Multiple hominin species used and/or produced stone tools (e.g., Australopithecus afarensis, Paranthropus robustus, Homo habilis), yet evidence suggests that only later Homo (i.e., H. erectus sensu lato) intensified and developed the behavior. This difference has been attributed to later Homo's...
Neandertals are our closest fossil relatives and have left a rich archaeological and fossil record, yet many aspects of their behavior are still under debate. In particular, their dietary patterns are an object of many studies, since food acquisition is a central feature of a species' adaptive...
The late Quaternary is characterized by massive extinctions of large mammals throughout the continents. Since recognition of the extinctions by 19th century scholars, understanding its causes has remained a challenge spanning the fields of archaeology, paleontology, paleoecology and climatology....
ABSTRACTAs museum shelves buckle under the weight of thousands of unstudied and virtually forgotten boxes of artifacts, many institutions are questioning the utility and benefit of future curation of these historically excavated materials. Much of the material in question is comprised of lithic...
This dissertation project sought to integrate multiple analytic and experimental methods to study the use of ochre pigments in Middle Stone Age (MSA) Africa. Ochre is a diverse category of iron-containing earth pigments, the appearance of which in MSA archaeological sites broadly coincides with...
Infectious disease has played an important role in driving human evolution and human population genetic variation. Malaria, caused by Plasmodium falciparum, is a particularly important infectious disease and is arguably one of the strongest selective forces in recent human evolution. Signatures...