Settlement and abandonment in ice age China

Professor Robin Dennell, Dept of Archaeology Conference Room of the Humanities Research Institute Wednesday 13 February, 5.15pm

One of the major themes of human settlement in continental Asia over the last million and a half years is its vulnerability to climate change: populations have routinely expanded and contracted according to climatic circumstance, and many have undoubtedly faced extinction. One region that shows this with great clarity is North China, which lies at the edge of the summer monsoon and has been occupied intermittently for over a million years. It also contains some of the earliest evidence for modern humans in East Asia, and the speaker was very fortunate last summer in being invited to join recent excavations of one of the earliest of these sites, on the margin of the North Chinese deserts.

This talk summarises present assessments of how humans have responded to long-term climate change in this area.

No booking required. Please contact Julie Banham, tel: 0114 222 9890

email : j.p.banham@sheffield.ac.uk,

http://www.shef.ac.uk/hri/news/china.html