Although greater Central Asia has been the focus of speculation concerning the antiquity of the human habitation of some of the Earth’s highest and driest ecosystems for more than eighty years, until recently archaeologists have contributed little to a coordinated understanding of the demographic and cultural components of this complex process.

 

    Archaeological studies undertaken during the last decade in Mongolia shed light on the earliest prehistoric human habitation of a broad and highly varied ecological corridor running from Lake Baikal in southern Siberia, south through the Gobi Desert.

 

    Current evidence suggests widespread occupation of this region at least as early as the Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 18-22,000 years ago) with some data indicating a substantially earlier human presence.

 

 

 

    John W. Olsen is Regents’ Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Je Tsongkhapa Endowment for Central and Inner Asian Archaeology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  He attended Florida State University and received Bachelor of Arts degrees with Honors in Anthropology and Oriental Studies from the University of Arizona.  Olsen holds Master of Arts and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley.  His research focuses on the Pleistocene prehistory of arid lands and high elevations in Central and Inner Asia.  Dr. Olsen has conducted archaeological fieldwork recently in the now independent Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, and in Russia, China, and Mongolia. 

 

    He is currently Co-Director of the Joint Mongolian-Russian-American Archaeological Expeditions and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Zhoukoudian International Paleoanthropological Research Center in Beijing.  Olsen is one of only a few foreign scholars to be awarded academic titles by the Mongolian Academy of Humanitarian Sciences (Academician, 1998) and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences (Doctoris Archaeologiae Honoris Causa, 2003). 

 

 

 

 

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