Publications by authors named "Mark J Hudson"

Article Synopsis
  • Anthropology originated in the late 1800s, focusing on kinship as a key part of human evolution, with archaeologists later seeking complex methods to reconstruct ancient kinship.
  • Advances in ancient DNA analysis have revolutionized the field, allowing for direct examination of kin relations from skeletal remains.
  • Research on four Late Neolithic individuals from central China reveals evidence of inbreeding among Longshan populations, suggesting that their societal structure expanded beyond the nuclear family in response to increased social complexity during this period.
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Article Synopsis
  • * This study integrates data from genetics, archaeology, and linguistics, showcasing information from various sources including vocabulary, archaeological sites, and ancient genomes from Northeast Asia.
  • * The findings suggest that the spread of Transeurasian languages is rooted in the movements of early farmers from the Neolithic era, rather than pastoralists, with extensive cultural interactions influencing the preservation of this shared heritage.
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While earlier research often saw Altaic as an exception to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, recent work on millet cultivation in northeast China has led to the proposal that the West Liao basin was the Neolithic homeland of a Transeurasian language family. Here, we examine the archaeolinguistic evidence used to associate millet farming dispersals with Proto-Macro-Koreanic, analysing the identification of population movements in the archaeological record, the role of small-scale cultivation in language dispersals, and Middle-Late Neolithic demography. We conclude that the archaeological evidence is consistent with the arrival and spread of Proto-Macro-Koreanic on the peninsula in association with millet cultivation in the Middle Neolithic.

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Northern China harbored the world's earliest complex societies based on millet farming, in two major centers in the Yellow (YR) and West Liao (WLR) River basins. Until now, their genetic histories have remained largely unknown. Here we present 55 ancient genomes dating to 7500-1700 BP from the YR, WLR, and Amur River (AR) regions.

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The population history of Japan has been one of the most intensively studied anthropological questions anywhere in the world, with a huge literature dating back to the nineteenth century and before. A growing consensus over the 1980s that the modern Japanese comprise an admixture of a Neolithic population with Bronze Age migrants from the Korean peninsula was crystallised in Kazurō Hanihara's influential 'dual structure hypothesis' published in 1991. Here, we use recent research in biological anthropology, historical linguistics and archaeology to evaluate this hypothesis after three decades.

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An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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Despite the growing importance of farmed fish for contemporary economies, the origins of aquaculture are poorly known. Although it is widely assumed that fish domestication began much later than the domestication of land animals, the evidence is largely negative. Here, we use age-mortality and species-selection profiles of fish bones from prehistoric East Asia to show that managed aquaculture of common carp (Cyprinus carpio) was present at the Early Neolithic Jiahu site, Henan Province, China, by around 6000 BC.

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Objectives: Accurately differentiating inflicted from accidental injury in infants and toddlers is critical. Many studies have documented characteristics of inflicted bruises, fractures, and head injuries facilitating the development of clinical tools. There are few studies characterizing inflicted oral injuries, and no clinical tools exist.

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Living in remote places can strain the adaptive capacities of human settlers. It can also protect communities from external social, political and economic forces. In this paper, we present an archaeological population history of the Kuril Islands.

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We present a description and differential diagnosis of pathological lesions observed on skeletal elements found during surface surveys of the Nagabaka site on Miyako-jima Island, Japan. The Nagabaka site served as a bone depository during the Early Modern period (c. AD 1600-1870).

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Background: Despite growing interest in indigenous peoples within occupational therapy in Canada and elsewhere, there has been little consideration of hunter-gathering-an occupation that retains great material and symbolic significance for many indigenous groups.

Purpose: A preliminary analysis of occupational behaviour amongst hunter-gatherers was conducted to aid understanding of the nature and evolution of human occupations and inform policy in indigenous occupational therapy.

Methods: Human behavioural ecology was used to analyze four aspects of hunter-gatherer occupations: occupational diversification, the sexual "division of labour," the long dependence of juveniles on adult provisioning, and active foraging by postmenopausal women.

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This article uses metric and nonmetric dental data to test the "two-layer" or immigration hypothesis whereby Southeast Asia was initially occupied by an "Australo-Melanesian" population that later underwent substantial genetic admixture with East Asian immigrants associated with the spread of agriculture from the Neolithic period onwards. We examined teeth from 4,002 individuals comprising 42 prehistoric and historic samples from East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Melanesia. For the odontometric analysis, dental size proportions were compared using factor analysis and Q-mode correlation coefficients, and overall tooth size was also compared between population samples.

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