Today’s highly endangered orangutan populations of Sumatra and Borneo offer but a glimpse into the taxonomic diversity and vast regional distribution enjoyed by orangutans and their great ape relatives in East Asia over the past 2.5 million years—a time when tropical forest pongine habitats stretched from Java to southern China. In addition to the giant terrestrial ape Gigantopithecus, other great ape genera have been proposed to have existed within this hominid community. The taxonomic diversity of this great ape faunal array is even further complicated when the purported presence of hominins at Early Pleistocene sites older than 1.85 Ma is considered. Highly acidic, the jungle floors of East Asia are notoriously bad at fossil preservation decomposing skeletal and dental evidence quickly. Fortunately, ph-neutral limestone caves have acted to offset these forces. The outcome of this peculiar taphonomy has left us with many teeth, but very little bone. With only unassociated fossil dentition to work with, modern geometric morphometrics offers scientists one of the few cutting-edge tools capable of systematically assessing this material reliably. This dissertation applies modern geometric morphometric statistical analysis to over two thousand fossil hominid teeth (Appendix A) from the Quaternary of southern China and Southeast Asia, which offers unique insight into the taxonomic diversity present in this sole Pleistocene great ape community. This study provides a much clearer understanding of the composition, paleoecology, and regional distribution of Pleistocene great ape communities of East Asia. Concordant with previous research, the main study and pilot study conducted in this dissertation showed Homo sapiens to always be morphologically and statistically distinct from extant and fossil orangutans. In turn, Pongo pygmaeus and Pongo abelii were continuously shown to be distinct from each other as well as from fossil Pongo groups. This investigation refutes hominin assignments for several teeth previously placed within early East Asian hominins (showing them to be orangutans instead) but supports the hominin status of the Jianshi upper third premolar. In combination with a published age of 1.95–2.15 million years (Ma), the hominin assignment reaffirmed here for the Jianshi dentition originally classified as human by Liu, Clarke, & Xing (2010) may offer a challenge to evolutionary models that recognize the 1.85 Ma Dmanisi hominins as the earliest hominins outside of Africa. This fact is often lost on most contemporary scientists due to their preoccupation with the 2.5 Ma Longgupo mandibular fragment, once thought to be a hominin but now assignable to an ape. Like the Jianshi upper third premolar, it is also based on a single specimen (in this case, a mandibular fragment). This dissertation supports the existence of Ciochon’s (2009) “mystery ape”. It refutes Schwartz et al., (1995) multiple Vietnamese Pongo taxa, including the proposed genus “Langsonia,” which is reassigned here to Pongo or the “mystery ape,” while placing Vietnamese fossil orangutans into either Pongo weidenreichi or Pongo devosi. Teeth from the Ralph von Koenigswald collection originally assigned to “Hemanthropus” were also determined to be representative of either the “mystery ape” or Pongo. Indeterminate “hominin” teeth were assignable to either Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, or Pongo only; no evidence was found for any other types of hominin species present in the collections examined for this study.

本研究以新竹縣尖石鄉前山地區的旮旯牌與尖石兩個客家聚落的經濟活動為研究範疇，藉由史料爬梳與深度訪談建構兩個移居聚落的形成過程、產業類型及社會關係網絡的樣貌，細緻地討論兩者的經濟活動如何運作，並於原鄉經濟發展的不同階段中扮演角色；同時，運用鑲嵌理論討論經濟活動與社會關係如何交織互動。本研究有三個主要的研究發現：一、在平地人無法輕易取得原鄉土地所有權的情況下，地權狀態與地理區位對於移居聚落的經濟活動與社會關係形塑具有決定性影響；二、不同時期出現的平地人聚落處在原鄉經濟發展的不同位階上，從早期作為泰雅族人的佃農與第一線山林資源採伐的勞動者，轉變為平地商品與山林產物交換的中介者；三、Polanyi與Granovetter對於經濟與社會鑲嵌的討論，提供本文不同的觀察尺度來解釋兩聚落中出現的不同鑲嵌型態；此外，本研究以兩個聚落雜貨店交換行為為例，指出經濟活動的「鑲嵌標的」，以及作為「交換媒介的物品特質」皆可成為觀察鑲嵌性質的指標。整體而言，本文突破以原（被剝削者）漢（剝削者）的二元架構來解釋原鄉中經濟關係的討論模式，並對鑲嵌理論的實際運用提出新的思考方向。 / This study focuses on the economic activities of Ga La Pai Community and Jian Shi Community in the front-mountain area of Jianshi Township, Hsinchu County. Adopting the methods of literature review and in-depth interview, this study retraces the history of the forming of these two communities, explores the industries and social relationships within, reveals how their economic activities operated, and the roles they played in different development stages of this region. Base on the concept of embeddedness, this study also discusses the role of social relations in economic activities. There are three main findings in this study. First, the land tenure and location of settlement area have significant impacts on the residents’ economic activities and social relations. Second, non-indigenous settlement are in different stratums of indigenous economy in different periods. They were at once peasants of Tayal people and workers of forest logging, but later they transformed into agents for the exchanges of forest products and commodities from urban area. Third, the different concerns of embeddedness from Karl Polanyi and Mark Granovetter provide multiple scales of view to approach several types of embeddedness occurred in each community. Besides, the comparison of exchange systems between two grocery shops respectively from Ga La Pai Community and Jian Shi Community points out that both of “the subject of embeddedness” and “the nature of medium for exchange” can be the indexes reflecting the characteristics of embeddedness. In general, this study makes a breakthrough in elaborating the roles of non-indigenous in indigenous economy other than the “Han-Chinese (exploiter)/ indigenous people (exploited)” dichotomy. Furthermore, this study makes additional remarks to the concept of embeddedness after practice case studies.