Pioneers at the Roof of the World

Tibet: Earlier humankind settlements than expected

Between the Himalayas, a sui generis state that have been governed for decades under the communist party rule, but without giving up its separatist roots, definetly an enigmatic state that has its own history.

Tibet is one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, winter temperature plunging as low as -40 degrees Celsius. Until very recently, scientists believed that the first inhabitants of Tibet arrived only around 4,000 years ago, after the end of its most recent Ice Age. They theorized that previously the Tibetan plateau had been covered by ice a mile thick.

Then, in 1986, a researcher from Hong Kong University named David Zhang made a remarkable discovery. HIgh on a mountain slope about 85 km from the city of Lhasa, he found 19 human handprints and footprints, embedded in ancient rock at the edge of a hot spring. But the real surprise didn't come until 1999. That's when he and his colleagues tried a technique called optical dating, which revealed that the prints were actually more than 20,000 years old

Zhang determined that he handprints and footprints were made by six different people, two of them children. He also found the remains of a stove there. It seems likely that this group of early tibetans came to the hot spring to take refuge form the extreme col of the Ice Age. Zhang says "the findings mean that human settlement occured here 16,000 years earlier than scientists had thought, and also that human beings had the ability to adapt to such a cold environment".

But why did they press their hands and feet into the mud? Zhang thinks they did it out of curiosity, or maybe just for fun. The soft mud around the spring preserved the prints when it later turned into a form of stone caller travertine. In the future, Zhang hopes to explore further on the Tibetan Plateau to collect more evidence of early Tibetan settlements. Chinese government-backed programs have been executed as well to strength efforts in developing the prehistorian anthropology of the first tibetan human settlers.

Source: Investigative research, most of info can be found in news media e.g. this CNN news article about it dated 2002 http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/04/17/tibet.iceage/

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