Northeast Asia in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene

This paper considers the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene record of the comparatively unexplored area of Northeast Siberia. This area is of key importance for our understanding of the first peopling of the Americas. Late Pleistocene cultural traditions include microblade (with wedge-shaped cores and bifaces), non-microblade, and pebble-based. No properly dated Pleistocene pebble complexes are however known in the area. In the Early Holocene new cultural traditions are referred to as Mesolithic or Holocene (relict) Palaeolithic. The major criterion for separating these epochs is the disappearance of wedge-shaped cores and the appearance of conical and prismatic ones. So far there is no clear evidence that Paleoindian cultures originated in Northeast Asia, but a fluted point from Uptar (King and Slobodin 1996) shows that the technique of fluting was known in Northeast Asia at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. © 1999 Routledge.