Publications
Late Glacial hunter-gatherer pottery in the Russian Far East: Indications of diversity in origins and use
During the Late Glacial, hunter-gatherers began using ceramic cooking containers in three separate geographic regions of East Asia: China, Japan and in the Russian Far East. While recent research has clarified the use of early pottery in Japan, very little is known about what led to the emergence of pottery in the other two areas, including the likely environmental, economic or cultural drivers. In this paper we focus on a series of key sites along the Amur River [...]
Discontinuous spread of millet agriculture in eastern Asia and prehistoric population dynamics
Although broomcorn and foxtail millet are among the earliest staple crop domesticates, their spread and impacts on demography remain controversial, mainly because of the use of indirect evidence. Bayesian modeling applied to a dataset of new and published radiocarbon dates derived from domesticated millet grains suggests that after their initial cultivation in the crescent around the Bohai Sea ca. 5800 BCE, the crops spread discontinuously across eastern Asia. Our findings on the spread of millet that intensified during [...]
Moisture origin and stable isotope characteristics of precipitation in southeast Siberia
The paper presents oxygen and hydrogen isotopes of 284 precipitation event samples systematically collected in Irkutsk, in the Baikal region (southeast Siberia), between June 2011 and April 2017. This is the first high‐resolution dataset of stable isotopes of precipitation from this poorly studied region of continental Asia, which has a high potential for isotope‐based palaeoclimate research. The dataset revealed distinct seasonal variations: relatively high δ18O (up to −4‰) and δD (up to −40‰) values characterize summer air masses, [...]
Special Issue: Climate change and human-environment interaction from Neolithic to historical times
The idea of the special issue “Climate change and human-environment interaction from Neolithic to historical times” arose from a session bearing the same name, which has been organized by the Commission on Environment Evolution of the International Geographical Union under the framework of the 33rd International Geographical Congress held in Beijing (PR China) in August, 2016. This volume is focused on multi-disciplinary studies of landscape evolution, climate dynamics and human activity in different regions of the world during [...]
Heterogeneous vegetation sensitivity at local and regional scales: Implications for pollen-based climate reconstruction
Vegetation–climate relationships are often different at varying spatial scales, which is seldom taken into account in reconstructing past climate changes from fossil pollen spectra represent more local vegetation composition but using regional or extra-regional modern pollen–climate calibration set. In this paper, we employ 2620 surface pollen spectra and six pollen sequences from continental East Asia to reconstruct Holocene climate with modern analogue technique. A novel data set of vegetation sensitivity index (VSI) is introduced to examine vegetation–climate relationships [...]
Postglacial vegetation and climate history and traces of early human impact and agriculture in the present-day cool mixed forest zone of European Russia
This study is based on the reassessment and correlation of five pollen records from the upper Western Dvina River region. For the most complete record (Korovinskoe Mire; 56°16′N, 31°20′E) we constructed a Bayesian age-depth model to provide robust chronological control for the reconstructed changes in the regional environments and to facilitate interregional comparisons. The results show that the Holocene Thermal Maximum in the study region (ca. 8600–6900 cal BP) started and ended some centuries earlier than suggested for the [...]