Early anatomically modern humans in Eurasia: coping with climatic complexity

• Dr Rhiannon Stevens, University of Cambridge, UK

Rhiannon Stevens is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and also an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. Previous to this she obtained a BSc joint honours degree in Geography and Archaeology from the University of Leicester and an MSc. in Quaternary Sciences from University College London and Royal Holloway. Moving to the University of Oxford to conduct her doctoral research, in 2004 she was awarded her DPhil in Archaeological Science. Her doctoral research focused on developing faunal isotopes as palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental proxies. In 2004 she awarded an Anne McLaren Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham and the NERC Isotope Geoscience Laboratory, then moved to be a Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and in 2007 received the Gibbs Fellowship from Newnham College, Cambridge.

Her research focuses on investigating the relationship between early human behaviour and climate change. She is currently involved in research projects in North Africa, Central Europe and Northwest Europe. Her interests include the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, the arrival of modern humans in Europe, and the response of humans and fauna to rapid climate change during the Palaeolithic. She uses isotopic techniques along with a variety of other methodologies to reconstruct past climates and environments at archaeological sites. 

• Professor Martin Jones, University of Cambridge, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Martin Jones has been Professor of Archaeological Science at Cambridge since 1990, where he leads a group researching the deep history of foodways and agriculture through a range of bio-archaeological and genetic methods. His two principal current research interests include the origins of modern food-sharing behaviour, and the spread of agricultural resources in both directions across prehistoric Eurasia.  Over the past five years he has worked with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and PKU to study agricultural origins and spread from North China.  Back in the UK, he has also chaired a number of panels involved with the promotion and resourcing of archaeological science for the NERC, AHRC and Wellcome Trust.  His recent books include The Molecule Hunt, archaeology and the search for ancient DNA, and Feast: why humans share food. 

• Professor Denis-Didier Rousseau, CNRS, France
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor Paul Valdes, University of Bristol, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Paul Valdes is Professor of Physical Geography and Head of the School of Geographical Sciences. He is an internationally recognized researcher on modelling the Earth system, especially focussing on past change. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers on various aspects of past, present, and future climate change. The work spans all time periods from millions of years into the past, to thousands of years into the future, and particularly examines the interactions between the climate system and other aspects of change including the impact on humans. Recent work has focussed on understanding the temporal variability of climate during the last 120,000 years.

He is also non-executive director of Greenstone Carbon Management. In 2007, he was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Prize for his work on climate change. 

• Professor Michael Petraglia, University of Oxford, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Michael Petraglia is Professor of Human Evolution and Prehistory, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. He is Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Asian Archaeology, Art and Culture. He has conducted large scale, interdisciplinary field programmes in the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian peninsula.  He is interested in out of Africa dispersals, the evolution of cognition, and the evolution of modern human behaviour. He has recently co-edited the book, “The Evolution of Human Populations in Arabia: Paleoenvironments, Prehistory and Genetics” (Springer Press, 2009), and he is currently editing a special volume for Quaternary International on the environmental and evolutionary impact of the Toba volcanic super-eruption of 74,000 years ago.  

• Professor Liping Zhou, Peking University, China
• Audio recording (mp3)

Liping Zhou is a Cheung Kong Professor of Physical Geography at Peking University in Beijing, China. He serves as the Deputy Director of Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes. His research has been mainly on long-term environmental change in loess regions of northern mid-latitudes. He conducted fieldwork at numerous sites for paleoenvironmental and archaeological studies. He has been working extensively on chronology of the Eurasian loess sequences and lake sediments. Part of his current research includes the evaluation of the impact of land use change on carbon dynamics in grassland of northern China. He is also responsible for the AMS facility of Peking University.

Liping Zhou studied Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology as an undergraduate at Peking University. After completing a PhD (with A G Wintle) on luminescence dating and environmental magnetism at University of Cambridge, he continued this research at School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, then McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cavendish Laboratory and the Godwin Laboratory in the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge. He returned to Peking University in 1999.   

• Dr Dustin White, University of Southampton, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dustin White's scientific interests are in the fields of prehistoric archaeology and Quaternary geology. In 2006 he completed his PhD at the University of Alberta in Canada and following postdoctoral research at Cambridge and Oxford is currently a Research Fellow in Archaeology at the University of Southampton, UK. Since 2008 he has been a member of the RESET consortium investigating cryptotephra and the chronology of the Middle and early Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and North Africa. He is also a co-investigator with the Baikal-Hokkaido Archaeology Project, a long-running study of Holocene climate change, hunter-gatherer bioarchaeology, and palaeoecology in northeast Asia. Over the last 15 years he has conducted field research throughout Europe, Siberia, Japan, Mongolia, China, NW Africa, Canada, and USA. 

• Dr Ulrich Müller, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
• Audio recording (mp3)

Ulrich Müller earned his PhD in Physical Geography at the University of Tübingen in 2001. His doctoral thesis examined vegetation and climate change in the northern alpine foreland during the late Quaternary. From 2002-2004 he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the NSF-Project: “The climate during the declining stage of the last interglacial” at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Columbia University of New York. Since 2004 he is a Fellow at the Institute of Geosciences, Goethe-University of Frankfurt and became approved in 2007 as a Senior Scientist and Reader (Habilitation) in Physical Geography and Quaternary Climate Change.

His research expertise is in the fields of: (1) Mechanisms and impact of climate change in the Quaternary. In this field his attention is on the phasing of orbital forcing and the resulting ice-age cycles, changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation and impact on terrestrial environment, and on the influence of pCO2 on climate and environmental change. (2) Influence of climate-related environmental changes on the genus Homo. In this field he is interested in the role of long and short-term climate change in the dispersal process of hominids from Africa. His particular interest is related to the question why Homo sapiens became the only remaining species with global distribution. 

• Professor John F. Hoffecker, University of Colorado, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

John F Hoffecker is a Fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado.  He received degrees from Yale (1975), the University of Alaska (1979), and the University of Chicago (1986), as well as an honorary degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences (2005).  Much of his research and writing has been focused on the Paleolithic archaeology of Russia, specifically the Northern Caucasus and the central Russian Plain. He also has conducted field research in Alaska during the past three decades, investigating early sites in the south-central interior and late prehistoric settlements on the northern coast.  He is the author of Desolate Landscapes: Ice-Age Settlement in Eastern Europe (2002), A Prehistory of the North (2005), Human Ecology of Beringia (with Scott A Elias) (2007), and Landscape of the Mind: Human Evolution and the Archaeology of Thought (2011).     

• Professor Mark G. Thomas, University College London, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Mark Thomas has worked extensively on understanding how humans have evolved and migrated around the World. He has used genetic data – including ancient DNA – computer simulations and archaeological information to examined the origins and past migrations of a number of specific human populations including Jewish and Judaic groups, British populations and a number of enigmatic European and African peoples. In recent years he has worked on using 14C data as a proxy for past demography, on modelling cultural evolution to better understand the origins of modern human behaviour, and to examine ethnic structuring in past populations, on recent natural selection using genetic data – particularly in relation to diet and infectious disease – and on gene-culture co-evolution, particularly the origins of lactase persistence and dairying in Europe and Africa. 

• Dr Ian Barnes, Royal Holloway, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dr Ian Barnes is Reader in Molecular Palaeobiology in the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway. He uses molecular techniques to investigate a range of evolutionary problems, largely through the use of ancient DNA - DNA recovered from historical, archaeological and palaeontological materials. A primary focus has been on the Late Pleistocene Holarctic, a period where many large mammal species died out, but where some seem to have flourished. He is investigating a complex series of changes in climate, vegetation, sea-levels and glacial extents, as well as the arrival of modern humans in the region. The research examines the relationship between the histories of these animals, and the complexities of environmental change. 

• Professor Nicholas Conard, University of Tübingen, Germany
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Conard earned his bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and chemistry at the University of Rochester in 1983. In 1986 he was awarded an interdisciplinary master’s degree in physics, geology and anthropology in Rochester. Following studies in Freiburg and Cologne, Professor Conard earned master’s and doctoral degrees in anthropology at Yale University in 1988 and 1990.

Professor Conard worked as an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Connecticut from 1991-1993. From 1993-1995 he worked as a Humboldt research fellow at the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz/Neuwied. In 1995 he was appointed Chair of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. He is director of the Urgeschichtliches Museum in Blaubeuren. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Geosciences 1998-2000 and as a vice dean of the faculty from 2004-2006. In 2005 he taught as a visiting professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. Since 2006 he has served as an elected senator in the University Senate. He founded and directed the University of Tübingen’s course of study in paleoanthropology from 2000 - 2010. In 2008, he was elected Director of the Center for Scientific Archaeology in Tübingen. Beginning in 2009 he has served as co-director of Tübingen’s MSc program in Archaeological Sciences. In 2009 he co-founded the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoecology of the University of Tübingen.

Professor Conard’s main areas of research include: Paleolithic archaeology; lithic, taphonomic, faunal and spatial analysis of archaeological sites; Pleistocene chronostratigraphy; evolution and dispersal of modern humans; environmental reconstruction and settlement history of western Eurasia and Africa, as well as the origins of agriculture and sedentism. 

• Professor Paul Haesaerts, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium
• Audio recording (mp3)

Paul Haesaerts joined the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in 1975 after gaining his Master's degree in Geology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (1966) and his PhD in Sciences from the Free University of Brussel (1973).  From 1985 – 2007 he was also External lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Quaternary Geology).

Since 1967, his research has been concentrated mostly on the loess deposits of the Eurasian Plain, focusing on palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of Palaeolithic sites. This approach is notably restsing on the study of paleosols and periglacial phenomena, completed by palaeobotanical analysis (anthracology and palynology); it furthers implies the defining of the chronostratigraphic context and the chronological frame of the loess sequences based on long series of radiocarbon dates.

Main fields of research: Upper and Middle Pleistocene loess sequences related to fluviatile deposits in Northern France (Somme Valley), Middle Belgium and Germany (Middle Rhine Area); Upper Pleistocene loess sequences with pluristratified Palaeolithic settlements  of Austria  (Willendorf and Grubgraben), Czech Republic (Dolni Vestonice), Northern Romania (Mitoc), Republic of Moldova (Cosautsi), Ukraine (Molodova and Mezherich), Central Russia (Kostienki) and Siberia (Kurtak, Afontova Gora and Malta); stratigraphy, palaeoecology and archaeology of the Plio-Pleistocene deposits of the Shungura Formation in South Ethiopia (1971-1982); loess sequences of China and Tadjikistan encompassing the last 2.6 MA (1990 - 1995). 

• Professor Jiří Svoboda, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Ph Dr Jiří Svoboda, DrSc, is professor of anthropology at the Masaryk University, Brno, and head of the Paleolithic and Paleoethnology Department at the Institute of Archaeology, Brno and Dolní Věstonice, Czech Republic. Research at Paleolithic sites in the Czech Republic, expeditions to Sahara and Siberia. Author or co-author of Hunters Between East and West (Plenum, New York-London, 1996, with V Ložek and E Vlček), Hunters of the Golden Age (Leiden, 2000, with Roebroeks, M Mussi and K Fennema), Stránská skála (Harvard University Press, 2003, with Ofer Bar-Yosef), Early Modern Human Evolution in Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006, with E Trinkaus), and editor of The Dolní Věstonice Studies, volumes 1-18.  

• Dr Lenka Lisá, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic
• Audio recording (mp3)

Lenka Lisá was born in Czech Republic and finished her University education in Masaryk University in Brno. As a postdoc fellow, she worked for two years at the Department of Archaeology at the Cambridge University and then moved back to Prague, where she currently works as Quaternary geologist and geoarchaeologist in the Institute of Geology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Her interest is concerned with the origin of sediments in archaeological context and the study of climatic changes. Her recent projects include the sedimentological and micromorphological work in Russia, Sudan, Poland and Czech Republic including loess stratigraphy in the context of Palaeolithic, Holocene alluvial sediments and the study of soil and antropogenic sediments. 

• Dr Rhiannon Stevens, University of Cambridge, UK

Rhiannon Stevens is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow based at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and also an affiliated lecturer at the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. Previous to this she obtained a BSc joint honours degree in Geography and Archaeology from the University of Leicester and an MSc. in Quaternary Sciences from University College London and Royal Holloway. Moving to the University of Oxford to conduct her doctoral research, in 2004 she was awarded her DPhil in Archaeological Science. Her doctoral research focused on developing faunal isotopes as palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental proxies. In 2004 she awarded an Anne McLaren Research Fellowship at the University of Nottingham and the NERC Isotope Geoscience Laboratory, then moved to be a Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and in 2007 received the Gibbs Fellowship from Newnham College, Cambridge.

Her research focuses on investigating the relationship between early human behaviour and climate change. She is currently involved in research projects in North Africa, Central Europe and Northwest Europe. Her interests include the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa, the arrival of modern humans in Europe, and the response of humans and fauna to rapid climate change during the Palaeolithic. She uses isotopic techniques along with a variety of other methodologies to reconstruct past climates and environments at archaeological sites. 

• Dr Rebecca Farbstein, University of Cambridge, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Rebecca Farbstein earned her PhD in archaeology from the University of Cambridge in 2008. She was the 2009-2010 Caroline Villers Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art, and she is currently a visiting scholar at the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research in Cambridge. Her research uses chaîne opératoire methodology to uncover the sequential actions and choices artists made while manufacturing prehistoric art. Recovering technological information about art allows for more detailed analysis of the interlinked social, material, technical, and aesthetic components of Palaeolithic societies. She has conducted international museum and field-based research, most recently in Britain, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, and Lesotho. 

• Dr Piotr Wojtal, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dr Piotr Wojtal is a researcher at the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals, Polish Academy of Sciences. His research focus on zooarchaeological and taphonomical studies mammals remains from Upper Paleolithic sites of Central Europe. He is interested in interactions between large mammals and human hunters. 

• Professor Martin Jones, University of Cambridge, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

Martin Jones has been Professor of Archaeological Science at Cambridge since 1990, where he leads a group researching the deep history of foodways and agriculture through a range of bio-archaeological and genetic methods. His two principal current research interests include the origins of modern food-sharing behaviour, and the spread of agricultural resources in both directions across prehistoric Eurasia.  Over the past five years he has worked with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and PKU to study agricultural origins and spread from North China.  Back in the UK, he has also chaired a number of panels involved with the promotion and resourcing of archaeological science for the NERC, AHRC and Wellcome Trust.  His recent books include The Molecule Hunt, archaeology and the search for ancient DNA, and Feast: why humans share food.