Two faculty members in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Anthropology are using modern scientific tools and working with international colleagues to help glean information about early peoples of East Asia.
Christopher Bae is working with an interdisciplinary team that includes geoscientists and biological anthropologists to investigate caves in the mountains of the South Korean peninsula. He is seeking hominid fossils and other early deposits that could shed light on human evolution during prehistory Asia.
Read in Mālamalama: Seeking Korea’s earliest inhabitants
Barry Rolett is interested in the evolutionary impact of rising sea levels, which may have triggered seafaring by early Fujian inhabitants in coastal China. He uses sediment coring to literally dig up the evidence of a maritime culture among probable predecessors to the Polynesian voyagers.
Read in Mālamalama: Tracing China’s ancient mariners.
