New Investigations Into the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Rainforest Prehistory of Sri Lanka

New Investigations into the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Rainforest Prehistory of Sri Lanka Dissertation To Fulfil the Requirements for the Degree of „Doctor of Philosophy“ (PhD) Submitted to the Council of the Faculty of Arts of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena By Oshan Wedage Manjula Chanaka Gutachter: 1. Prof.Dr. Clemens Pasda 2. Prof. Dr. Michael Petraglia 3. Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier Tag der öffentlichen Verteidigung: 26. August 2020 Oshan Wedage Ph. D. Candidate Department of Archaeology Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Kahlaische Strasse 10 07745 Jena Germany Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 Late Pleistocene occupation of extreme environments ........................................................6 Late Pleistocene tropical forest occupation in the Old World and its material culture ......9 Sri Lanka: A brief geological, geographic, climatic, and environmental introduction .....13 Pleistocene archaeological and palaeoecological research in Sri Lanka .........................14 Remaining questions ..........................................................................................................17 Research outline and hypotheses for this thesis ................................................................20 Manuscript A Specialized rainforest hunting by Homo sapiens ~45,000 years ago ................................24 Manuscript B Microliths in the South Asian rainforest ~45-4 ka: New insights from Fa-Hien Lena Cave, Sri Lanka .........................................................................................................32 Manuscript C Late Pleistocene to Early-Holocene Rainforest Foraging in Sri Lanka: Multidisciplinary analysis at Kitulgala Beli-lena ..............................................................68 Discussion........................................................................................................................120 Chronology ......................................................................................................................121 Settlement and subsistence ...............................................................................................123 Technology .......................................................................................................................127 Microlith Technologies ....................................................................................................127 Osseous Technology .........................................................................................................131 Social and Symbolic Technologies...................................................................................132 Conclusion and Outlook ..................................................................................................134 References for Introduction and Discussion/Conclusion ...........................................138 Appendices ......................................................................................................................152 Further notes on stratigraphic phasing of Fa Hien Lena ..................................................153 Further detail relating to analyses of faunal remains from Fa Hien Lena .......................163 Lithic Materials from Fa Hien Lena ................................................................................216 Supplementary References ...............................................................................................223 Summary ..........................................................................................................................225 Zusammenfassung (Summary in German) ......................................................................229 Curriculum Vitae .............................................................................................................233 Statement of honour .........................................................................................................238 Introduction The timing, routes, and nature of the dispersal of our species, anatomically modern1 Homo sapiens, Out of Africa during the Late Pleistocene (125-12 ka) remains one of the most debated topics in current palaeoanthropology and archaeology. In terms of timing, there has been a long- running debate between scholars that argue that our species left Africa prior to the end of Marine Isotope Stage 5 (130-80 ka) (e.g. Petraglia et al., 2010; Groucutt et al., 2015, 2017; Hershkovtiz et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2010) and those that believe this only occurred c. 60 ka (e.g. Mellars, 2005, 2006; Soares et al., 2011 Mellars et al., 2013). With respect to routes, previous arguments have suggested that our species made use of corridors of grassland that extended across temperate, arid, and tropical environments in Eurasia under climatically favourable conditions (Bird et al., 2005; Boivin et al., 2013). In the context of a ‘southern’ route of dispersal from Africa, through South Asia, and into Southeast Asia and Australasia, alternative narratives have centred on coastal resources as providing a rich source of protein and driving rapid human dispersal around the Indian Ocean rim (Mellars, 2005; 2006). Nevertheless, recent archaeological research across Southeast Asia, Sahul, the Middle East, and notably South Asia, have highlighted potential colonization of a diversity of extreme environments, including deserts, high-altitude settings, and tropical rainforests, during the Late Pleistocene (Deraniyagala, 1992; Summerhayes et al., 2010; Blinkhorn et al., 2013; Roberts et al., 2015a, 2017; Roberts and Stewart, 2018; Zhang et al., 2018). Over the course of the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent that H. sapiens did manage ‘early’ migrations beyond Africa. Not only have new fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco 1 Note, throughout this thesis, ‘Homo sapiens’ and ‘humans’ are used to refer solely to anatomically modern humans, defined on the basis of Stringer (2016), and not to Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) or Denisovans. 1 demonstrated that our species emerged gradually in various parts of Africa from as early as 300 ka (Hublin et al., 2018), but fossil findings in Israel from Misliya Cave indicate that it had made it beyond the African continent by 194-177 ka (Hershkovitz et al., 2018). Early finds of H. sapiens fossils at Skhul (120-90 ka) and Qafzeh (100-90 ka) from the same country further confirm an earlier route (Valladas et al., 1987; Stringer et al., 1989; Grün and Stringer, 2000). Although the populations that produced these fossils have often been argued to be part of a failed dispersal event (Shea and Bar-Yosef, 2005), fossil finds of H. sapiens in Saudi Arabia c. 80 ka (Groucutt et al., 2018), and China c. 139-111 ka at Tongtianyan Cave (Shen et al., 2002), 106 ka at Zhirendong (Liu et al., 2010), and c. 100 ka at Fuyan Cave (Liu et al., 2015), while hotly contested in the case of some of the Chinese examples (Michel et al., 2016) suggest a wider phenomenon (Bae et al., 2017). Nevertheless, more sustained fossil, material culture, and genetic evidence for our species seems to appear between 60-40 ka in Europe, Asia, and Australia (Conard, 2010; Rabett, 2012; Soares et al., 2011; Pagani et al., 2015; Groucutt et al., 2015; Bae et al., 2017), implying later potential population replacements as the result of renewed migrations from Africa. The last decade has also produced a diversity of multidisciplinary archaeological records, particularly from sites across Asia, that have enabled more detailed insights into Late Pleistocene human adaptations to environments previously considered to have been intentionally avoided by foragers until much later (Gamble, 1993). One of these, tropical forests, was traditionally assumed to be a barrier to human occupation due to a lack of large protein-rich resource packages, highly-spaced carbohydrates, dense vegetation, and issues of thermoregulation (Bailey et al., 1989; Gamble, 1993; Boivin et al., 2013). Moreover, highly acidic, hydrologically active deposition conditions have been assumed to be poor places to look for well-preserved 2 archaeological sequences with organic materials that could be used to reconstruct human subsistence (Tappen, 1994). However, archaeological and palaeoanthropological work across Southeast Asia (Barker et al., 2007; Barker and Farr, 2016; Westaway et al., 2017; Roberts, 2019), Melanesia (Gosden, 2010; Summerhayes et al., 2010, 2016), and China (Liu et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2015) has presented growing evidence for the sophisticated use of tropical forest resources from as early as 45 ka, and potentially 100-75 ka (Roberts and Petraglia, 2015). South Asia, and notably the island of Sri Lanka, has also played an increasingly significant role in discussions of the capacity of Late Pleistocene members of our species to inhabit tropical forests. As early as 1992, Siran Deraniyagala argued for the significance of Sri Lanka as part of the story of Late Pleistocene human dispersals by arguing that microlithic technologies, similar to those associated with sophisticated hunting strategies of diverse prey species in ‘Mesolithic’ Europe, dated to older on the island than anywhere else (1992; Perera, 2010). More recently dated to c. 38-36,000 years old (Roberts et al., 2015b) they are now far from the oldest globally, but they are the most ancient in South Asia and, at the sites of Fa

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