The Purpose of Our Research

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The purpose of our research is to determine the advancement of Homo sapiens toward the northeastern Eurasian continent during the last glacial period (about 70,000 years ago or later), and their adaptive behavior to the environment that existed as the background of their advancement. The area of our investigation and research is the Lena-Angara highland in the northern area of Lake Baikal, the Baikal low-mountain area in the southern area of Lake Baikal and the mountainous area of Inner Mongolia. We expect to achieve our goal through the collaborative research through multilateral and cross-disciplinary studies with researchers from a variety of study fields such as archaeology, archaeological chronology, paleontology, molecular phylogenetic evolution theory, ecogenetics, geological science and so forth.  In association with several research organizations of related countries such as Russia, Mongolia and China, we aim for the clarification of the paleo-environment under the oxygen isotope stage 3 (OIS3) of the geological area, and the cultural aspects as well as the adaptive behavior to the environment of human groups.


In recent years, the results of the investigation on the Rakhamat cave in Tajikistan and the Kara-Bom site in Altai revealed that homo sapiens spread from Africa approximately 100,000 years ago, and advanced toward the central Asia at least 40,000 years ago. Moreover, we reached a conclusion that humans attempted to advance toward the northern latitude of 70 degrees locally, that is, not very much very later than the advancement toward the Far East region. Under the circumstances, it is necessary to develop new scenarios to describe the process of the advancement towards and the spread of human being in northern Eurasia.


Needless to say, there is no question as to the absolute necessity of the development and acquisition of many cultural adaptation equipments for humans, a creature that originated in the Torrid Zone or subtropical zones in Africa, to advance to the cold region during the last glacial period. It is the very reason why we set the geological area of our investigation and research to from Inner Mongolia to the area around Lake Baikal which had never been covered over by an ice sheet throughout the last glacial period. We consider that the process of the development and the acquisition may be clarified by our investigation of and research on sites that remain widely in the region between several tens of thousand of years in Pleistocene epoch.

The advancement of humans towards the northern Eurasian continent (illustration by a research associate, Prof. Kato.)