Since 1998, over 5500 people have died while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization. These deaths have primarily occurred in the Arizona desert. Despite the high volume of deaths, little experimental work has been conducted on Sonoran Desert taphonomy. In this study, pig carcasses were used as proxies for human remains and placed in different depositional contexts (i.e...

Revision of Upper Pleistocene lagomorph, canid, mustelid, and felid remains from Veternica Cave, Croatia, eliminates previously-identifi ed “cold-adapted” taxa like mountain hare (Lepus timidus), arctic fox (Alopex lagopus), and wolverine (Gulo gulo), and “steppe-adapted” animals like pika (Ochotona sp.) from the faunal assemblage. Our revision does not support an interpretation of signifi cant...

The Ficoncella site in northern Latium (Italy) represents a unique opportunity to investigate the modalities of a short occupation in an alluvial setting during the Lower Palaeolithic. The small excavation area yielded a lithic assemblage, a carcass of Palaeoloxodon antiquus, and some other faunal remains. The main objectives of the study are to better characterize the depositional context wher...

Stone Age research on Northern Europe frequently makes gross generalizations about the Mesolithic and Neolithic, although we still lack much basic knowledge on how the people lived. The transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Europe has been described as a radical shift from an economy dominated by marine resources to one solely dependent on farming. Both the occurrence and the geogr...

Faunal elements are groups of species with similar contemporary distributional patterns and may represent an historical association. It is hypothesized that members of a faunal element will respond similarly to environmental conditions. Since the mid-1960s the central plains has experienced cool, mesic (cryomesic) conditions. The distributional limits of members of the Boreal faunal element in ...

The accretion of the Indian subcontinent to Eurasia triggered a massive faunal and floral exchange, with Gondwanan taxa entering into Asia and vice versa. The traditional view on the Indian-Asian collision assumes contact of the continental plates during the Early Eocene. Many biogeographic studies rely on this assumption. However, the exact mode and timing of this geological event is still und...

Faunal remains from archaeological sites allow for the identification of animal species that enables better understanding relationships between humans and animals, not only their morphological information, but also ancient biomolecules (lipids, proteins, DNA) preserved in these thousands even millions years. However, due to costs efforts required biomolecular analysis, there has been considerab...