Beyond 55° North latitude: Expanding the northern boundary of initial upper Paleolithic dispersal

Abstract

Human populations, the bearers of laminar Initial Upper Paleolithic industries (IUP) in Central Eurasia, were adapted to the mosaic environments of mountains and their piedmonts. Until recently, no IUP sites in northern Asia had been found north of 55° North latitude, beyond the mountain belt of southern Siberia. Increasingly over the past 20 years, emerging evidence of human occupation of northern latitudes during the early stages of the Upper Paleolithic have raised questions concerning the boundaries of their adaptation plasticity, the character of these populations that can be seen from their rapid exploration and spread along mountain ranges and in piedmonts regions of Southern Siberia and Central Asia. Ongoing research and reassessment of older data makes it possible to significantly correct perceptions of the limitations of adaptive capabilities of earliest Homo sapiens associated with the mountain belt of South Siberia. Here we consider the distribution of lithic industries, indicating technological and typological IUP components, through the valleys of large Siberian rivers – Yenisei, Angara, and Lena – to latitudes up to 58°-63° North. We hypothesize these lithic industries dispersed within a chronological span approximately comprising Greenland interstadial GI12, about 47–45 ka BP. Lithic assemblages that these populations left behind were impacted by denudation, aeolian, and cryogenic processes during cold phases of MIS-3 and were finally buried in chronologically younger sediments. The evidence from the Kolpakov Ruchei site on the middle Angara reveals the ability of these populations to expand beyond their indigenous zones of mountains and foothills in South Siberia and Central Asia, relying on exploitation of large herd ungulates in the open spaces of subarctic latitudes.