 I'd like to start by acknowledging celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet, pay my respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present and I acknowledge their contribution to this place and to this institution. My name's Ann Evans, I'm the Associate Dean of Research in the College of Arts and Social Sciences and a couple of years ago Cass started this inaugural professorial lecture series as an opportunity for us as a community to welcome and to celebrate new professorial appointments to our college. So today we celebrate the promotion of Professor Mark Oxenham from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts. So Mark trained at what was then called Northern Territory University, now Charles Darwin University in Bioanthropology and Archaeology and he was awarded his PhD in 2001. He's held teaching and research positions in the US at Colorado College and at the ANU. So he has been president of the Australasian Society of Human Biology, he has been an Australian Future Fellow, he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and in 2016. Since 2009 Mark has acted as a consultant for the unrecovered war casualties unit of the Australian Department of Defence in which capacity he has searched for, recovered and identified defence force personnel from conflicts ranging from World War One to the Vietnam War. In France, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Northern Australia. I understand you're off to Papua New Guinea in a few minutes time. Yes, so please join me in welcoming Professor Oxenham. Thanks a lot. I had my own Welcome to Country slide as well prepared so I'd like to do that. And I'd also like to point out that this is, although some of you might not know it, the International Day of Worlds Indigenous Peoples which is somewhat relevant given my talk. I'm not talking about Indigenous Australians but I am talking about ancient Indigenous people in Southeast Asia that is the focus of the talk. Now there are images of human remains. These are skeletonised remains for the most part and these are remains of ancient Indigenous people that lived in what is now geopolitically known as Northern Vietnam. So if anyone has issue with that, you might not want to stay. Now one of the key words in my talk is complexity. I'm not going to come up with an answer what is complexity at the end of this talk but I want you to consider this concept of complexity whilst I go through this presentation particularly in an archaeological sense what is complexity because basically I'm an archaeologist that looks at human remains and tries to develop narratives based on those remains. So some of the things I want you to think about complexity in an archaeological sense is complex behaviour as an absolute or is it relative to something before or after. One of the other major themes here is farming and hunter-gatherers. So I'm going to be talking about these quite a lot particularly the hunter-gatherer side of it. So is complexity something we only see with the emergence of farming and there's a whole range of things associated with the emergence of farming that I'll talk about and then I'll just oppose that with some of the things that we see emerging with complex hunter-gatherers in Northern Southeast Asia. So are farmers and hunter-gatherer cultures are they fundamentally different or do they have more in common than we think and that's the sort of spoiler. So that's what I'm on about in this talk today. And along that theme of relativity if you like there are things that have happened in human and pre-human antiquity that seem to suggest sudden punctuations and the normal day-to-day scheme of things. One of these is tool manufacture. We have physical evidence for stone tools at least two and a half million years ago. Obviously not by people that would necessarily classify as human but certainly belonging to our greater family and if some reports are to be believed maybe even a million years earlier we have evidence for the use of those tools if not the tools themselves. So you know that's incredible sort of antiquity we're talking about there. Controlled use of fire again before we are really on the stage you know nearly one and a half million years ago. You know another indicator of complexity relative to what went on before. Art a bit controversial but we've had and as you saw on my leading slide there that was a representation of art from Sulawesi that's been dated to nearly 40,000 years ago. So again it's compared to what went before. You know a sudden punctuation and the equilibrium of things if you like. Deliberate burial is a little bit controversial but at least around about the same age around 49,000 years and then domestication. This comes into the farming versus hunter-gatherer theme I'm talking about for the most part domestication seems to kick in around 49,000 years ago although there are things like dogs that were probably domesticated much earlier with hunter-gatherer populations. So these are some things I want you to think about you know this relative nature of complexity. So I want to set the scene here. I'm interested in in northern Southeast Asia so I'm going to introduce you to half the world. So this is my version of the population history of this part of the world. There's basically a two-pronged event. There's the emergence of anatomically modern humans which a recent nature paper suggests may go back as far as 200,000 years ago but we've fairly clear evidence for them emerging out of Africa somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years. The recent dates in northern Australia would suggest that modern humans made it here 65,000 years ago so I updated my slide here to put circa 70,000 years. It doesn't really matter it does that early date doesn't really affect much. Although it is interesting that I've put I've listed a range of sites here with the earliest known evidence of modern humans and in Cambodia Damparling around 50,000 years ago. Tabon in Palawan Island in the Philippines around 47,000 years ago. Kienyuan up in near where the Jocodin Homo erectus material was found nearly 40,000 years ago. The deep skull in Borneo 37,000 years ago. Wajak somewhere between 28 and 30,000 years. So you know there's a lot of early stuff but we haven't found any sites or fossil evidence approach in the 65,000 years in Southeast Asia but we should because this is where the first Australians came from. There's nowhere else for them to come from they had to have come through this region. Things are a lot a lot later through the northern route and I'll show you why in a minute and the fossil evidence is a bit spotty. I mean I've got Denisovan cave up there more of a reference point than anything else because that's clearly not an anatomically modern human. But it just shows you know we've got a few scattered fossils the earliest about 45,000 years. Not enough bone there to really tell us much but ancient DNA stuff has suggest these are anatomically modern humans. They're also associated with a particular tool kit the upper paleolithic or early upper paleolithic tool kit and there's a lot of that material culture going on which supports the idea of the date when they're coming in through the north. We don't really have an equivalent tool kit in Southeast Asia except maybe edge grinding technology which is very very early. Very early dates in Australia and also very early dates up if you believe it up to 30 or 40,000 years ago in Japan, the edge grinding technology. Now these things are shaped by climate which is another theme that I'm talking about. In the north this graph down the bottom there is measured in hundreds of thousands of years so over the far right is 200,000 years ago and coming towards the left you see that big dip that's 20,000 years ago that's the last glacial maximum. So this colonisation of the north couldn't have happened at many periods in prehistory but around about 45,000 years ago we have the marine isotope stage 3 which is a warming event which would allow colonisation of that part of the world then. Now as far as the south goes it's not a big deal it would have been relatively warm anyway. There's no barriers but the landscape would have been a very different back then. So if we look at these two maps on the far right is what our part of the world would have looked like from around 50 odd thousand years ago to about 20 odd thousand years ago. So that's the landscape that the first modern people in our part of the world would have experienced. It's very different to the modern landscape. So on the left this is where we are now in a major warming event and on the right this is when it was really really cold. So obviously climate would have had an effect on what the first people would have encountered and in fact most of the sites where the first people would have been living which is coastal for the most part along since gone which is problematic for archaeology. Okay hunter-gatherers this is a talk where I want to suggest hunter-gatherers rule so it's about hunter-gatherers this is my focus. Now they've been kicking around the region for at least 70,000 years okay but something happens roughly seven or eight thousand years ago where this blue ellipse is which is modern day southern China Guangxi Guangdong province in northern Vietnam. In this whole region okay something interesting happens and this is what I'm going to focus on. Now and this is where the complex hunter-gatherers that I'm going to talk about and I'll sort of define that as I go through the talk. This is where these guys are operating. These little pictures icons represent the modern-day descendants of the original people in these particular areas. Okay we don't really know a lot about the what the first people in this part of the world look like. It's very very hard to tap into but we know what their descendants some seventy-odd thousand years ago looked like and that's why I'm using these to help you focus what I'm talking about in terms of farmers and hunter-gatherers. So hunter-gatherers look like the guy next to the blue ellipse and the farmers look like the girl next to the yellow ellipse. Now these complex hunter-gatherers had a significant presence in this part of the world from about seven or eight thousand years ago to about four or five thousand years ago which seems to coincide with the end of a particular warming event which is many many different names but you know the Holocene Thermal Maximum or the you know whatever there was a major warming event occurring and maximizing somewhere between eight or nine thousand years ago and four or five thousand years ago. Okay which coincides with the presence of these complex hunter-gatherers. At a similar time we get the rise of agriculturalists or the rise of the Neolithic as it's often called in archaeology. We got domesticated plants the more northerly yellow ellipses where we get millet in the Yellow River and the more southerly yellow ellipses centers on the Yangtze River basins where we get the domestication of rice. Okay now there's very early domestication of rice and other animals such as pigs going on in this part of the world you know roughly nine thousand years ago but these guys are not dependent on farming at all until several millennia later. They're essentially hunter-gatherers that just so happen to have domesticated stuff okay that's something to be aware of. They become dependent on farming roughly towards the end of this warming event. Roughly towards the end of this warming event is where our complex hunter-gatherers disappear so there's something potentially interesting going on there but why the why the big deal about farming you know as I was suggesting we think about complexity and punctuations and some sort of status quo or equilibrium going through time you know a lot of people turn to farming or domestication of stuff domestication of animals and domestication of plants and our dependency on that is a massively big deal you know the foundations of civilization okay this is what farming led to and if we didn't have farming we didn't have civilization that's the sort of big deal a lot of people couch this issue in or the way they think about it okay now farming such a big deal why am I interested in complex hunter-gatherers who came into existence you know roughly the same time as domestication was occurring in East Asia and also why am I interested in hunter-gatherers given that they've been kicking around in this part of the world for 70,000 years and in fact right from the time where we have our first stone tools or evidence of stone tool used millions of years ago these guys were hunting and gathering okay so why is it such a big deal well hopefully I'm going to tell you okay what did farming ever give to us and then after we think about this let's think about what complex hunter-gatherers gave to us now there are pros and there are cons okay most farming activities early farming activities are assumed to be associated with sedentism of staying put in one place for the most part we had dependable plant and animal resources it was the ability to have food surpluses which could be put aside for lean years or when there were droughts or when a plague of locusts came through but also we could use surpluses to pay for people to do other things to free them up from the necessity of creating their own food so then we can get craft specialization going on and again with with farming there's the idea this is a this is a the beginnings of social differentiation and hierarchy okay so all the things that lead to civilization and the greatness that civilization is now there are cons we we invariably get increases in population the best-facing you know for individual mothers decreases they end up by having more children's populations grow and then of course they're all the issues associated with limited resources and with population growth there's arguably decreased dietary breads so they're eating you know they've got their wheat crop or their rice crop or whatever but they don't have the breads of plant resources they may have had during their hunter-gatherer years all the time to go out and hunt or search for the breads of protein sources that they would have had as a hunter-gatherer and there's an increase in animal-born diseases when you interact with animals domesticated animals there's an increase in a whole range of diseases associated with that and in general from many parts of the world we look at it the adoption of agriculture has led to relatively poor health compared to previous periods so there are pros and there are cons so you know presumably hunting and gathering is going to be quite different it's not going to have those same pros and so cons because these are hunter-gatherers and they're very different and they aren't the basis of you know civilization so what characterizes these complex hunter-gatherers I've been talking about and what makes them so distinct to their revolutionary or progressive farmers so here's a case study this is a site I've been working on for a while in fact I worked on material from the site for my PhD that had been excavated back in the late 70s and early 80s and I went back and did a tech excavation several years ago and then put in a massive trench 12 by 8 I think it was back in 2013 it's basically situated on the periphery of that hunter-gatherer complex hunter-gatherer zone in northern Vietnam these particular guys Kong Kong war is a site that believed to have emerged they must have come from somewhere and we know that hunter-gatherers in the region most of the hunter-gatherers in southeast Asia are blanketed under term of whole opinion which suggests that there's not much differentiation going on but this there certainly was these guys from Kong Kong war seem to have emerged from a series of communities that developed from the whole of Benin and can be characterized as a separate entity as compared to the hunter-gatherer entities that had occurred for the last sixty odd thousand years by the fact that they had edge grinding technology edge ground stone implements and they had pottery so the earliest pottery in Vietnam is nearly 9000 years old now pottery is a characteristic of farmers in many parts of the world not everywhere but in many parts of the world and when I talk about farmers I'm talking about people who are farming domesticated animals and domesticated crops here but what do you do with pottery normally I mean you can put flowers in it these days and you can decorate your kitchen but what do you do with pottery why is pottery useful because you can store stuff in it you know you can even make bear in it maybe what some of these people were doing so it's something you can use to store stuff on the right-hand side there we got over 300 kilos of pottery from our hunter-gatherer site pottery was important to them okay presumably they were using pottery the same way most people use pottery and they were storing stuff but why would hunter-gatherers be storing stuff isn't that a limiting if you're mobile and this is the other thing about hunter-gatherers hunter-gatherers have to be mobile if you're not mobile you're not hunter-gatherer okay but these guys had a lot of pottery and some of these pots a 30 centimetre diameter pots are really large pots they're not thinking you know sling a bunch of them on your back and tracks around the landscape it suggests sedentary behavior it suggests they were storing stuff maybe for you know later on or maybe they're storing stuff so they can use those stored surpluses to allow other people to engage in specialized activities I don't know but pottery has been around for a very long time in East Asia it's not like Europe where pottery emerges at the same time as farming in Europe in Southeast Asia pottery existed for you know at least 10,000 years before anyone thought of domesticating anything okay this is northern Vietnam that square there is on the southern part of the Red River Delta so just south of modern-day Hanoi about 16 of these hunter-gatherer sites in here so there's a lot of them this is a picture of a part of my one where if I add the and we put our square next to the 1979 80 square we've got over 266 individuals in the site and I don't think I've excavated 10% of the site this is a massive site there's lots of people living here and there's lots of these sites around this is not what you typically associate with normal hunter-gatherers it suggests some sort of demographic expansions going on population growth now another things that well in Europe again well that's probably not a very good analogy one of the characteristics of the Neolithic in Europe was the introduction of edge grinding technology but we know we've had edge grinding technology in our part of the world for probably 50 if not more thousand years okay but the thing is they had sophisticated tools they had tiny little ads is this big for fine work and they had massive things that were probably half did for God knows what hollowing out tree trunks making canoes chopping down trees I don't know why do you need an axe that big if you're a hunter-gatherer seriously there's something else you got a cart around the landscape with you they had fine bone tools and this is Rebecca James has done a lot of work on these bone tools again something that farmers had but hunter-gatherers have them as well so they're not they don't lack sophistication in their toolkit at all they also had ornamentation this is very very rare in this particular site but this is someone's wrist bone wrapped around the wrist bone is this bracelet and the bracelet is made from the incisors of a porcupine which continuously grow and I've fashioned this into a bracelet and it's been worked let's turn to food I've shown sophistication in a range of areas that are comparable to between farmers and complex hunter-gatherers but what about food surely with if you know if you're going to engage in sedentary behaviour if you're sedentary and you've got population growth going on you got sites popping up all over the place surely you must have had a reliable source of food now farmers can lay claim to that okay we've we've engaged in techniques called flotation which allows you to find tiny minute plant fossils in your site and we found plants like canarium which you can still buy today and a lot of people eat them they're high in proteins fats enzymes you know all sorts of things so they're a great staple there's a lot of canarium all around the landscape but the next question is okay but yeah hunter-gatherers of course they collect stuff so sure you're going to find canarium and other nuts and and remains of tubers if you've got good preservation in your site but are they cultivating in other words are they managing these wild plants so cultivating is just managing wild plants which could be as simple as weeding something or pulling out a you know a banana shoot from one place and putting in another or tending a grove of sago trees or whatever it's just managing stuff okay we've got a number of sites in southern China which have evidence for all of these types of things you know things like wild bananas these giant seeds inside them jobs is water chestnuts sago okay so there is evidence not necessarily just from my site but from a number of these sites in the region that they may well have been cultivating or managing wild resources so these were reliable and it was also suggest that they would have to stay put as well you can't you know well you can plant your sago tree and disappear and come back but a lot of these things you need to look after them what about animals and this is a lot of stuff Rebecca Jones has been working on identifying all the animals we have and look at a lot of animals which you would expect in a hunter-gatherer site okay we've got really weird animals like pangolins we've got other things like fish sharks rays goannas range of turtles monkeys and and what have you keep little otters I don't know who them we've got these guys I don't know if they would necessarily hunting them I think we've only got one haven't we so we know a lot but when you crunch the numbers they're focusing on these water buff or wild cattle cattle most of the protein animal protein they're getting are these big animals okay so again you think well yeah okay the hunter-gatherers they're gonna go out and find big animals what what's the big deal are they managing these animals can I make an argument that they are interacting with these wild animals in a way that suggests some sort of management of them now there's a couple of lines of evidence for this this is very very difficult to do archaeologically to demonstrate that someone is managing wild animals because a wild if they were domesticated you would go well yeah okay fine you must have been managing them because they're domesticated but when the wild doesn't doesn't work you know so we've looked at a range of things now one of the things that occurs in our site is a very high level of serious trauma okay so this person was whacked on their head by something fairly large and hard and this is perimortem so it occurred around the time of death they died from this probably subdural hematoma and they died okay this is serious concussion follow by death what caused this I don't know I like to think it looks uncannily like the shape of a water buffalo's hoof anyway this is my own evidence we've got between seven and ten percent of the adults have serious trauma they've got broken arms that have snapped and then they've joined them back together and then they've overlapped and shortened the limb it's the same with the legs this poor individual here and elderly female has had a crushing injury to a foot okay it's fused some of the bones together and at the same time it's amputated some of her toes maybe she was trodden on by a giant water buffalo the thing is in this landscape that these people are living in there's there's not a lot of really dangerous things going on unless people were deliberately climbing up cliff faces and throwing themselves off there's not a lot of there's not a lot of you know opportunity to hurt yourself okay look at this individual two broken arms and a broken leg and again we're talking about this broken leg here this person's shin has broken overlapped and then healed okay now I don't focus on this in this lecture but we have so much of these broken bones going on in the site that it suggests that they must have actually had some sort of sophistication and medical intervention as well okay but anyway that's another story I've got enough sophisticated stuff without bringing that in but the idea is that these are very serious injuries there's not really any opportunity in the landscape as it is to to you know develop these types of injuries are these injuries consistent with getting in close to large animals when you're trying to manage them in some way okay is it possibly but we need more evidence tada couldn't believe it when we found on this this these bits of cystic material it's something that's roughly this big okay it's the size of a golf ball basically it's a calcified hydrated cyst associated with a barrier on our site now in hydrated disease which I'll talk a little bit about in a second one of the outcomes of it is the development of these cysts within your soft tissue particularly likes to live up okay we've got a lot of skeletal lesions these types of things here which are in under x-ray are consistent with hydrated cysts that love these highly vascularized parts of your long bones we've got a lot of this stuff going on these people had rampant hydrated disease okay to have hydrated disease normally you need something like this some cattle or sheep let in have sheep but we've got cattle and often you need a dog of some form modern days you know I mean hydrated disease was a big thing in Australia and New Zealand in the 60s and 70s until they stopped farmers from giving their dogs raw awful they can then stop the life cycle of it okay but typically you need a dog and it can be a wild one and we have these wild dogs Rebecca's identified them in our site we've got these cattle and of course we've got humans okay you don't get rampant hydrated disease in a population and these days or in any case I've heard of unless you're a pastoralist or a farmer okay you need to have a really intimate relationship with a cattle so add this to the trauma and the fact that they're targeting these types of animals I think there's a good argument here that they may well have been managing these cattle okay so apart from the fact that they've got pottery and they could have had surfaces on surpluses they had sophisticated tools and ornamentation just like our farmers they had reliable potentially cultivated plants sources reliable potentially managed cattle sources resources they had nasty infectious diseases so they were just like the farmers okay there was nothing different going on there elevated levels of fertility population increases so what's the difference between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers here okay it must be clearly these guys didn't have complex belief systems how do we look at complex belief systems from an archaeological perspective we look at the way they bury their dead the way they treated their dead so surely if we look at how they treated their dead we're gonna see it was totally different and simplistic compared to hunter-gatherers we're gonna find a different somewhere okay the two top burials here the left and the right are examples of burial treatment in these sites all three northern Vietnam and southern China we call it flexed so you know they're tightly pulled together in various ways this one is like fetal flexed so then the knees are brought up to the chest and the elbows are like this lying on the side just like a little baby would be sleeping right this individual although it might not look like it at the moment is squatting down the head's obviously moved but they're squatting down okay except for that bracelet I showed you that in size a book point in size of bracelet they don't have anything in their graves so that you know pulpit graves if you like let's have a look at this is a site which is a stone throw away literally but several thousand years later an early farming site in northern Vietnam this is how they buried their dead with lots and lots of grave goods okay and evidence for some sort of social differentiation some people had more grave goods some people had less okay there may have been elites and non elites going on okay when when you look at this particular burial there's also evidence which I don't have time to go into now to suggest that this burial even though it's nearly 4,000 years old was originally coffined so you know a lot of energy was expended to create a large coffin to put this individual in put all these pots around and you can just make out these bracelets these are beautiful fine jade bracelets okay so there's no doubting that the quality of the ornamentation is a higher order of magnitude but we would be absolutely and totally wrong to suspect that there weren't highly complex ritualized mortuary behaviors associated with these complex hunter-gatherers I believe we have funerary specialists involved here there's something that we were loosely referring to as mutilation of the corpses going on roughly 70% of the adults are mutilated in a highly systematic manner we believe the bodies are laid out someone's using one of these giant edge ground axes and the chopping the body not at the joints but in the mid-shaft of the upper arms in the insides of the thighs and the outsides of the shins sometimes are removing the heads sometimes they're chopping the collar bones as well okay it's highly systematic sometimes we're getting probable rearrangement of the head going on and other things place where the head was we can tell from these chops so this is this is a thigh bone on the right hand side with the piece that's been detached through the chopping put back and this is just to show you what separate this indicates that this chopping was done when the person was fully flashed okay but after death well hopefully after death what are they doing next okay after they've rich really chopped the body and maybe removed the head and whatnot they're bringing it to be together in this tight position either a flexed fetal flexed one or a squatting position they're binding it we think they may be using bark cloth although we can't prove that okay now there's complex arguments for why we think that they're inserting them into circular pets and you can see one of these circular pets here this is all dirt going on but this is a dirt that's been refilled and you can actually see the person's knees popping out there because that's a squatting one we think because sometimes the bodies fall in various directions but they maintain their integrity that they may be putting basket tree in there so they may well be grave goods but we can't see them because they're decomposed okay it's a perishable grave goods and then for the most part the place squatting facing the rising sun with a little bit of variation that probably has to do with the seasonal variation and where the sun rises okay from summer to winter I'll put these two guys over here just to give you an indication of how this sort of wrapping would go this one indicates we also think the head was covered unlike this weather the skulls exposed so these Peruvian mummies are only there to illustrate how I think it's they may have been wrapped so this is highly complex behavior argue we've been more complex than the farmers mortuary behavior we know of early farmers in the region I think we can say we have similar levels of complexity no matter how we look at it going on between these early farmers and these complex hunter-gatherer groups in this part of the world this is what I'm leaning towards these are just you know what we're looking at we're not looking at some sort of developmental chain or some sort of progressive chain we're just looking at alternative responses to what's going on at the time and we know what was going on at the time around eight or nine thousand years ago there was a massive warming event and then about four or five thousand years ago there was a cooling event okay so these are the main environmental things that's going on but why did if these hunter-gatherer is as equally complex as the farmers why did they disappear why do the farmers still with us was farming a better option this is a slide that I showed you at the beginning looking at this this climate change graph up the top here that thick red line represents that optimal period of warming after which it drops down they disappear when it starts to get cold they rose when it started to get warm they disappear when it started to get cold by three and a half thousand years ago farmers have taken over the whole region now it's not as simple and I'll show you another slide in the second to demonstrate that but for the most part these guys are gone they've disappeared their signature is disappeared a lot of things could have happened with cooling okay they could have been real you know I'm suggesting that they're relying on a managed cattle wild cattle they're relying on managed wild plants cooling could have totally disrupted that system totally okay and it could have put them under an enormous amount of stress okay then we have these migrations of new farmers coming into the region and we know there's an archaeological signature of them moving into the region okay so they got this double whammy this is a site here that I worked on several years ago back in 2005 and then again in 2007 it's a really interesting site it's a smoking gun an archaeological smoking gun it's situated where that red dot is as I said a stone's throw away from the hunter-gatherer site I've been using as a case study to illustrate you know complex hunter-gatherers throughout the region I'm using my little people again the little icons to suggest what the population makeup would have been now if we go back to this previous slide it's suggested that they're all modern East Asian looking farmers no a lot of these sites are dated I'm using BC on this I should have standardized it for the full present but just add a couple of thousand years and you'll know how many years ago but they range in age from nearly 4,000 years ago to this site here is Maconville of Cambodia which is maybe 13 or 1400 years old if the East Asian person is in front that means a dominant genetic contribution is East Asian but there's still a residual indigenous signature going on if they're next to each other it means half-half if one is as in Pomsnoy the Cambodian one which is really interesting because it's very late there's still a very strong indigenous presence there so what I'm saying is that yeah these farmers came pouring down but there was a lot of genetic interaction going on okay a lot some sites more than others and man back when these are just fancy schematics to sort of differentiate between populations based on you know whatever set of criteria you're interested in you might be measuring the head or looking at the teeth or whatever it's a proxy for genetic distance but our mum back we have people that look like this people that look like this and people that look like the combination of the two and they're all treated the same although in in some circumstances where we have elite burials guess who the elites are this is one of our late these guys are the elites not the new incoming farmers so these hunter-gatherers didn't disappear they're potentially still with us okay so conclusions in the first slides I showed you you know these early population movements were clearly influenced by major climate events such as you know the the northern colonisation of Siberia couldn't have occurred until marine isotope stage three when there was a massive warming event and allowed them to move into that area the southern route would have been fine regardless of what period of the glaciation we're in but we know the coastline was a hell of a lot different back then that it is is today okay so that would have been a totally different environment back then more recent minor climate events such as that one that started around eight or nine thousand years ago and finished four or five thousand years ago I say minor we're talking about one to four degrees increase in temperature wherever you are and between 15 a hundred percent increase in precipitation depending on where you are so minor that's actually quite quite significant that many climate change event seems to coincide with the emergence of both farming and complex hunter-gathering these hunter-gatherers are as sophisticated as complex however measured than their relative farmers or neighboring farmers farmers and hunter-gatherers have clearly adapted in their own ways to the environment what they've had to deal with we see these hunter-gatherers start to disappear when the climate starts to cool again but as I've just said they didn't totally disappear they're actually still with us and they have a very strong genetic signature still within Southeast Asia what about the future this is my last slide just remember the slide I threw up there on the right hand side this was a situation from you know 50 60,000 years ago until 20,000 years this is a situation today so we're roughly on this graph here this is a different scale we're looking at centuries here the 21st century we're about here this is a predicted climate modelling I don't know I was trying to search for some maps to see how much landmass we're gonna lose in the next several centuries this is how much we lost how much we gained during the last glacial maximum when all of that seawater was locked up in ice sheets this is where we are now and we've got you know we've got predicted climate change similar to this Holocene event where we've got one to four degree increases in temperature and obviously precipitation is going to depend on what part of the world you're going to be in but I definitely know that some parts of Southeast Asia what most of this part where the meat on is and much of southern Vietnam and Cambodia is going to disappear and quite a few other areas around here I think Australia is fairly safe for the most part although this is very low I am ran here the much of this area that's only fix the South Australians that's going to disappear that's a significant amount of landmass particularly if it's the landmass that we're living on so in the past we are dealing with relatively small populations our complex hunter-gatherers and our farmers are relatively small populations you know they can adapt to changes in climate although ultimately our complex hunter-gatherers didn't okay but it wasn't only climate change that dealt them a final blow it was massive demographic expansion from the north of them that you know was a final straw I guess the question is when we're not well I mean we're totally dependent on farming now most of us wouldn't consider ourselves to be farmers I think if anything if you think about it we what do we get most of our food we go into the supermarket so we're foragers yeah we're not hunter-gatherers we'll hunt a forager with foragers okay are we flexible enough to deal with what's coming I don't know I'm an archaeologist I only deal with stuff that happened in the past okay thank you