ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses primarily on the Palaeolithic archaeology of mainland Southeast Asia, though many of the arguments presented can be generalised to other parts of Eastern Eurasia. One of the key anthropological challenges of prehistoric archaeological research is to investigate the ways that ancient humans and their ancestors adapted to different environments through space and time. By examining how this occurred, archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists shed a clarifying light on those adaptive behaviours that ultimately enabled our species Homo sapiens to disperse across the globe, ultimately becoming the most successful invasive species in the history of planet earth, olonizing and transforming nearly every hospitable environment on the planet. Stone tool assemblages are key tools for reconstructing the human past, due in part to their survivability and relative abundance in the archaeological record. However, without proper contextual information and an appropriate theoretical framework, it can be easy to misinterpret human behaviour from lithic assemblages.
