the sleigh ride through the night, and the integrity of my fingers and toes, had depended on my reindeer coat, hood, mitts and – perhaps most importantly – boots, and the generosity of the Evenki villagers who had lent me these clothes. Here I was: a vegetarian who would never buy fur, standing in the snow in Siberia dressed almost entirely, from head to foot, in the skin of a dead animal. But I was borrowing these clothes, and the deer had not been killed for me. Neither was the one that was about to meet its end. I walked over to the opposite end of the camp while a reindeer was lassoed, gently pressed to the ground, then stabbed swiftly through the heart.

I waited, then went over just as the Evenki men were starting to expertly skin the deer. Its eyes were still bright. But very quickly, it was changed from dead animal into a pile of meat: gutted and jointed with surgical precision. Anatoly took a metal mug and dipped it into the cavity of the reindeer’s abdomen, bringing up a cupful of fresh, warm reindeer blood to his lips. He offered it to me; I refused as politely as I could.

The skin was laid out, fur down, on the snow. I noticed strange, bean-sized objects stuck to the inside of the hide around the shoulders; Piers later told me that these were the grubs of warbleflies, which lay their eggs under reindeers’ skin. Later that afternoon, I watched three Evenki women, Valya, Tanya and Zoya, making reindeer boots from a prepared skin. They chose the fur from the legs of the reindeer to make the upper part of the boot, and sewed together patches from the reindeers’ feet to create the soles. The sewing thread was also from the reindeer – long fibres pulled from a dried ligament.

The finished boots were both pieces of art and functionally formidable. It seemed amazing that these relatively simple fabrications could outperform my Baffin boots – but they did. Reindeer fur provides fantastic insulation: there is an outer coat of long guard hairs, and dense under-wool next to the skin. The guard hairs contain cells with such large air spaces within them that they appear to be hollow under the microscope – and this is what makes reindeer fur so effective.⁶

The meat from the slaughtered reindeer was swiftly converted into dinner. Marina was very sanguine about the slaughter.

‘Whoever likes the blood can drink it,’ she said. ‘The liver is also good hot, and you can eat the eyes, which are delicious and good for you. We always eat the raw brains – they’re very tasty and healthy, too.’

Meals with the Evenki consisted of a lot of reindeer meat, mostly boiled, with the water forming a sort of fatty, reindeer broth. Sometimes there were also bowls of chopped reindeer fat and, once, a bowl of pieces of frozen reindeer milk. I was lucky in that there was also some bread, small triangles of processed soft cheese in foil wrappers, and bowls of bon bons (which I suspect were laid on for guests). I had brought some packet meals with me, and the Evenki looked on in mild disgust as I poured boiling water into these concoctions. One of the children was brave enough to try some – and the other children ran away from him, screaming.

The meat-rich diet of the Evenki seems somewhat bizarre and unhealthy from a Western perspective, but there’s evidence that it’s just what the Evenki need in their extreme environment. Our bodies produce heat all the time, as a by-product of metabolism, and the Evenki have been found to have a very high metabolic rate, probably due to high levels of thyroid hormones. A study of thyroid hormone levels in the Evenki suggested that there was a correlation with total energy and protein intake. A high proportion of the Evenki’s energy intake came in the form of protein and fat, not surprising given their reindeer-rich diet. It seems that eating a lot – in particular, a lot of meat – may spur the thyroid gland into producing more hormones. The result: raised metabolic rate and heat production. It’s as though the body is so well supplied with fuel that it can afford to ‘waste’ some as heat – except that, in northern Siberia, that ‘wastefulness’ is itself important to survival.^{7, 8}

A diet like the Evenki’s should set the heart disease alarm bells ringing, but, in spite of their meat-rich diet, the Evenki appear to have paradoxically low levels of ‘bad cholesterol’ in their blood. There are probably a number of reasons for this, including a genetic predisposition to low cholesterol, a high metabolic rate and a physically active lifestyle, all of which should help to keep ‘bad cholesterol’ down. Studies of other northern indigenous people have also shown strangely low rates of heart disease; a high consumption of fish containing omega-3 fatty acids may also play a role. However, very sadly, there have been recent reports of rising rates of heart disease in Siberian and Alaskan natives, as they move away from traditional lifestyles. The modern lifestyle diseases of heart disease and diabetes are spreading into the far north.⁹

That night, Marina and her two children shared the tent with me. There was plenty of room; we slept close to the edges (but not too close as it would drop to –40 degrees outside during the night), on a raised floor of slim larch logs. The stove occupied an off-centre position. Marina’s husband was sleeping somewhere else but he would dutifully come in periodically to check on the stove and replenish the pile of larch logs. We fell asleep in such warmth, with our faces almost roasting in the heat from the stove, that I stripped off most of my layers inside my down sleeping bag, but left them in the bag in case I needed them later in the night. I did.

We awoke in a cold tent. The temperature inside the tents quickly dropped to match the ambient temperature outside as soon as the life-giving stove burned out. But before long Marina’s husband had coaxed the stove back to life and I could contemplate emerging from my sleeping bag and getting layered up, ready to step outside. It felt warmer again, but it was hard to tell if this was a real change in external conditions or if I was acclimatising to my new environment. Certainly, I was now out and about in –20 degrees, thinking how pleasantly mild it was, very different from my initial reaction to the same temperature when I had stepped off the plane in Yakutsk. But the Evenki were walking around in far fewer layers than their recently acquired and rather less self-sufficient companion. Many of the snowmobile drivers on the journey to the camp had kept their heads covered with reindeer hoods but their faces had been bare the entire way.

Cold adaptation in humans is a tricky subject. It’s very difficult to be sure if what you’re looking at in terms of anatomy is an adaptation to, rather than a consequence of, an environment. Short stature and limbs certainly make sense in a cold climate as this reduces the surface area to volume ratio, making it easier to keep body warmth in. But short stature may also be the result of cold stress as the body is growing, in other words, a by-product of cold rather than an adaptation to it. Short limbs, though, may be a true anatomical-physiological adaptation to low environmental temperatures: something which is inherited rather than acquired as a child grows.

In the 1960s the anthropologist Carlton Coon and others proposed that facial characteristics such as narrowed eyes, epicanthic folds, small noses and broad, flat faces – i.e. East Asian, or what were then described as ‘Mongoloid’ features – were specific cold adaptations, protecting the eyes and creating fewer projecting ‘corners’ to get cold. But at the other end of the landmass, large noses are put forward as cold adaptations in Neanderthals and modern Europeans, designed to warm icy air before it’s drawn into the lungs. And if East Asian features are cold adaptations, why haven’t northern Europeans ended up looking the same? The theory starts to look decidedly shaky.

It seems unlikely to me that the environment could have been such a powerful sculptor of our bodies and faces when a fundamental characteristic of modern humans is the use of culture to buffer ourselves from such pressures. Being able to sew fur together to create protection from the elements would have been essential for the initial colonisation of northern Siberia, as it clearly still was for day-to-day survival in this extreme environment. Looking at the poor little girl who had ridden in on a sledge the same night as me, with an enormous chilblain blister on her right cheek, it was also clear that the Evenki were not immune from the cold. And, beyond intuition and anecdote, various researchers have presented anatomical and physiological evidence to show that East Asian faces cannot be the result of cold adaptation. Steegman published a series of papers along these lines in the sixties and seventies, including a report of a physiological study where he had compared the surface temperature of the face in Japanese and European people, at zero degrees, and found absolutely no difference in the thermal responses;¹⁰ indeed, he wrote, ‘If anything, the thin and hawk-like visage of the European is better protected from cold than that of the Asiatic.’ Evolutionary biologist Brian Shea¹¹ looked at the facial anatomy of Eskimos; he suggested that the internal architecture of the nose and sinuses might show some evidence of cold adaptation, but concluded that there was nothing to support the general idea of Asian faces being ‘cold-engineered’.

Having eliminated cold adaptation, we are still left with the question of why (or indeed where and when) typically East Asian features arose. I will return to these questions later in this chapter, with the fossil and genetic evidence that I explored in China.

Staying with cold adaptation for a minute, though, there does seem to be some interesting recent research suggesting that there may be some adaptive changes in northern populations – not in faces, but deep inside cells. There are very few examples of definite Darwinian or genetic adaptations among modern humans. Sickle cell anaemia and Stephen Oppenheimer’s thalassaemia in South-East Asian populations are rare examples, and the links in the chain are understood: the gene(s) responsible, the effect on phenotype (the observable characteristics: in these examples, the effect on blood), and the way in which a mutation confers its selective advantage (protection against malaria infection in these cases).

The boosting of thyroid hormones and metabolic rate discussed earlier is a short-term, physiological mechanism that allows the body to effectively turn excess food into heat, not an example of a Darwinian adaptation to cold. The proposed genetic adaptation to the cold is related to the efficiency of mitochondria. In these minute ‘power stations’, of which there are thousands per cell, dietary calories are transformed into a package of energy that can be used by the cell (adenosine triphosphate, or ATP). Mitochondrial DNA contains the genes coding for just thirteen proteins, all of which are employed in energy production. Doug Wallace of the University of California, aficionado of all things mitochondrial, has studied how genetic mutations in mtDNA could alter the efficiency of mitochondria. A less efficient system produces less ATP per calorie, and loses energy as heat. So here comes the adaptation: Wallace argues that, in the tropics, mitochondria tend to be very efficient and generate little heat, whereas, in the Arctic, mutations make the mitochondria less efficient, and they produce heat.¹²

So while I was relying on chemical reactions inside bags of hand-warmer granules to keep my fingers going, it seems that the Evenki may have been benefiting from their own internal heat generation. And the short-term physiological response stimulated by the Evenki’s meaty diet would have further amplified that effect: thyroid hormones mainly work on mitochondria. Native Siberians have higher metabolic rates than non-natives on a similar diet. Even if I’d eschewed my vegetarianism and eaten reindeer meat, I still wouldn’t have been able to compete in the production of metabolic warmth.

It does seem that modern humans are the only hominins to have colonised the Arctic and subarctic regions of the far north. This feat of survival may have depended on a whole range of adaptations, biological, behavioural and cultural, which together made it possible for humans to flourish in Siberia, and heat-generating mitochondria may be among those adaptations. But one other adaptation seems even more important: it was reindeer hunting, providing a meat-rich diet and fur for cold-weather clothing, that paved the way for colonisation of the north.

Back to the Evenki, and the camp was getting busy as the brigade prepared to move house. It was remarkable how quickly a chum could be taken apart and packed up ready to be moved off on reindeer-drawn sledges. Once the stove had been dismantled and taken away, it was time to start on the tent itself. I helped to untie the leather strips holding the reindeer-hide covering on to the larch skeleton of the chum. Tricky little knots involved removing my gloves to work with bare fingers for a few minutes each time before the cold got to my fingertips and I had to plunge them back into my mitts to recover. Nevertheless, the hides came off quickly and we then folded them up and tied them on to sledges. Then the tepee-like framework of larch poles was taken apart. All the poles were simply resting together, apart from the final three, which were tied at the top to create a tripod, which gave the chum its strength. These were toppled and separated, and then all that was left was the floor of larch branches. It was interesting to reflect that there would be no archaeological trace of this temporary dwelling.

The twenty-foot larch poles were tied up and attached to the back of sledges, and we were ready to set off: a caravan of reindeer sledges moving through a snowy landscape. The female leaders of the herd had been lassoed and came with us on the caravan, and as I looked back along the snowy valley my eyes met an extraordinary sight. The entire herd was following us, surging like a great wave through the woods. You could hardly separate individuals: it was like a flood of fur, hooves and antlers, flowing down the valley behind us. And this, of course, was the whole point of the nomadic lifestyle of the Evenki: their reindeer needed to migrate, to move on to fresh pastures, however strange it may have seemed to think of the lichen buried beneath the snow as ‘pasture’. But as soon as we stopped the herd was busy digging down through the snow with hooves to get at their food. Piers said it was difficult to work out who was leading whom. The reindeer herd periodically felt the urge to migrate; their human companions needed to anticipate this and direct their movement accordingly

At a new site we dug out a circle of snow with wooden spades, and the air was full of the smell of freshly cut larch as small trees were brought over and stripped of their branches to create a floor for the chum. The three foundation poles went up first, and then more poles laid up against them, about twenty in all. Then we unfolded the hides and tied them in place. Reindeer skins were spread on the larch branches inside. Just ten minutes later, we had something that looked like home.

But having nomadised with the Evenki, it was time to continue my own migration. The temperature was dropping by the day and Vasily advised us to travel out that afternoon, so Piers, Anatoly and I packed up and readied ourselves for the snowmobile caravan again. This time, in daylight, it was much warmer than the trip out (this was relative by now: it was still less than –20 degrees), and I even risked going without goggles. Riding, facing backwards, on the sledge, I waved to the Evenki children as we left the camp, and had one last view of the reindeer herd among the trees, and then we were off into the woods and snow. The landscape was beautiful: we rode for a long time in a valley alongside pink cliffs, and I saw rolling snow-clad hills stretching off into the distance. Eventually, the windows of Olenek came into view, shining out in the distance like a cluster of beacons, reflecting the orange light of the setting sun.

Before flying out, I spent one more night in the village, at Marina Stepanova’s once again. And just before I left the following morning, the other Marina, head of the reindeer herders, who had travelled back with us, sniffed both my cheeks and gave me the reindeer boots as a gift.

The Riddle of Peking Man: Beijing, China

Having explored the genetic and archaeological evidence for the peopling of North Asia, and having experienced the deathly chill of the taiga for myself, it was time for a change of tack, to track down the first modern human East Asians. But in the Orient, I was going to be walking into one of the biggest controversies in palaeoanthropology, because the prevailing theory in China is that the modern Chinese are descended from Homo erectus in China. Chinese palaeoanthropologists claim that the available evidence supports regional continuity: an unbroken line of descent from the archaic humans that made it to East Asia over a million years ago, and they even claim that the features so characteristic of modern Chinese faces are already there in ancient Chinese Homo erectus fossils. This stands in direct opposition to the more widely accepted theory of a recent African origin for all anatomically modern humans, across the globe. Social scientist Barry Sautman has argued that the Chinese state has used palaeoanthropology in this way to support racial nationalism and foster a sense of ‘Chineseness’.¹

I left Russia, flying from Yakutsk to the severe, grey, end-of-the-world airport at Vladivostock, and on to Beijing. Once again I was meeting two great figures from the world of palaeoanthropology: one in the present and one from the deep past. I was to become acquainted with Professor Xingzhi Wu and Peking Man.

The argument over Peking Man and the ancestry of the Chinese people has a long history, and progress in the debate has been stymied by a lack of open scientific communication between East and West, the language barrier further cemented by political tensions. Anthropologists from the West have had limited access to both specimens and ideas from China.² But things are changing. There are now British and Canadian researchers working away on Chinese dinosaurs in the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, and Chinese researchers are publishing more and more in international journals.

I met Professor Wu at Zhoukoudian, the place where the Peking Man fossils had been found. It felt as if I’d come on some sort of pilgrimage to one of the ancient places. Zhoukoudian is about 50km south-west of Beijing, in a landscape dominated by limestone massifs riddled with fissures and caves. In 1921, a Swedish geologist called John Gunnar Andersson was visiting Zhoukoudian, and a local resident took him to a cave that was reputed to be full of ‘dragon bones’. He realised that the bones of the mythical creatures were in fact fossils, and, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, extensive excavations were undertaken at the site by an international team of scientists. Ancient human teeth, and then parts of skulls, started to emerge from the ground, and the hominin was christened Sinanthropus pekinensis. The fossils have since been reclassified as Homo erectus, and the finds from Zhoukoudian represent the largest sample of specimens of this species from a single locality.

Professor Wu led me through a tunnel-like cave into a deep, steep-sided pit on the side of Dragon-Bone Hill. I was amazed to find out that this pit, which was around 40m in depth, had been entirely dug out as an archaeological excavation. It must have been a mammoth undertaking. What was originally a cave in the side of the hill had filled up with sediments, and the roof had fallen in. As the archaeologists had dug down and down, they had found layers full of limestone blocks, fossils and stone tools. The first skull of Peking Man was found in layer 11, in sediments 20m below the surface.

The skulls of what was then called Sinanthropus pekinensis (literally ‘Peking China-Man’, or, as it was to become known, Peking Man) were studied by the German anatomist Franz Weidenreich, who proposed that they represented ancestors of modern Chinese. To him, the ancient skulls possessed features that linked them with modern populations. Weidenreich took the fragments that had been recovered in the dig at Zhoukoudian, and, with his assistant Lucille Swan, made a reconstruction of an entire skull, which was to become the icon of the newly discovered species.³ The idea that Chinese people had a lineage stretching back a million years, in China, led Chinese archaeologist Lin Yan to proclaim that the Chinese are ‘the earth’s most ancient original inhabitants’.¹

Wu and I walked up, out of the pit of Locality 1, and up on to the north-east slope of Dragon-Bone Hill, where we could look down into the excavated Upper Cave, Shandingdong. In the 1930s, excavations in this area had yielded three well-preserved skulls of modern humans, as well as perforated animal teeth, pebbles and shells. The Upper Cave skulls were also examined and described by Weidenreich.

Then, in late June 1937, Chinese and Japanese troops clashed in the town of Wanping, about thirty miles from Beijing, in what was to become known as the ‘Marco Polo Bridge Incident’, and effectively the beginning of the Second World War in the East. By the end of July, Beijing had fallen to the Japanese. Excavations at Zhoukoudian ceased, and the precious Peking Man fossils were packed up into crates to be sent for safe-keeping to America. But they never made it. The tragic loss of the Peking Man fossils is one of the great mysteries of palaeoanthropology. There are all sorts of stories about where the fossils may now reside (if indeed they still exist). Suggestions include the fossils having been removed to a museum in Taiwan, sent to the Crimea on a Russian ship, or having been kept in a hospital in Beijing.⁴ So, when I said I was to meet Peking Man, I was actually going to see casts of the original fossils.

Professor Wu and I returned to Beijing, to the IVPP, where the casts of Peking Man and the Upper Cave skulls are kept. We entered a room where one wall was lined with lockers from floor to ceiling. A table covered in a deep red cloth stood in the centre of the room. But then we both had to leave the room and stand in the corridor while a security officer removed the specimens from the lockers.

‘I am not allowed to see the drawers out of which the skulls come. I will stand back and wait here.’ The location of the specimens was kept secret even from Professor Wu, such was the nature of this magnificently elaborate security system.

‘He keeps the key so that nobody knows the number,’ said Professor Wu.

‘So you don’t know the number?’

‘No. I don’t want to know. If I know, and if it is lost, then I have the responsibility. But now I don’t know anything. I have no responsibility,’ Wu smiled.

While we were waiting out in the corridor, I asked Professor Wu how he had become interested in palaeoanthropology. It turned out that he had qualified as a medical doctor, but that, at the time, China had needed more medical teachers, so he was instructed to become a lecturer in anatomy. Anatomy and palaeoanthropology have always been closely allied professions, and so when excavations restarted at Zhoukoudian in the 1950s, Wu naturally became involved.

He asked me about my background, and I was really pleased to be able to tell him that I too had trained as a medical doctor, then became a lecturer in anatomy, and developed an interest in palaeoanthropology. I felt like an apprentice in the presence of a grand master. At the age of eighty, Professor Wu was still coming to work every day (on his bike) at the IVPP.

Once the specimens were out of the lockers, we could re-enter the room. Six or seven of them now sat, neatly lined up, on the table. There were some modern human skulls, and casts of Homo erectus. I recognised the cast of the original Weidenreich/Swan reconstruction but I had also read about a newer reconstruction put together by Ian Tattersall and Gary Sawyer from the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and Professor Wu had arranged for this to be taken out as well. There were also two thick fragments from the top of a skull.

‘These are original fossils of Peking Man,’ he said. I was taken aback. I knew the story of the missing crates of fossils in the Second World War, and I had not expected to see any actual fossils, just casts.

‘I honestly thought all the specimens had been lost,’ I said.

‘After the war, in the 1950s, we carried out some new excavations, and we got some new specimens,’ explained Wu.

So I was holding in my hands fragments of a skull of an earlier human who had lived in China some one million years ago. It was quite a strange moment: there was something about the physicality of holding something I knew to be truly ancient. The vast depths of time through which these fossilised bones had passed, and then to end up in the present as some sort of magical talisman that could give us the power to know the past, made me feel almost giddy. A great range of dating techniques has been used to pin down the dates of the layers at Zhoukoudian. Most suggest that the hominin fossils come from layers dating to between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago. But the latest uranium series dates suggest that the fossils may be more than 400,000 years old, and perhaps as much as 800,000 years.^{5, 6} I laid the fragments back down on the red cloth. This was Chinese erectus, the real thing, with its massive brow and sloping forehead.

Having got over the shock of seeing Peking Man, I turned my attention to the reconstructed casts – and the face of Chinese Homo erectus. The Weidenreich/Swan and Tattersall/Sawyer reconstructions were quite different looking. Professor Ian Tattersall had wanted to make a new reconstruction using more fragments from the face than had been used in the Weidenreich model. This had been possible, because, although the majority of original fossil fragments had been lost, casts had survived – and there were fragments of twelve separate skulls to work from. The original reconstruction had been based on just three pieces of skull: the skullcap, part of the right side of the mandible and a fragment of the left maxilla (the bone that bears the upper teeth and forms much of the cheek), and photographs and casts of this reconstruction didn’t make it obvious which parts were real and which were ‘restored’. Tattersall and Sawyer had wanted to keep artistic licence to a minimum, by using as many fragments of facial bones as possible in their reconstruction.³

Professor Wu held up the Weidenreich/ Swan reconstruction and started to point out the features that he thought to be evidence for regional continuity. He indicated the flatness of the bridge of the nose, and the shape of the edges of the cheekbones. Then he pointed to these features on his own face and mine: it was true that he had a much less pronounced bridge of the nose than I had, and much wider, flatter cheekbones. But I couldn’t really see any similarity between Professor Wu’s face and that of Peking Man, even though it seemed that the Weidenreich/Swan reconstruction had somehow accentuated these Chinese-looking features. On the Tattersall/Sawyer skull, the nasal bones were more prominent, the face taller and narrower across the cheekbones, and the jaw more protruding. In general, this reconstruction looked less ‘Chinese’ and more like other erectus specimens around the world.³

The shape of the front teeth was another feature that Wu considered as evidence of regional continuity. Weidenreich had proposed that shovel-shaped incisors were a regional trait shared by Chinese Homo erectus and many modern Chinese. But this tooth shape is also seen in African erectus and in Neanderthals, so, while it may be an archaic trait, it is not specifically East Asian. And the shovel shape seen in the teeth of some living Chinese people seems to be developmentally different from the shovelling of the archaic teeth, even though it looks superficially similar – in which case it can’t be used to argue for a connection at all.⁷

Then we looked at the modern human specimens, including casts of two of the Upper Cave skulls. Their dates haven’t really been pinned down, and range between 10,000 and 30,000 years old, based on radiocarbon dating of animal bones in the same layer. Some archaeologists argue that the Upper Cave skulls might be burials that have been moved around by animals, and so seem older than they should be – preferring the lower estimate of around 10,000 years old.

‘There are many common features among them,’ said Wu, indicating the Upper Cave skulls and the Peking Man reconstruction. ‘I think it is most probable that the Upper Cave man are the descendants of Homo erectus man.’

To me, the Upper Cave skulls looked undeniably modern, but they didn’t really look East Asian. Neither had the characteristic flattened nasal bones or tilted-out cheekbones. In fact they both looked quite similar to European modern humans: Cro-Magnon man. And the Peking Man skull looked completely different.

Professor Wu had failed to convince me, by showing me the skulls, that there was any evidence here for regional continuity in China. But it’s not that easy. It was clear to me that interpretation of the characteristics of these skulls could be very subjective. Professor Wu, who had spent a lifetime studying these skulls, was utterly convinced by the features, which seemed so obvious to him.

Chris Stringer, a prodigious analyser of skulls, has tackled the problem of quantifying differences and similarities between archaic and modern skulls. Rather than describing and counting up ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ features in skulls, he prefers to take measurements and objectively compare differences in skull shape in that way. The regional continuity model as put forward by Weidenreich proposes not only that Homo erectus in China is a direct ancestor of modern humans, but also that later archaic fossils represent an intermediate or ‘Neanderthal’ stage between erectus and sapiens. Specimens that seem to fit into Weidenreich’s ‘in-betweener’ stage of human evolution in China include fossil skulls from Maba and Dali.² The Maba cranium was discovered in 1958 in Guandong Province in southern China, while the Dali cranium was found in 1978, in Shaanxi Province. Uranium series dating of a cow tooth from the site gave a date of around 200,000 years ago for Dali, but it’s not clear how close the tooth was to the skull, so this date should be treated with some caution.⁵ Maba has been reported to be around 150,000 years old.

Stringer included the Maba and Dali skulls in a study where he took skull measurements from a range of archaic and modern skulls from Africa, Europe and East Asia, and then mathematically compared the ‘shape distance’ between skulls to show how closely related they might be. He also looked at the three anatomically modern skulls from the Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian. The results showed that the archaic African skulls were the ‘best shape ancestors’ for modern human skulls, including those from East Asia, and that the Dali and Maba skulls were very different from modern skulls, and so were not convincing ‘in-betweeners’.⁸ It seems they might represent East Asian populations of Homo heidelbergensis, or even Neanderthals, that were later replaced when modern humans arrived.⁹

It is clear that analysing skull shape is a very complicated business. Anatomical features don’t just vary from one population (or species) to another: they also vary within populations. Just to make things even more complicated, the variation within populations is often greater than that between them.^{2, 7} If you’re looking for differences between groups, you have to pick your features carefully. Another major problem is that we don’t yet understand how different anatomical features of the skull are connected or related to each other. Such connections could really skew the data one way or the other, whether we are just ‘counting up’ features or indeed taking measurements and trying to do something a bit more objective, as in Stringer’s analyses.

These connections are a bit difficult to get your head around (again, forgive the pun), but just imagine that, for instance, eating a really crunchy diet from a young age could produce widespread effects on your skull. For the sake of argument, let’s say it would make the corners of your mandible more pronounced, give you a stronger browridge to resist the powerful forces of the chewing muscles, and maybe even affect the whole shape of your skull. (This isn’t entirely hypothetical: there’s good evidence to suggest that a switch to softer diets in the last thousand years is linked to smaller face size.¹⁰) Now, if I compared your skull with that of someone who ate much softer food, there would be several features that looked different, all of them linked to diet. If I compared your skull to an ancient fossil, from an early human who also ate hard food, then you might look more like them than your soup-drinking counterpart would. I could count up the features and find at least three where your skull was similar to the fossil, but this wouldn’t mean that you were closely related, just that you ate a similarly tough diet.⁷

As well as acquired characteristics which may be linked by some aspect of function, there are likely to be genetic connections between various skull features. There’s no way that each tiny feature of your skull is neatly controlled by a separate gene; one gene might affect a whole suite of features in different parts of your head. So again, just counting differences between skulls isn’t going to give you a real idea of how closely, genetically related two populations or species are.

The genetics of morphology is hugely complicated, and an area with which researchers are really only just starting to get to grips. Genes don’t operate independently; they work as a team, with proteins sticking their oar in as well. Geneticists can look at whole genomes now, but it is like having a book in a foreign language (in this case, spelt ‘AGTCTGTTAATCCGG’ etc …), where we are only just beginning to understand what a few of the words mean. Some of them are about chemistry inside cells, but others dictate anatomy. Somehow, those gene-words create a conversation telling one fertilised cell to multiply and change and multiply and change until an adult human being is produced. Picking apart the complex tapestry of development, and finding out which genes are responsible for each motif, is a hugely exciting area of research in the twenty-first century.

As many features of skull shape may be tied together by function or by genes, it means that huge, inclusive lists of features linking modern and archaic skulls (or not) are misconceived. It explains how it’s possible for such long-list-making studies to have been used on both sides of the argument, both for and against the regional continuity. This doesn’t mean we should give up on using morphology to help work out our evolutionary past, but we do have to be careful about how we go about it. And at the moment, while we’re still finding out how morphological features are related through function and genetics, all we can do is try not to use sets of features that seem to have a tendency to occur together.²

Of course, while the relationship between genes, function and morphology is still being elucidated, the genes of living people offer us another powerful tool for reconstructing human lineages and migrations. I asked Professor Wu what he thought about genetic studies that suggested all modern humans had a recent African origin. He was quite sceptical about the potential for building evolutionary trees based on genes, and especially about the power of genetic studies to predict dates of divergence of lineages. ‘Different genetic studies even disagree on the age of the last common ancestor,’ he said. ‘Putting a date on it using the molecular clock assumes a constant mutation rate, which we can’t be sure about.’

It’s true that different genetic studies have produced different predictions of age of a last common ancestor – but most agree that the date lies between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.¹¹

It was clear that Professor Wu had much more faith in what he considered to be the hard – fossil – evidence, and he was absolutely sure that the fossils pointed to regional continuity. For him, as for Alan Thorne, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens were not even separate species, but subspecies. Wu preferred the labels Homo sapiens erectus and Homo sapiens sapiens. He argued that one form had gradually changed into the other over time, without speciation, and that the unity of the species across the world was maintained through gene flow between populations. Wu himself had proposed this theory, of ‘continuity with hybridisation’.

But there does seem to be a significant temporal gap between archaic and modern human fossils in China. The most recent archaic fossils, from Xujiayo, date to around 100,000–125,000 years ago. The oldest well-dated modern human remains in China, including a mandible and limb bones, were discovered in Tianyuan Cave, about 6km away from the main site at Zhoukoudian. AMS radiocarbon dating placed these fossils at 39,000–42,000 years old.¹² The next oldest modern human remains in the Far East are some leg bones from Yamashita-cho, Okinawa, dated to around 32,000 radiocarbon thousand years old (about 37,000 calendar years), and the Upper Cave skulls, at around 10,000 to (at a push) 30,000 years old. And, on balance, it seems that most investigators believe that the gap between archaic and modern Chinese fossils is not only temporal, but also morphological and genetic. Having seen the fossils and casts of Peking Man, I was not at all convinced that I had seen the ancestors of the Chinese.

But there was something else in China that Wu believed supported his theory of regional continuity: stone tools. And here, I had to admit, he had a point. In Europe, the arrival of modern humans on the scene was marked by a clearly new ‘archaeological signature’, a sudden change in stone tool technology, with the appearance of the Upper Palaeolithic.

In the East, modern humans seem to have been around for a long time before a distinct toolkit appears.

An Archaeological Puzzle: Zhujiatun, China

From around 1,000,000 to 30,000 years ago, the stone tools of East Asia are predominantly fairly crude, Oldowan-style pebble and flake tools. The archaeology of this part of the world is particularly strange, when viewed from a European perspective. The Acheulean, with its classic hand axes, doesn’t really happen, and neither does the Middle Palaeolithic.^{1, 2} People just seem to carry on using really basic pebble tools that even Neanderthals would have considered crude. In 1955, this moved American archaeologist Hallam Movius deprecatingly to call the East ‘a marginal area of cultural retardation’.³

It’s not until 30,000 years ago, in the late Upper Pleistocene, that the Upper Palaeolithic appears in China, with more sophisticated tools like end-scrapers, burins, blades and microblades, as well as tools made from bone and antler. But that transition happened some 20,000 to 30,000 years after genetic estimates for the arrival of modern humans in East Asia, and a good 10,000 years after the first fossil evidence of modern humans in China.⁴ Before then, the tools the modern humans were making were no different from the tools made by earlier archaic humans in the East. It was this persistence of pebble tools – the so-called ‘chopper-chopping’ technology – that Wu interpreted as archaeological evidence for regional continuity. If all we had to look at were the stone tools, then regional continuity does seem like a reasonable explanation.

But if the balance of evidence favours a recent African origin for modern humans, and if we take those dates from the genetic and fossil record, suggesting a colonisation of South-East and East Asia by (presumably ingenious and adaptable) modern humans between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago, then why were they putting so little thought into their tools? Were they really culturally retarded, or had Movius missed the real technology of Palaeolithic East Asia?

Palaeolithic archaeology is a difficult area just because so little is left behind. As I had seen in Siberia, it was possible to erect a comfortable home, live in it, then move on without leaving any clue for future archaeologists to uncover. Archaeological clues in prehistory are rare and precious. As for tools, anything made out of something we would now consider as biodegradable – wood, other plant materials, animal skin – is by its very nature going to disappear from the archaeological record.

Some archaeologists believe that the riddle of stone tools in East Asia could be explained by something that is both biodegradable and ubiquitous in the region. I met up with Australian archaeologist Jo Kamminga and we made our way to the small village of Zhujiatun in southern China, to find out more about this theory.

Jo had armed himself with a selection of typical pebble and flake tools. I had a look at one of them.

‘This is a fairly crude tool,’ I observed.

‘Well, this is what we find in China, and South-East Asia, and in Australia as well. It’s not beautifully shaped, but it’s incredibly sharp,’ said Jo.

‘But at the end of the Palaeolithic in Europe, people are making really sophisticated stone tools – so what’s going on here?’

‘Well, we’re in a different world here. Firstly, you don’t have the big cobbles of flint that are found in the chalk and limestone areas of Europe. The chert here comes in smaller nodules, and the material is not so nice to work. You can’t make those fine points. But the most important thing is that we have a different climate and vegetation here. You have a different range of raw materials available: not only stone, but also bamboo. It’s a very resilient material and it can be used to make the sorts of things you might be using stone for in other places.’

So perhaps those most basic of pebble tools are just enough to make more sophisticated tools out of plant material, and, perhaps, out of that most prolific subfamily of grasses in East Asia: bamboo. Bamboo is used so widely in the East today that it is easy to imagine it would have been seized upon by the first colonisers. But there would be no trace of it left in the ground, only that of the stone tools which had been used to shape it. Although Movius had concentrated on pebbles from which flakes had been struck, leaving a sharp edge on a heavy tool, perhaps he had missed the point. Certainly, the flaked pebble could be used as a crude ‘chopper’, but the ‘waste flakes’ also had useful cutting edges.

‘Why would you go to all that trouble of making a sophisticated stone tool,’ asked Jo, rhetorically, ‘when you can just take a piece of bamboo, use that as a knife – and throw it away when you’ve finished? Because it’s everywhere.’

He was right. Zhujiatun was surrounded by bamboo forest. From a distance, the hillsides looked feathery: the wind blew through the bamboo leaves as through a field of corn. Jo and I were going to try a bit of experimental archaeology. We used a large, very crudely sharpened cobble to bash at the base of a bamboo trunk. The bamboo was thick, about 15cm in diameter, and I prepared for some hard physical work to fell it. But after just a few minutes of bashing, the bamboo fell. With a little twisting, it ripped away from its base, and we had the raw material we needed to try making some ‘Palaeolithic’ bamboo tools.

We took our length of bamboo down to the village, where this material was still being used to make all manner of things. There were piles of long, thick bamboo trunks lying around, ready for construction. We were invited into a house in which there were piles of bamboo baskets stacked up, and an old man was in the process of weaving one out of long, bendy strips of bamboo epithelium, or ‘bark’. In the yard, small ducklings had nestled together under a bamboo cage.

Jo and I set to work on our bamboo tools. Using very basic, unretouched stone flakes, we pared down slivers of bamboo and quickly made sharp-edged ‘knives’. I was surprised at how quick and easy the process was, though sceptical about just how sharp and strong my bamboo knife would prove to be. The family had a chicken carcass ready for supper, and, using my brand new bamboo knife, I made short work of butchering it, separating drumsticks, wings and breasts from the carcass (I may be a vegetarian but I’m also an anatomist). The use of bamboo knives has been documented right across the Pacific. Ethnographic studies have also shown that bamboo may even be used in preference to stone tools: the stone-adze-makers of Irian Jaya in New Guinea, for example, like to use a simple piece of split bamboo for butchering.⁵ And although my green bamboo knife had done the job well, Jo said it would have been even sharper had it been dried bamboo.

It was clear that bamboo could be used to make excellent cutting tools as well as being suitable for houses, baskets – and even, as I had already seen, rafts. It was a wonderfully versatile material. (You could eat it, too. Bamboo became one of my favourite dishes on my visit to China, not as the more familiar, delicate white bamboo shoots, but as inch-long pieces of thick shoots, rather like asparagus but crunchier – and delicious.) However, the fact that bamboo could be used to make efficient tools isn’t proof that it was used. Neither is the fact that bamboo is still being used in some places to make tools.

So was there any archaeological evidence of bamboo tools?

‘Well, no, not of the bamboo itself,’ admitted Jo. ‘But there is evidence of bamboo being worked – as well as other materials like rattan and palm wood – because there’s a high silica content in these materials. Using a stone tool on bamboo leaves a very distinctive polish on that tool.’

This polish could be seen with the naked eye; Jo had brought along with him some stone flakes that he had used to cut bamboo, and I could see the polishing quite clearly, next to the cutting edge.

‘How long does it take for this type of polish to develop?’ I asked him.

‘It starts to form immediately,’ he replied. ‘You can see the polish appearing within the first few minutes of cutting bamboo or rattan.’

Employing microscopic use-wear analysis, it was actually possible to find out exactly what had been cut: different materials leave different tell-tale marks on stone tools.⁶ Under a light or electron microscope, minute abrasions and polishing on tool edges provide clues that allow the material that was cut to be identified. This means that archaeologists should be able to tell if stone tools have been used to cut into bamboo, or rattan, or other materials. It may also be possible to find evidence of bamboo tool use as well. A study of experimentally produced cut marks on bone showed that it was possible to tell the difference between cuts made with bamboo knives or stone flakes, using scanning electron microscopy, which produces a very detailed, 3D image.³

Jo had found examples of polish from cutting rattan on archaeological stone tools from a rockshelter in Timor. But those tools had been only a few thousand years old.

‘What I’d really like to do is look at the very early, Chinese stone tools,’ said Jo.

As more Asian Palaeolithic sites are discovered, it is clear that the toolkits are more variable than was apparent to Movius in the 1940s, when he drew a simple distinction between Acheulean hand axes in the West and chopper-chopping tools in the East. His scheme also lifted the tools out of their environmental context: it didn’t take into account what the tools may have been used for, or the raw materials that were available to the toolmakers. Archaeologists now caution against ranking various toolkits in terms of how sophisticated the tools may appear, and also argue that Palaeolithic toolkits are generally more diverse than previously thought, reflecting intelligent adaptations to a variety of environments.⁵

However, even with new discoveries and the emerging impression of a wider variety of stone tools in East Asia, there is still a clear distinction between the tools of East and West. Bamboo technology provides a tempting explanation for that difference. Bamboo was everywhere, whereas it may have been difficult to find sources of good quality, workable stone in the rainforest. Modern rainforest-based hunter-gatherers are mostly vegetarian and occasionally eat small animals – which would have been easily butchered with bamboo knives, just as I had managed to prepare the chicken in the village. Heavy-duty butchery tools would have been redundant in the rainforest.³ I had seen how quick and easy it was to make a good, sharp bamboo knife, using just a simple stone flake. Bamboo technology seemed as if it would have been a sensible, expedient adaptation to rainforest environments.

Although bamboo itself may be missing from the archaeological record, microscopic use-wear analysis of stone tools and examination of cut marks on bones now provides archaeologists with an opportunity to test this theory. It may not be long before we know for sure whether bamboo use really can explain the simplicity of stone tools in East Asia.

However, we are still left with a problem: there is no clear difference between the archaeology associated with archaic humans and early modern humans in East Asia. Surely we should find some kind of ‘signal of modernity’ as soon as modern humans arrive on the scene? Shouldn’t modern humans carry with them some badge of superior intelligence, a mark of technological sophistication that has been lacking from previous human incarnations?

But are we once again falling into the trap of divorcing stone tools from their environmental context? We should not even start to think about a tool assemblage without first firmly placing our toolmakers in their environment. The suggested bamboo explanation for the basic stone tools of East Asia could work for archaic human populations just as it does for modern ones: an intelligent solution to tool-making in a rainforest environment, where bamboo abounds.

So why do the tools change at around 30,000 years? If it’s not a different toolmaker, what is it? What is changing at that time? The answer is: climate. And at 30,000 years ago, East Asia was starting to feel the cold and dryness of the approaching LGM. And now we really do see the signature of modern human behaviour: when the environment changed around them, the modern humans in East Asia adapted, by inventing new technologies.

East Asian Genes to the Rescue: Shanghai, China

I wanted to find out just what Chinese genes revealed about regional continuity versus a recent African origin. And I wanted to speak to a Chinese geneticist.

It was time to leave Beijing and move on to China’s commercial capital, Shanghai. Beijing had seemed grey and somehow very stolid. It felt like a place where dogma would have very deep foundations. On first impressions alone, Shanghai felt more progressive, cosmopolitan and open. The centre of the city was an architectural palimpsest, with pre-war art deco hotels standing next to concrete high-rises, with ugly flyovers and an elegant museum shaped like an ancient bronze cauldron. On the main streets, international brands jostled for room alongside homegrown shops, and gigantic screens mounted high on buildings displayed streams of advertisements. There was even a huge screen being carried up and down the Huangpu River on a boat. From the Bund, I watched the Pudong district lighting up at dusk, as though it was, itself, a huge advertisement for commercialism and capitalism. China was changing.

I drove out to Fudan University, to the Institute of Genetics, to meet Professor Jin Li. He showed me around labs where teams of enthusiastic post-doctoral researchers were busy with pipettes and centrifuges. It was out of these labs, some seven years earlier, that compelling genetic evidence about the origin of the Chinese people had emerged.

Li’s research group had undertaken a massive project designed to test the competing hypotheses about the origins of East Asians.

‘I wanted to see if I could find evidence for regional continuity in the genes of Chinese,’ he explained. ‘I decided to look at the Y chromosome, and I started off using a marker of recent African origin, which would allow me to filter out those individuals and leave me with other lineages that may have survived locally through regional continuity. We took thousands of DNA samples from people all over China.’

So Li had started off wanting to prove the patriotic theory that the modern Chinese had a heritage in China which stretched back, unbroken, to Homo erectus, a million years ago. The genetic marker he had used was a mutation at a site on the Y chromosome called M168, a swap of a cytosine base to thymine, which previous studies had suggested was present in all non-African populations. But previous studies had taken only limited samples from Asia. Li’s group had collected DNA samples from more than 12,000 men from South-East Asia, Oceania, East Asia, Siberia and Central Asia, with the idea that, somewhere among them, there would be much more ancient, non-African Y chromosomes.¹

‘We knew that the old type of M168 mutated to the new type about 80,000 years ago, in Africa. So if the Out of Africa hypothesis was true, we would expect that everybody in China would be carrying the new type of M186. But if there had been an independent origin of modern humans in China, we should be able to see that at least some people were carrying the old type.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘We did not see any old type in the Chinese population. In fact, we had a very large sample covering almost every corner of East Asia, and everybody was carrying the new type of M168.’

The ubiquity of the M168 mutation in Chinese DNA showed that modern humans emerging from Africa had completely replaced earlier East Asian populations.¹ Peking Man had no descendants alive today.

‘And what did that result mean to you?’ I asked.

‘Well, as a Chinese, of course I wanted to find evidence that we have ancient roots in China. That was my education,’ said Jin. ‘It is what we are all taught. But, as a scientist, I have to accept the evidence. And the evidence showed that the recent Out of Africa hypothesis is right. Regional continuity can’t be true.’

‘Do you think, on balance, that other genetic evidence supports Out of Africa?’ I asked him.

He was categorical in his reply: ‘I would make a stronger statement: it exclusively supports the Out of Africa hypothesis.’

Genetics also offered some insight into how the East had become colonised by modern humans. A greater diversity of Y chromosomes in the south, including among Thais and Cambodians, tells the tale of initial colonisation of South-East Asia, followed by a northwards migration. And the Y chromosome tree suggests a very broad range for the initial date of entry into East Asia, at some time between 25,000 and 60,000 years ago.² Mitochondrial DNA analyses also show greater diversity in the south, and support the main theme of a south-to-north colonisation of the Far East. The four main haplogroups in East Asia (B, M7, F and R) are all about 50,000 years old.³

It is quite extraordinary that, despite the thousands of years since the initial colonisation of the East, and all the population movements that have occurred since then, it is still possible to look into the genes of living East Asians and find the clues to where they first came from. Like a piece of parchment that has been written over and over, the faint traces of the original story are still there. Analysis of complete mtDNA sequences shows a distinction between northern and southern East Asians, but more than that – a geographic structure can be discerned in the boughs, branches and twigs of the East Asian mtDNA tree.⁴

But as well as the mitochondrial genetic evidence for a general migration from south to north, there are lineages in northern East Asia – particularly C and Z – that are missing in the south. So where have these come from? Stephen Oppenheimer⁵ traces these lineages back to India, to early Asians who had skirted the western end of the Himalayas to reach the Russian Altai and populate Siberia between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, leaving archaeological traces at places like Kara-Bom. The Y chromosome evidence mirrors the mtDNA phylogeography, with the North Asian founder population splitting east and west. Some headed west to Europe, while the eastward-bound colonisers continued following the mammoth steppe all the way into what is now northern China. Some remarkable details emerge from the complicated, over-written palimpsest: among the Ainu of Japan, a mitochondrial haplogroup called Y1 seems to record a specific migration from north-east Siberia into the northern Japanese islands.⁶ And the north-east Asian populations share lineages, like C, with Native Americans – but that is the subject of another chapter entirely.

So it seemed that the East Asians were indeed descendants of the South-East Asian beachcombers, except for a few lineages that had made their way east from Central and northern Asia. Also on the Y chromosome, the M130 marker seems to record a migration along the South-East Asian coast, turning north to Japan, and there are a scattering of archaeological sites in Korea and Japan dating to around 37,000 to 40,000 years ago that may record this wave of colonisation.⁷

I wondered if Jin Li had any thoughts on the origin of East Asian features, and whether genetics could yet shed any light on the development of these specific facial characteristics. Although he thought they may have first arisen in South-East Asians, perhaps around the LGM, he was also sceptical about any association with cold adaptation. Another hypothesis puts the origin and spread of East Asian features down to expansion of Neolithic populations with the advent of rice farming, but that didn’t seem to fit with the suggested timing of the mutations either.

Li Jin wanted to pin down the relationship between genes and facial morphology – something that might help him answer where and how East Asian features arose and spread.

‘We don’t know what features are determined by which genes. We are just starting to try to identify the genes underlying morphological variation, and then we should be able to tell when exactly these features developed as well.’

He was about to embark on what sounded like an extraordinarily ambitious project: to relate genetics to morphology by collecting anthropomorphic data from living people – effectively measuring them up – and using whole genome sequencing to look for genes or patterns of genes that seemed to be associated with particular features.

‘We’re looking at a thousand people, recording their morphological features – and we’re in the process of doing whole genome scanning.’

This was just the sort of research that would start to fill in that vast gap in our understanding, building a bridge between genetics and morphology. And there were already some results …

‘We already know which genes underlie the orientation of hair whorls,’ said Jin grandly, but with a wry smile.

It was clear that Jin Li was hugely excited by the potential of genetics to delve into the deep past and tackle the questions of origins of modern humans and modern Chinese. I was incredibly impressed by his open-mindedness and objectivity: surely the mark of a true scientist. And it was clear that the scientists at Fudan University were operating in a culture of academic freedom. In a country where regional continuity was still a ‘fact’ taught to schoolchildren and endorsed by the state, Li had been able to publish evidence for a recent African origin of East Asians.

We walked out of the Institute of Genetics and across a garden dominated by a large statue of Chairman Mao. It seemed ironic. The poorly proportioned figure had been erected by students and Red Guards in 1966, but he was presiding over a very different cultural revolution now. Academic and individual freedom seemed to be winning back some ground.

Pottery and Rice: Guilin and Long Ji, China

Throughout prehistory, human populations have contracted and expanded, pushing into new territories and then withdrawing, largely under the influence of climate change. But three major episodes of Stone Age ‘migrations’ or population movements of modern humans can be discerned amid the general oscillations and milling about: the initial spread across and out of Africa, resettlement of great areas of the northern hemisphere after the end of the Ice Age, and the spread of expanding populations after the invention of farming.¹

The ‘Neolithic revolution’ and the origin of agriculture in the East was independent of that in Europe. Just as in the West, the East Asian farmers were more successful than hunter-gatherers at a population level (if not really at the level of the health and longevity of individuals). Higher levels of food production supported growing populations, and agriculturalists spread out of their homeland, carrying their languages and lifestyles with them. Indeed, some archaeologists have argued that the facial – and dental – characteristics of East Asians are so recent that they reflect that dispersal of a quickly expanding population of rice farmers as the Neolithic got under way in the East.^{2, 3}

It seems that the ‘Neolithic package’ of settlement, farming and pottery didn’t just suddenly spring into existence: the elements we recognise as being characteristic of the Neolithic way of life emerged in a mosaic fashion. In the East, one of the first elements to appear was pottery, pre-dating the development of farming. From the 1960s onwards, it was thought that the earliest pots in the world belonged to the Jomon culture of Japan, dating to nearly 13,000 years ago. But new archaeological evidence suggests that pottery may also have appeared at this time, and independently, in the Russian Far East and in south China.⁴

In the late Pleistocene and early Holocene of south China, between 14,000 and 9,000 years ago, a culture appears which is characterised by grinding stones, shell and bone tools – and the earliest pottery. Some archaeologists have called it ‘Mesolithic’, comparing it with the same period in Europe; others prefer ‘pre-Neolithic’. I visited Guilin, in Guangxi Province, to see the oldest known pot in China.

The landscape around Guilin was quite striking and beautiful. Out of the fertile plains rose huge, wooded, karst outcrops. Some were cone-shaped, others more rounded. Guilin City itself was spread out on the flat ground among the karst hills, and along the Li Jiang (Willow River). I was visiting soon after Qingming (pronounced ‘chingming’), the annual Chinese Festival of the Dead, when tombs are swept clean, inscriptions touched up and new pine trees planted in cemeteries. Qingming literally means ‘clear and bright’. I drove past graveyards with cairn-like tombs adorned with bright strips of red paper – prayers for protection – and in one village a funeral procession was making its way down the road, with a banging of cymbals and drums. The coffin was brightly decorated, topped off with a giant purple moth.

But I was visiting a much older graveyard: the cave site of Zengpiyan in Guilin, where I met the deputy director of the museum, Mr Wei Jun. He opened the iron gate protecting the cave and we stepped inside.

Archaeologists had dug down through river sediments and the trenches were still open. Eighteen burials had been discovered in the cave, mostly in flexed positions, and some covered in red ochre. As well as the human burials, Wei and his colleagues had found pebble tools and animal bones.

‘But the most important discovery was the pottery we found here in 2001,’ said Wei.

‘It happened on the morning of 7 July. I recall it was raining very hard outside. There were about seven or eight archaeologists working inside the cave. Then, suddenly, one of my colleagues came upon a piece of pottery that was a different colour – much paler – than other pottery we’d found.

‘Professor Fu came over and looked at it carefully, and thought it might be very old.’

From the depth at which it was found the archaeologists immediately suspected the pot of being ancient; when it was dated, from fragments of charcoal in the same layer, it turned out to be 12,000 years old.

‘From the radiocarbon dating, we know that these pieces of pottery are the oldest in China.’

These pieces of pottery were also among the oldest in the world. There was no evidence of plant or animal domestication at Guilin: the pots appeared to have been made by hunter-gatherers.⁵

The following day, I met Professor Fu Xianguo, who had directed the excavations at the cave. The earliest Zengpiyan pots were made with local clay, apparently deliberately tempered with quartz particles, and fired low, at less than 250 degrees C. They were thick, wide-mouthed and almost hemispherical in shape. On a sunny day, in a field near Guilin, 12,000 years after pottery was first made there, we recreated a pre-Neolithic pot. Fu’s chief pottery technician, Mr Wang Hao Tian, collected reddish clay, and we mixed it with smashed-up quartz particles. Wang dug a round pit and we pushed pieces of clay into it, to form the hemispherical shape. Then we fired the pot, along with other pots that Wang had been busy making that week, on an open fire. Two brothers, Mr Liu Cheng Jie and Mr Liu Cheng Yi, traditional potters from nearby Jing Xi (pronounced ‘Jing see’) on the Vietnamese border, came to help with the firing. The Liu brothers laid logs across large stones to form a rack on which to place the pots, then pushed burning sheaves of straw under the rack, moving the flaming bundle around with a long stick to sear the pots. After about an hour of this gentle firing, the Lius built up a bonfire over the rack, with piles of straw and branches, and our pots were hidden inside the blaze. Another hour later and the potters started to dismantle the still-smoking fire, hooking the pots out on long sticks and setting them down on the ground, where they made a quiet tinkling noise as they cooled. Most of the pots had survived the firing – including our experimental pre-Neolithic cauldron, now dark grey but still speckled with quartz.

Fu had his own particular theory about why the foragers around Guilin had started to make pottery.

‘In north China, the origin of pottery is thought to be very much related to the development of agriculture,’ explained Fu. ‘But from our study, we think the origin of the pottery in south China is related to boiling snails.’

I was more than a little sceptical about this idea. Certainly, there were plenty of snail shells in Zengpiyan Cave, but there was no real evidence that they had been deposited there by humans, rather than washed in with the river sediments, or even that they had been cooked.

But it was time to subject our pot to a test. Most of the early pots were round-bottomed cooking cauldrons, like the hemispherical pot we had made, and seemed well designed for boiling water. After our pot had cooled, we subjected it to another test: filling it with water and bringing it to the boil over an open fire. It didn’t break. In fact, there’s no evidence that the Guilin pots had been heated again after their initial firing, although our experiment had at least demonstrated that they could survive being heated.

It may be possible to find out what the pre-Neolithic potters of Guilin were putting in their pots, using residue analysis – which can be applied to fragments. Until then, any theories about what the pots were used for, including snail-cooking, must remain speculative. Some archaeologists have argued that the early pre-Neolithic pots were used to cook wild grains, and although there is no direct evidence for this either the pots are from a time when wild grasses start to form a more important part of diets.⁶

During the LGM, East Asia became colder and drier: deciduous trees retreated south of the Yangtze River and vast areas of what is now China became grassland. After the Ice Age, the global climate became warmer and wetter, and there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which may have resulted in grasses becoming up to 50 per cent more productive. It is around this time that the archaeological record shows people in China, as well as in south-west Asia and Europe, beginning to focus on collecting wild grasses.⁷ But then, around 11,000 years ago, there was a cold, dry spell, comparable to the Younger Dryas in Europe. Perhaps it was this deterioration in climate that provoked the foragers to start cultivating grasses – whose seeds could be stored through the winter.^{7, 8}

Although China is now dominated by rice agriculture, millet was just as important to the early cereal growers. Genetic studies of modern cultivated and wild grasses have suggested that domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) may derive from the Asian wild rices O. rufipogon and O. nivara. There are two subspecies of domestic rice which may relate to two, separate centres of origin of rice farming: in East Asia and in South Asia. Foxtail millet (Setaria italica) may come from the wild green foxtail (S. viridis), while broomcorn millet may come from a wild grass of the same name: Panicum miliaceum. Generation upon generation, selection of more seedy plants made the domesticated varieties more productive than their wild counterparts. I had never really thought of rice as ‘grass’. Then I visited the terraced paddy fields of Long Ji and saw Liao Jongpu, whose family had farmed there for generations, with a handful of grass-like seedlings, picking out sprigs of three or four stems at a time, to sow into his submerged fields. It looked like grass, but it was going to be food.

As the climate warmed back up again after 10,000 years, cereal cultivation intensified – and was there to stay. Today, rice in south China has a higher genetic diversity than that in the north, suggesting that the origins of domestication lay in the south. But the rice of the Yangtzi Basin, while less genetically diverse, looks more ancient and closer to its wild counterpart.⁸ Climatic changes and human manipulation of the environment make it really difficult to predict the origins of plant strains from their modern-day distributions.⁷

The earliest archaeological evidence of agriculture in China comes from the area around the Yangtzi River Valley. Grinding slabs and wild rice husks have been found in Upper Palaeolithic cave and rockshelter sites, dating to beyond 10,000 years ago, showing that people were collecting and processing wild grasses. It’s important to remember that the grass seeds were just part of a much wider diet: wild rice and millet were not productive enough to have been a staple food, and would have been just one part of a broad-based subsistence strategy. And, in fact, although we tend to focus on rice because of its importance today, the earliest domesticated plants may not have been cereals: they could have been starchy roots and tubers like yams and taro, or even non-food plants like gourds or jute. The first farmers are likely to have been cultivating a range of crops.⁷

In the 1970s, evidence for cultivation started to appear as Neolithic villages were discovered, dating to around 7000 years ago. Since then, the earliest dates for farming in the region have been pushed back to about 10,000 years ago, and even earlier. In 2001, archaeologists uncovered a Neolithic site in Shangshan, in Zhejiang Province. The site was the remains of an early village: post-holes and trenches marked the outlines of dwellings, while stone tools, large grinding stones, pebble pestles and red pottery provided clues about life in the village. Many of the stone tools were basic chipped pebbles and flakes, just as are found throughout the Palaeolithic in China, but some are something new and different entirely – stone axes and adzes – suggesting an increased reliance on cultivation. These people were working the land.⁹

The pottery at Shangshan is still similar to the earlier forms – simple, hand-formed or slab-built pots, fired at low temperatures – but it also contains important clues to the new way of life in Shangshan village. The clay was tempered with bits of plant – the first example of this – and some of those plant remains are rice husks, shorter and fatter than wild grains, suggesting these may be the remains of an early domesticated variety. Charcoal embedded in the pottery has been radiocarbon dated to around 10,000 years ago.

Earlier sites with pottery are caves, like Zengpiyan. But the Neolithic village of Shangshan is in the middle of a river basin. It represents the beginnings of a new, more sedentary lifestyle. Instead of moving around the landscape, setting up temporary camps or using natural ‘homes’ like rockshelters and caves, a place was chosen for its suitability for growing crops, and permanent houses were built.⁹

The transition to farming and a settled way of life was gradual and patchy. It is likely that the early cultivators were semi-nomadic ‘collectors’, using wild foods supplemented with cultivated varieties. Caring for crops would have increased productivity but would also have tied farmers to their fields, so this is perhaps why they stopped being nomads and settled down in villages like Shangshan. But it is also important not to imagine that hunting and gathering was completely abandoned as agriculturalism was taken up. Even in recent, historic times, farmers continued to collect wild plants and hunt wild animals.⁸

Some archaeologists have suggested that population pressure was a motivating factor in the origin of farming and a settled way of life. But settlement of large communities doesn’t happen until after 9000 years ago in China. Early settlements are small-scale and most of the artefacts found in them are the tools of daily use, rather than ‘luxury’ items like beautiful pots or jewellery. So prehistoric Chinese society between 13,000 and 9000 years ago seems quite egalitarian; the proposition that agriculture may have arisen there to support a stratified society and accumulation of wealth – or that early pottery was developed by aggrandising individuals as a sign of prestige – seems unfounded. Although I rather like the idea of ‘competitive feasting’, there’s no evidence that this drove the origins of agriculture or pottery. Climate seems to have been a major factor, but the precise environmental and social factors that led to the gradual adoption of agriculturalism and a settled way of life in the East are still unclear.^{8, 5}

The transition to agriculture should not be viewed as inevitable or progressive, but once it originated it spread (although, in a few areas, including parts of Polynesia, New Zealand and Borneo, farmers faced with unsuitable environments reverted to foraging).¹

So how did the spread of agriculturalism occur? Did the farmers’ population expand and replace the hunter-gatherers and their culture, or did the culture of agriculturalism spread among existing populations of foragers? Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza proposed a ‘wave-of-advance’ model in Europe, where the farmers’ expansion can be seen as a spreading ripple of intermarriage and gene dilution, until the populations furthest from the cultural epicentre are genetically almost entirely derived from the original hunter-gatherers. Thus the population of western Ireland is 99 per cent genetically from the original foragers, with just 1 per cent of lineages traceable back to Anatolian farmers.¹

Although we don’t yet understand the relationship between genetics and morphology, we can at least assume that people’s faces reflect their genetic make-up. So are East Asian features an indication that Neolithic farmers spread throughout eastern Asia, replacing earlier populations, or are those faces from more ancient lineages, before the advent of agriculturalism?

It would be nice to have a range of skulls that showed the emergence of East Asian features and allowed us to date the morphological changes, but skeletal evidence from the Far East is rare, especially before 11,000 years ago. The Niah skull, at around 40,000 years old, does not look ‘East Asian’, although it does bear similarities to the Ainu, the descendants of the original Jomon population in Japan. But there is a skull with recognisably East Asian features, from Java, dated to 7000 years ago, and thus pre-dating the beginning of rice cultivation in Indonesia.³

Some geneticists have argued that Y chromosome variants suggest that millet and rice farmers did indeed spread out from China, largely replacing earlier populations throughout East and South-East Asia,¹⁰ but Oppenheimer³ argues that the balance of the genetic evidence suggests a spread of people, with what we now recognise as East Asian features, much earlier than the Neolithic – around the LGM. He suggests that, at this time, people would have been retreating back towards the warmer coastline, populating the expanded coastal plains left by the drop in sea level. Oppenheimer suggests that, before the LGM, the inhabitants of East Asia looked like the original beachcombers. Then, during the LGM, ‘East Asian’-looking people from Central Asia moved outwards to the coasts of East Asia.

If Oppenheimer’s theory is right, it would seem that, as in Europe, most of the inhabitants of East Asia today are descended from the original beachcombers and the coastward-bound populations of the LGM, rather than from a wave of Neolithic farmers spreading through the region. Culture and language are much more labile, transportable commodities. Our genes betray a much more ancient heritage.

So, even in Shanghai, with all its skyscrapers and technology, the people may look very much like the hunter-gatherers who inhabited that coastal plain 20,000 years ago.