Hunter-gatherer populations in greater northeast Asia experienced dramatic range expansions during the early Upper Paleolithic (45-22 ka) and the late Upper Paleolithic (18-10 ka), both of which led to intensive occupations of cold desert environments including the Mongolian Gobi and northwest China. Range contractions under the cold, arid extremes of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 22-18 ka) may have entailed widespread population extirpations. The high elevation Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is significantly more extreme in both climate and environment than either the Gobi or the Siberian taiga forests, and provides an ideal setting to test fundamental models of human biogeog-raphy in the context of regional population fluctuations. The area is presently occupied primarily by nomadic pastoralists, but it is clear that these complex middle Holocene (