Full Description
South Asia is home to a diverse range of prehistoric and contemporary cultures that include foragers, pastoralists, and farmers. In this book, archaeologists, biological anthropologists, geneticists and linguists are brought together in order to provide a comprehensive account of the history and evolution of human populations residing in the subcontinent. A wide range of topics and issues are addressed in this book, including hominin adaptations, behaviours, and dispersals; the origin and spread of food producing economies; and the cultural, biological and genetic relationship of foragers and settled communities. New theories, methodologies and interpretations presented in this book are bound to have a profound effect on the way in which the cultural record of South Asia is perceived and how this evolutionary history relates to events in the wider world.
Contents
Setting Foundations.- Afro-Eurasian mammalian fauna and early hominin dispersals.- "Resource-rich, stone-poor": Early hominin land use in large river systems of northern India and Pakistan.- Toward developing a basin model for Paleolithic settlement of the Indian subcontinent: Geodynamics, monsoon dynamics, habitat diversity and dispersal routes.- The Acheulean of peninsular India with special reference to the Hungsi and Baichbal valleys of the lower Deccan.- Changing trends in the study of a Paleolithic site in India: A century of research at Attirampakkam.- Was Homo heidelbergensis in South Asia? A test using the Narmada fossil from central India.- The Modern Scene.- The Toba supervolcanic eruption: Tephra-fall deposits in India and paleoanthropological implications.- The emergence of modern human behavior in South Asia: A review of the current evidence and discussion of its possible implications.- Genetic evidence on modern human dispersals in South Asia: Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA perspectives: The world through the eyes of two haploid genomes.- Cranial diversity in South Asia relative to modern human dispersals and global patterns of human variation.- New Worlds in the Holocene.- Interpreting biological diversity in South Asian prehistory: Early Holocene population affinities and subsistence adaptations.- Population movements in the Indian subcontinent during the protohistoric period: Physical anthropological assessment.- Foragers and forager-traders in South Asian worlds: Some thoughts from the last 10,000 years.- Anthropological, historical, archaeological and genetic perspectives on the origins of caste in South Asia.- Language families and quantitative methods in South Asia and elsewhere.- Duality in Bos indicus mtDNA diversity: Support forgeographical complexity in zebu domestication.- Non-human genetics, agricultural origins and historical linguistics in South Asia.- Concluding Remarks.- Thoughts on The Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia.- Human evolution and culture change in the Indian subcontinent.- Human evolution and culture change in the Indian subcontinent.
