Ice Age Climate SE Asia

A tentative piece of evidence that might suggest the geoid of the earth was different during the last Ice Age – particularly during the Late Glacial Maximum. I picked it up from reading Current World Archaeology 122 page 12. Charles Higham has done a lot of archaeology in regions such as SE Asia, and here he writes about a particular kind of pottery, Hoabinhian. And an excavation that goes back as far as 40,000 years ago. It seems the environment of SE Asia was quite unlike what it is nowadays in those far off times. It was almost steppe like. Or at least, a mixture of forest and grassland, typical of the temperate zone of mid latitudes. It had wild cattle, water buffalo, and deer. At the end of the Pleistocene the climate switched to a more tropical zone – of rainforest. It had a completely different set of animals – and this climate has persisted through the Holocene. More or less. Higham has an interest in hunter gatherers – and the Late Glacial Maximum was an era of hunter gatherer societies. Some of these people have survived into the modern day, recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries. Small patches of hunter gatherers still exist in pockets. For example, in the deep forest of the Thai-Malaysia border zone. During the rainy seasons they used rock shelters – returning to their vegetation huts during the dry season. They also exist in Guangxi, the Chinese province bordering Vietnam. This is a region of karst outcrops and small rivers and streams, unattractive to incoming farmers. They also used pottery. Lots to learn from the prehistory of SE Asia. Even the Andaman Islanders get a mention.