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Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent: Lower Paleolithic

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

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State of Knowledge and Current Debates

Introduction

The Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and Central Asia are key regions in human evolution as they are the gateway between our African homeland and the rest of the world. Understanding the early prehistory of these regions is critical to understanding both hominin dispersal patterns and the divergent evolutionary trajectories of hominins in different parts of the Old World. Here, the Middle East is defined as that part of Asia from Anatolia, the Levant, and the Sinai in the west to the Iranian plateau in the east, and from the southern shores of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Lesser Caucasus mountains in the north to Yemen in the south. The Indian Subcontinent is defined as stretching from the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau in the west to the Chittagong hills in the east, and from the High Himalayas in the north to Sri Lanka in the south. Central Asia is defined as extending from the Caspian Sea and the Ural River in...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Ceri Shipton

  2. School of Archaeology, Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Michael Petraglia

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  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Shipton, C., Petraglia, M. (2014). Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent: Lower Paleolithic. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1902

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