Prehistoric pathways to Anthropocene adaptation: Evidence from the Red River Delta, Vietnam.

Over the past twenty years, government advisory bodies have placed increasing emphasis on the need for adaptive measures in response to the effects of human-induced climate change. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which incorporate macroeconomic and climate variables, feature prominently in advisory content, though they rarely draw on data from outside strictly constrained hypothetical systems. This has led to assertions that they are not well-suited to approximate complex systemic human-environment processes.

Confirmed archaeological evidence of water deer in Vietnam: relics of the Pleistocene or a shifting baseline?

Studies of archaeological and palaeontological bone assemblages increasingly show that the historical distributions of many mammal species are unrepresentative of their longer-term geographical ranges in the Quaternary. Consequently, the geographical and ecological scope of potential conservation efforts may be inappropriately narrow. Here, we consider a case-in-point, the water deer , which has historical native distributions in eastern China and the Korean peninsula.

An 11 000-year-old giant muntjac subfossil from Northern Vietnam: implications for past and present populations.

Described at the end of the twentieth century, the large-antlered or giant muntjac, (syn), is a Critically Endangered species currently restricted to the Annamite region in Southeast Asia. Here we report subfossil evidence of giant muntjac, a mandible fragment dated between 11.1 and 11.

The success of failed Homo sapiens dispersals out of Africa and into Asia.

The evidence for an early dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa into the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS-5) 126-74 ka (thousand years ago) was characterized for many years as an 'abortive' expansion: a precursor to a sustained dispersal from which all extant human populations can be traced. Recent archaeological and genetic data from both western and eastern parts of Eurasia and from Australia are starting to challenge that interpretation. This Perspective reviews the current evidence for a scenario where the MIS-5 dispersal encompassed a much greater geographic distribution and temporal duration.