The Tibetan Plateau has been the site of some huge archaeological discoveries.
OUR WORLD: A SAMPLING OF
UC MERCED RESEARCH WITH GLOBAL REACH MARK ALDENDERFER The Himalaya is a cold, unforgiving place. Home to some of the Earth’s highest peaks, including Mount Everest, the Asian mountain range separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau is known for extreme weather. It’s here where archaeologist Mark Aldenderfer peers into the mystery of highland dwellers. Why live here when lower lands are more fertile and abundant with resources? How did they adapt to environments as high as 16,000 feet? “Although high-elevation environments may appear forbidding, there are a number of instances in human history when they were likely seen as very attractive,” Aldenderfer said. “Periods of warming, documented by painstaking paleoclimatic research in the Himalayas and other mountainous regions, would have allowed familiar low-elevation species to migrate into the mountains, creating new, fertile niches for hunting and gathering. People took advantage of these opportunities and began to exploit the new environments.”
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FALL 2013 | UC MERCED MAGAZINE
Aldenderfer, the dean of UC Merced’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, has turned his research attention to the Mustang district of Nepal. In places it seems only birds could reach lie man-made caves carved deep into the rock. National Geographic, which has funded his exploration into Mustang, refers to these sky caves as one of world’s greatest archaeological mysteries. The thousands of caves have served three major uses: burial chambers 3,000 years ago; dwellings from 1100-1600 AD; and in more recent times, as places for meditation, military observation and storage. Aldenderfer’s quest is to search the sky tombs for human remains, from which members of his team can extract DNA in hopes of identifying the genetic changes that allowed people to survive the seemingly uninhabitable region. “Our species evolved at low elevations — oxygen- and resource-rich environments. But to live permanently above 7,500 feet requires both physiological and cultural adaptations for survival,” Aldenderfer said.
BY TONYA KUBO University Communications
“I want to recover data that may help to resolve these questions.” Aldenderfer returned to the Tibetan Plateau this fall to reexamine archaeological sites thought to date between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. Understanding the age of these sites is crucial to evaluating arguments about the peopling of the plateau and the antiquity of the genetic changes that had to take place to make it possible to live there.
Forty-three hundred feet above the valley floor, Dean Mark Aldenderfer stands at A Chusang, Nepal, archeological site thought to be as old as 20,000 years.