University of New South Wales - BEES Home - Late Pleistocene Peopling Of East Asia

HUMAN AND PRIMATE ORIGINS PROGRAM AND ASSOCIATED CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT HISTORY

CURRENT RESEARCH BY DR DARREN CURNOE

This major project aims to determine the contribution of late Pleistocene humans in southwest China to the peopling of East Asia and Australasia, the role of climate and environmental change during this evolutionary episode and to provide a deep-time context for understanding contemporary environmental concerns in our region.

These aims will be addressed through palaeoanthropological, archaeological, rock art, sedimentology and palaeoecology studies, as well as four main site-based sub-projects.

Palaeoanthropological research involves the dating and new description of fossil human remains from the sites of Dahe, Mengzi, Longtanshan and Lijiang sites. We are also attempting to extract and sequence DNA from Pleistocene modern human fossils. Archaeological research consists of an analysis of excavated material from Dahe, Mengzi and Longtanshan, and further excavation at Mengzi and Dahe.

Rock art studies will focus on the dating, description, animal species identification and environmental relationship of painting sites of northwest Yunnan, near Jinsha Jiang (Yangtze Kiang) River, already surveyed and initially recorded. Sediment analysis will consist of describing the nature of the charcoal, pollen and magnetic mineralogy of sediment from Dahe, Mengzi and possibly Longtanshan. Research will also be undertaken on a lake sediment core from Yunnan in order to examine the climate-environment history of the Upper Pleistocene.

Principal researchers are:

Dr Darren Curnoe (Project Co-Leader - BEES),
Assoc. Prof. Ji Xueping (Project Co-Leader - Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics & Archaeology),
Dr Andy Herries (BEES),
Dr Scott Mooney (BEES),
Prof. Paul Tacon (Griffith University),
Assoc. Prof. Yang Decoung (Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics & Archaeology),
Prof. Bing Su (Kunming Institute of Zoology and Kunming Primate Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences),
Dr Dan Penny (USyd),
Dr Ruliang Pan (University of the Witwatersrand),
Dr David Fink (ANSTO)
and many other collaborating scientists in Australia and China.

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council under DP0877603 for five-years (2008-2012).

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HUMAN AND PRIMATE ORIGINS PROGRAM