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Lessons From The Past: Unfolding The Dynamics Among Climate, Balkan Landscapes, And Humans Over The Past Millennium, Charuta J. Kulkarni
Lessons From The Past: Unfolding The Dynamics Among Climate, Balkan Landscapes, And Humans Over The Past Millennium, Charuta J. Kulkarni
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The primary objective of this doctoral dissertation is to reconstruct the environmental history of the Central Balkans (Serbia) over the past millennium utilizing biological proxies (pollen, spores, and charcoal), geochemical signals through X-ray fluorescence (XRF), statistical analyses, and atomic mass spectrometry (AMS) 14C chronology. This dissertation establishes the first chronological framework for vegetation-landscape changes in Serbia and discusses the role of humans and climate as underlying processes.
Chapter 1 discusses the background and the nature of the research problem followed by the extensive literature review on the topic of the Holocene climate and paleoecology. The state of Holocene paleoecology …
Climate, Ecology, And Human Evolution During The Plio-Pleistocene, Scott Adam Blumenthal
Climate, Ecology, And Human Evolution During The Plio-Pleistocene, Scott Adam Blumenthal
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A major goal of paleoanthropology is to identify the selective pressures associated with hominin biological and behavioral evolution, yet establishing cause-effect relationships between climate, ecology, and human evolution remains problematic. This dissertation seeks to investigate hominin paleoecology in eastern Africa by reconstructing aspects of climate and ecology using stable isotope analysis.
The first part of this dissertation is focused on the ecology of primates and hominins. Modern tropical African ecosystems provide a useful model for understanding the ecological correlates of isotopic variation in the fossil record, and living primates provide a useful model for understanding the ecological significance of isotopic …