Ayushi Nayak

The mountain foothills of Inner Asia have served as a corridor of communication and exchange for at least five millennia, fostering historically documented trade routes, such as the Silk Road and the Tea-Horse Road. Recent research has illustrated the important role that this mountain corridor played in the dispersal of crops and cultivation technology between northeast and southwest Asia between 5,000 and 1,000 years ago. However, the role of the mountain valleys along the southern rim of the Pamirs and Himalaya in facilitating crop dispersals has not been fully explored. Notably, ongoing debates over secondary dispersals of barley and wheat into China and the routes of dispersal for East Asian crops (Oryza sativa, Prunus persica, and P. armeniaca) into northern India are continuing topics of inquiry. In this article, we add to these discussions by focusing on archaeobotanical remains from the Barikot site (ca. 1200B.C.-A.D.50) in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan. The Swat Valley was an ancient settlement zone in the Hindukush-Karakoram foothills, whose cultural features have always had a strong link with Inner Asia. The archaeobotanical assemblage illustrates that a diverse array of crops, with origins across Asia, were cultivated around the same village. Additionally, these farmers likely implemented seasonal cropping cycles and irrigation that required differing labor inputs, water regimes, and seasonality.

Ancient DNA has allowed us to begin tracing the history of human movements across the globe. Narasimhan et al. identify a complex pattern of human migrations and admixture events in South and Central Asia by performing genetic analysis of more than 500 people who lived over the past 8000 years (see the Perspective by Schaefer and Shapiro). They establish key phases in the population prehistory of Eurasia, including the spread of farming peoples from the Near East, with movements both westward and eastward. The people known as the Yamnaya in the Bronze Age also moved both westward and eastward from a focal area located north of the Black Sea. The overall patterns of genetic clines reflect similar and parallel patterns in South Asia and Europe.

Environmentally transformative human use of land accelerated with the emergence of 5 agriculture, but the extent, trajectory, and implications of these early changes are not well understood. An empirical global assessment of land use from 10,000 BP to 1850 CE reveals a planet largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago, significantly earlier than land-use reconstructions commonly used by Earth scientists. Synthesis of knowledge contributed by over 250 archaeologists highlighted gaps in archaeological 10 expertise and data quality, which peaked at 2000 BP and in traditionally studied and wealthier regions. Archaeological reconstruction of global land-use history illuminates the deep roots of Earth's transformation through millennia of increasingly intensive land use, challenging the emerging Anthropocene paradigm that anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly recent. 15 One Sentence Summary: A map of synthesized archaeological knowledge on land use reveals a planet transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 3,000 years ago.

Authors not found on Academia:
Torben Rick, Tim Denham, Jonathan Driver, Heather Thakar, Amber L. Johnson, R. Alan Covey, Jason Herrmann, Carrie Hritz, Catherine Kearns, Dan Lawrence, Michael Morrison, Robert J. Speakman, Martina L. Steffen, Keir M. Strickland, M. Cemre Ustunkaya, Jeremy Powell, Alexa Thornton.