Preface

Summary

In this book, I have tried to summarise and integrate the archaeological, fossil hominin, and climatic records of Asia before it was colonised by modern humans ca. 100 ka. I first thought about writing this book ten to fifteen years ago, but had to delay the attempt until I had published the results of the fieldwork I had directed in the Pabbi Hills, Pakistan (Dennell 2004a), and also until I had escaped the burdens of departmental administration. There are several reasons that I have long wanted to write a synthesis of Asia's early prehistory. The first is that (surprisingly) no one has ever written one, despite the fact that Asia, as the largest continent, was where a substantial part of early human prehistory took place in the last two million years, and it thus deserves to be treated in its own right as much as that of Europe or Africa. Second, and as a result of this neglect, most accounts of early human prehistory are biased towards evidence from Europe and Africa, with often only brief mention of what is known from Asia. One unfortunate result of this bias is the prominence that is usually ascribed to European evidence. Europe is little more than the western peninsula of Asia, and was often a very small tail wagged by a much larger dog.