Once abundant in the Arctic, bison (Bison bison) declined almost to extinction in the North but have subsequently been reintroduced into Alaska. The predecessors of these modern bison were the ancient steppe bison (Bison priscus), which were abundant throughout the Northern Hemi…
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The goal of my dissertation is to expand our knowledge of how mammalian diets are affected by and affect other ecological and evolutionary processes. I did this by evaluating how diet is related to mammalian diversity, body mass, and evolution. I also evaluated and how environme…
This project expands on the 4200-year history of Laguna Los Mangos by adding diatom analysis to existing records of pollen, charcoal, elemental composition, and stable light isotope analysis. Diatoms were counted in peroxide-treated samples, and data were analyzed using cluster …
Algonquin Provincial Park (APP), located in south-central Ontario, spans an area of 7,635 km 2 and is a destination for over 800,000 visitors a year. These visitors include cottage owners, as cottages have been leased in APP since the early 1900s. In October 2017, policy makers …
My dissertation weaves together paleo-ecological data, archival records, historical evidence, and modern inventories to understand the long-term impacts of fire disturbance on forest carbon dynamics in Six Rivers National Forest, California. Over three chapters, I use my results…
Historical records suggest that the coastlines of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and the Sultanate of Oman have been subjected to catastrophic storm and tsunami events throughout recorded history. In 1945, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ∼100 km south of Karachi, Pakistan generated…
This thesis reports on the analysis of seed macroremain samples dating to the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age from Jerablus Tahtani located in present day northern Syria. Detailed numerical and statistical analyses were used to evaluate the relative importance of crop spe…
The Tertiary fossil record of Africa has offered several important primate species relevant to understanding crucial moments in primate evolution. Regrettably, the origin of apes has not been one of them. The reason for this was a large temporal gap of African fossil mammals tha…
The 140 m Dababaiya Corehole (DBQ), drilled in the Dababiya Quarry about 35 km south of Luxor, Upper Nile Valley, Egypt, spans the stratigraphic interval from upper Campanian/lower Maastrichtian (the Globotruncana aegyptiaca Zone) to the lower Eocene. This study is devoted to an…
Novel molecular isotope proxies measured in bivalve tissues represent a wide range of approaches for tracing ecological and climatological change through time and space. In comparison to other oceanographic data used to reconstruct modern and past biogeochemical cycles (e.g., ma…
Organic matter dynamics were investigated in the surface peat layer (acrotelm) in study sites traversing three raised ombrotrophic peat deposits, containing up to 3, 6 and 12m, respectively, of peat located on the east coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The three deposits were uniform…
The Pliocene is an epoch of climatic transition between the warm Miocene and the cool Pleistocene. This climatic transition may have played a critical role in the evolution of many groups of African mammals, and perhaps in the emergence of the genus Homo and the robust australop…
A comprehensive study of Maastrichtian planktic foraminiferal populations from low and midlatitudes localities provides crucial knowledge on the paleoecology and life strategies of individual species, and new insights their biotic response to climatic perturbations preceding the…
The cause for large mammal extinctions in the Late Pleistocene has been debated for decades, with two main factors constantly discussed--human hunting and climatic change. The Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus represents a case study of one such extinction event. The last appearance of…
Liang Bua, an archaeological cave site on the Indonesian island of Flores, is best known as the type locality of the enigmatic hominin species, Homo floresiensis. Excavations at Liang Bua have recovered a very large number of vertebrate remains, including more than 230,000 bone …
Research carried out in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa was conceived to examine specific points of correlation between several sources for reconstructing early African history. The primary source is historical linguistics. Cultural and technical vocabulary, collected f…
In order to address how aquaculture has influenced the Setiu estuary and lagoon of northeast peninsular Malaysia, foraminifera, sediment grain-size, and carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios and abundances were analyzed in surface samples collected from beneath and around three flo…
Long-chain n -alkanes are extensively utilized terrestrial plant biomarkers that serve as paleoenvironment and paleoclimate proxy records. However, robust proxy interpretations require robust calibrations, and a major goal of this work is to ground-truth the interpretative frame…
The parallel development of archaeology and Quaternary geology in several regions of the world is reviewed, and common problems in dating and correlating alluvial sequences are discussed. Buried archaeological remains and radiometric dates provide a chronological framework for t…