The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twelve-month research fellowship by Dr. William E. Banks to work with Dr. Francesco d'Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France.
This project will evaluate the impact of rapid-scale climatic changes (Dansgaard-Oeschger events) on large mammal and human populations during Oxygen Isotope Stages (OIS) 3-2 (ca. 60-10k BP) in Europe. These climatic oscillations had profound impacts on animal and human populations, but hunter-gatherer responses to such changes are poorly understood. The PI will examine their responses to these climatic events with the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-Set Prediction (GARP). GARP is a machine-learning genetic algorithm that creates an ecological niche model for a species representing the environmental conditions in which that species could maintain a population in stasis. He will employ archaeological, geographic, and paleoclimatic data to produce eco-cultural niche models for specific time periods. Preliminary analyses have demonstrated the utility of this approach in modeling eco-cultural niches for human populations of the Last Glacial Maximum. This approach has the capacity to identify the environmental and cultural constraints on prehistoric geography and how cultural variability is expressed in the archaeological record. He hypothesizes that the ecological niches of human groups expanded and contracted in concert with rapid-scale climatic changes. His Eco-Cultural Niche Modeling approach will allow him to test this hypothesis and quantify and interpret such adaptive variability.
