Books in the Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology series

This volume brings together diverse contributions from leading archaeologists and paleoanthropologists, covering various spatial and temporal periods to distinguish convergent evolution from cultural transmission in order to see if we can discover ancient human populations.

Bringing together archaeological, paleoenvironmental, paleontological and genetic data, this book makes a first attempt to reconstruct African population histories from out species' evolution to the Holocene.

The site is also important due to the discovery of Neanderthal remains by the current research group in addition to the Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils during a previous phase of excavation work led by M.

This volume focuses on small mammal fossils from extinct Asian faunas of about 1 to 7 million years ago in North China.

This volume presents the current state of knowledge on the osseous projectile weaponry that was produced by Pleistocene cultures across the globe.

This edited volume systematically reviews the evidence for early human presence in one of the most relevant geographic regions of Europe - the Balkans and Anatolia, an area that has been crucial in shaping the course of human evolution in Europe, but whose paleoanthropological record is poorly known.

This volume describes a 3.6 million-years-old partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis from the Woranso-Mille, central Afar, Ethiopia.

This book contributes to the current discussion on climate change by presenting selected studies on the ways in which past human groups responded to climatic and environmental change.

The objective of this volume is to showcase the contemporary state of research on recognizing and evaluating the performance of stone age weapons from a variety of viewpoints, including investigating their cognitive and evolutionary significance. New archaeological finds and experimental studies have helped to bring this subject back to the forefront of human origins research. In the last few years, investigations have expanded beyond examining the tools themselves to include studies of damage caused by projectile weapons on animal and hominin bones and skeletal asymmetries in ancient hominin populations. Only recently has there been a growing interest in controlled and replicative experiments. Through this book readers will be updated in the state of knowledge through a multidisciplinary scientific reconstruction of prehistoric weapon use and its implications.Contributions from expert authors are organized into three themed parts: recognizing weapon use (experimental and archaeological studies of impact traces), performance of weapon systems (factors influencing penetration depth etc.), and behavioral and evolutionary ramifications (cognitive and ecological effects of using different weapons).

The aim of the atlas is to provide images of taphonomic modifications, making it as comprehensive as possible with evidence presently available. This volume is intended both as a field guide for identifying taphonomic modifications in the field, and for use in the laboratory when collections of fossils are being analyzed. Images in the book are a combination of scanning electron micrographs, regular photographs, cross-sections of bones and line drawings and graphs. By providing good quality illustrations of taphonomic modifications, with links between similar types of modification, the atlas provides a reference source for identifying the agents responsible for the modifications, the processes by which they were formed, and the potential bias introduced by the processes.The authors also aim to emphasize on the directions they consider taphonomic studies should be headed. Firstly, we should seek to quantify the degree of bias introduced into a fossil fauna and to take account of this bias before interpreting the palaeoecology of the fossil site. Secondly, we should recognize that taphonomic modifications increase the information encoded in fossils by identifying perimortem and postmortem contexts. This provides a more dynamic and realistic view of the past.

The aim of the book is to present original and though-provoking essays in human paleontology and prehistory, which are at the forefront of human evolutionary research, in honor of Professor Yoel Rak (a leading scholar in paleoanthropology).¿ ¿The volume presents a collection of original papers contributed by many of Yoel's friends and colleagues from all over the globe. Contributions from experts around the globe fall roughly into three broad categories: Reflections on some of the broad theoretical questions of evolution, and especially about human evolution; the early hominins, with special emphasis on Australopithecus afarensis and Paranthropus; and the Neanderthals, that contentious group of our closest extinct relatives. Within and across these categories, nearly every paper addresses combinations of methodological, analytical and theoretical questions that are pertinent to the whole human evolutionary time span. This book will appeal most to scholars and advanced students in paleoanthropology, human paleontology and prehistoric archaeology.

The Late Cenozoic Yushe Basin, Shanxi Province, China embodies the bulk of our knowledge on successions of terrestrial vertebrates in the northern part of East Asia.

This book celebrates the contributions of Dr. Frederick S. Szalay to the field of Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology. This book features subjects such as the evolution and adaptation of mammals and provides up-to-date articles on the evolutionary morphology of a wide range of mammalian groups.