The Michigan Anthropology Colloquia Series: "A Tale of Two Islands: Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Hunter-Gatherers in Sri Lanka and Java (Indonesia)"

"The transition from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene, which was accompanied by significant climatic fluctuations and drastic sea level changes, is a suitable period to study the relationships between environmental changes and human behavioral adaptations. Perhaps one of the most dramatic landscape changes during the period was the inundation of the Sunda Shelf which resulted in the modern configuration of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA). Investigations in the region have provided information on how ancient foraging communities responded to these changes. In this talk, results of the analyses of faunal assemblages from sites in Java are presented. The results are compared to those obtained from sites in Sri Lanka. In the Javanese sites, a shift from hunting large-bodied ungulates during the Late Pleistocene to targeting small and intermediate, forest-adapted mammals following the onset of the Holocene was observed. This is in contrast to Sri Lankan sites, where there was targeted hunting of small arboreal taxa as early as ca. 50,000 years ago. The results of the studies provide unique insights on subsistence strategies of prehistoric foraging communities and the environment they encountered in South/Southeast Asia during a key period in human history."

https://umich.zoom.us/j/96568104186