Resilience Across Scales: A Multi-Proxy Framework for Understanding Hominin Survival and Extinction in Asia

Renaud Joannes-Boyau1*, Kira Westaway2, ZHANG Yingqi3, YU Wenjing Yu3, Adhi Agus Oktaviana4,5, Adam Brumm5, Manish Arora6, Alysson Muotri7, and Maxime Aubert5

Explaining why Homo sapiens survived when other Asian hominins and primates did not demand more than a single adaptive advantage — it requires understanding resilience as a phenomenon operating simultaneously at ecological, behavioural, and cognitive scales. Single-proxy approaches have consistently produced partial, contested explanations; only by integrating evidence across scales can we reconstruct the full architecture of differential survival. Here we present a multi-scalar framework drawing on three complementary lines of investigation. At the species-ecological scale, the extinction of Gigantopithecus blacki — the largest primate in evolutionary history — reveals how dietary specialisation and habitat inflexibility rendered even the most dominant species catastrophically vulnerable to Pleistocene environmental change. At the population-behavioural scale, lead isotope signatures preserved in hominin dental enamel expose fundamental differences in landscape use, dietary breadth, and niche width between H. sapiens and co-existing archaic populations, providing rare geochemical evidence of the behavioural plasticity that may have been decisive. At the cultural-cognitive scale, the geochronological record of figurative art in island Southeast Asia establishes that H. sapiens were symbolically modern while archaic hominins persisted in the same region — suggesting symbolic culture, with its implications for social cohesion and inter-generational knowledge transfer, constitutes a resilience mechanism largely invisible to conventional archaeology. Together, these scales converge on a single conclusion: resilience was not a fixed trait but an emergent property of interacting biological, behavioural, and cultural capacities. Understanding how H. sapiens became the last humans on Earth may depend less on finding the right answer than on asking the question at the right resolution.