Funding for our research has been provided by our home institutions and grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, Wenner Gren Foundation, and other sources. We thank the editors, Todd Braje, and two anonymous reviewers for help in Galunisertib molecular weight the review and production of this manuscript. “
“The Northwest China Upper Paleolithic site of Shuidonggou, and related sites in Ukraine, the

Central Russian Plain, Mongolia, Siberia, and Korea confirm that after about 40,000 cal BP technologically sophisticated and socially well-organized hunting-gathering populations of anatomically modern humans were widely present across northeastern Eurasia (Milisauskas, 2011 and Morgan et al., 2014). DAPT mw Extensive biological, geological, and archeological research shows that warming climate and rising sea levels in final Pleistocene and early Holocene times greatly increased the biodiversity and productivity of natural landscapes throughout East Asia, and substantial pollen records from Japan document a gradual northward spread of broadleaf oak and beech woodlands from southerly Pleistocene refugia between about 20,000 and 8500 cal BP (Aikens and Akazawa, 1996, Aikens and Higuchi, 1982 and Tsukada

et al., 1986). The return of a rich mid-latitude biota fed growing human population densities. All animals affect the environments they occupy, but humans are uniquely creative both intellectually and technologically. To a much greater degree than other animals,

humans are able to create and modify their own ecological niche because their large brains support an ability to learn quickly, anticipate the future, and share detailed knowledge and experience through highly specific linguistic communication. Their long legs and sturdy feet ID-8 help them travel efficiently and routinely over long distances in the course of earning their living, and their deft hands and binocular vision enable them to create highly detailed and refined objects using a variety of tools. Humans also are omnivorous and able to thrive in a broad range of environmental settings. As humans became ever more numerous in East Asia during the final Pleistocene and Holocene, the landscapes they occupied took on an increasingly “anthropogenic” character. Natural scientists seeking to define a new human-centered epoch of earth history suggest that human effects on the climates and environments of earth are now so powerful and pervasive as to warrant the recognition of a new “Anthropocene” epoch of earth history. As recently proposed by Foley et al. (2014), the anthropogenic developments treated in this paper might well be seen as belonging to a “Paleoanthropocene” prelude – belonging to an interval when the human capabilities and actions that are now becoming decisive factors in planet Earth’s climatic and geological history were just beginning to ramp up.