Reevaluating Ecological Drivers of Hominin Evolution in Southern China and Southeast Asia

Dean Anthony Arcega

With its high hominin diversity, the Southern China and Southeast Asian regions are well placed to address key questions on the adaptability of humans to dynamic and extreme environments. Hypotheses on why archaic hominins went extinct in this region typically involve ecological inflexibility to changing environments such as persistent droughts and rainforest encroachment, though high-resolution environmental datasets are largely absent to support these claims. Here, I review the state of the paleoenvironmental data across selected hominin sites. I will consider key issues such as challenges in synthesizing multiproxy evidence, the spatiotemporal scale of paleoenvironmental reconstructions, and the alignment of contextual data with evidence for behavioral adaptations. Potential avenues to address these issues in the data will be explored, including the application of novel proxies to this region such as plant wax biomarkers. Robust and aligned contexts of hominin lifeways will shed light on our status and future as the sole living member of the genus Homo.