Western China
Tibet
The Tibetan Plateau, also known as the “Third Pole,” is one of the most challenging habitats on the planet. While selection at several genomic loci enabled early Tibetans to adapt biologically to living at high altitudes, the challenge of acquiring sufficient food from the frozen deserts of the plateau required novel cultural adaptations. However, we still know little about how ancient Tibetans who lived in different ecological niches on the plateau fed themselves. By combining archaeobotany, proteomics, and isotope analyses, our project aims to explore the complex high-altitude adaptations in prehistoric agriculture, pastoralism, and craft production. This project contributes to our understanding of the early peopling history on the Tibetan Plateau and how our species adapted to extreme environments.
Dr. Spengler first began collaborative work on archaeobotanical material from Tibet in 2013, resulting in a reassessment of the data on the earliest spread of agriculture in Tibet, which was published a year later (d’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2014). Subsequently, Dr. Spengler has worked on many different projects across western China, with a particular interest in the high elevations of Qinghai and Tibet. As one prominent example of this work, he collaborated with Yiming Yang and his colleagues on a study that identified some of the earliest use of cannabis for its chemical properties in Eurasia (Ren et al. 2018).
Li Tang has been leading a series of collaborative projects on the Tibetan Plateau, as a member of the Spengler Lab, since 2018. Among other projects, she has conducted considerable archaeobotanical research (Tang et al. 2021). Dr. Tang has also conducted isotopic studies on bone collagen collected from human remains across the Plateau, noting varying levels of grain consumption that appear to be determined by local ecological factors (Tang et al. forthcoming). She has analyzed dental calculus on teeth from ancient skeletal remains across Tibet, noting that local peoples consumed milk from sheep, goats, cows, and horses—possibly also yaks—in prehistory (Tang et al. 2023). This research is leading to a large-scale reassessment of everything that we thought we knew about the peopling of the highest elevation landscape that humans have ever adapted to.
Xinjiang
The northwestern arid regions of China harbored a key set of routes along the ancient Silk Road, with caravans jumping between desert oases. Long before an organized Silk Road existed, people were living in these oases and developing productive and stable economies. Dr. Spengler has fostered close connections with scholars working at archaeological sites across this region, who are interested in better understanding human adaptations to these deserts in the past.
For example, in collaboration with Xinying Zhou and his colleagues, a manuscript was published in Nature Plants that presents the oldest evidence of domesticated crops in far northern Asia. Archaeobotanical studies at the Tangtian Cave have demonstrated that people were farming wheat and barley in the foothills of the Altai by approximately 3200 B.C. (Zhou et al. 2019). In another important study, which also represents a collaboration with Dr. Zhou and his colleagues, isotopes for nitrogen and carbon were examined on ancient cereal grains from the site of Wupaer in the southern Taklimakan Desert. The study demonstrated that people were irrigating their crops in this hyper-arid region at least three millennia ago (Yang et al. 2020); a similar study conducted through the same collaborations yielded identical results (Zhou et al. 2020).
Taking a large-scale approach, a collaboration with a team of paleoclimatologists, directed by Liangcheng Tan, pulled together data to show that a mega drought may have made much of the region of eastern Central Asia uninhabitable more than five millennia ago; this may have facilitated isolation of East and West Asian populations before this time (Liangcheng et al. 2020). In another large-scale assessment of data, Hui Shen led a collaborative project that compiled all data from wood charcoal identification coming from archaeological sites across western China. Shen and her colleagues (2021) demonstrated broad shifts in forest tree composition over time across vast regions, linking these shifts to human-induced deforestation. For a follow-up study with Dr. Shen, see (Shen et al. 2023). They were also able to speculate about preferences in wood use, whereas people appear to have traveled over long distances in prehistory to collect resinous juniper and spruce wood.
