Late Pleistocene of East Asia

This chapter focuses on the evolutionary and paleoecological context of Late Pleistocene large mammal faunas from East Asia. Through the Quaternary, the faunal physiognomy of East Asia has largely set the pretext for the present-day division between the Palearctic and Oriental zoogeographic realms; although recurrent climatic oscillations created faunal distribution patterns that were manifestly counterintuitive with respect to the traditionally understood geographic and environmental envelopes of many mammal taxa. The fossil record now convincingly demonstrates that keystone megafaunal herbivores of the mammoth steppe biome which characterized Middle-Late Pleistocene Northern Eurasia, such as Mammuthus, Coelodonta, and Bison, oversaw important hallmarks of their early adaptive evolution in northern China and the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. It is then paradoxical that the mammoth steppe biome only partially extended into northern China and Japan at its maximum expansion during the Last Glacial. Instead, mid-latitude Eastern Palearctic was mainly dominated by a Palaeoloxodon-Coelodonta association also frequented by Sinomegaceros and Stephanorhinus, suggesting closer ecological analogy with the Western Palearctic interglacial fauna demarcated by Palaeoloxodon and Stephanorhinus. In southern China, the Ailuropoda-Stegodon Faunal Complex constituted a mixture of Chinese endemics and species typical of today’s Indo-Malayan region (e.g., Pongo and Dicerorhinus), adapting to habitats which became more seasonal, with greater resource variability throughout the Pleistocene.