This is the new website for the INQUA Commission formerly known as Palaeoecology and Human Evolution (PAHE).

 

The commission's old name did not convey the breadth of the commission's activities or clearly distinguish the commission from INQUA's others. The old name suggested a split in purpose, while the new name tries to communicate the integrated nature of the themes of interest, including studies of vertebrates, botany and paleobotany, cultural processes, modern proxies and databases, geoarchaeology, and ecosystem dynamics in the past and present.

 

Objectives: The Commission’s goal is to facilitate communication and interchange among specialists in palaeontology, palaeobotany, palaeoecology, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, and geology, in order to understand human responses to global and regional changes. An ancillary goal is to provide a unifying framework for the exchange of information between palaeoecologists and neo-ecologists working on issues of global change.

 

Organisation: Important changes affecting INQUA’s organisation were introduced during the XVIth INQUA Congress in Reno, Nevada, and reinforced by INQUA’s International Council at the XVIIth Congress in Cairns, Australia. The Commissions initiate and nurture International Focus Groups, non-permanent collaborations designed to address scientific issues of wide international significance. The duration of IFGs depends on their track records at meeting key scientific needs. Projects are limited-scale activities focused on very specific aims and objectives and which contribute in strategic ways to the wider aims of one or more IFGs. 

 

Projects: The Commission-sponsored projects of 2004-09 (listed below) incorporate themes that are geographically and temporally wide-ranging. They share important characteristics -- they are concerned with how animals and plants adapted to changing climates, and how humans or human ancestors adapted during sometimes challenging periods of climatic instability. All the projects are multidisciplinary and involve younger colleagues and scientists from developing countries.

Project No.            Awardee                Project Theme/Title

0401                         Deckers                    Eastern Mediterranean/ Near Eastern geoarchaeology

0402                         Dodson                    Human dispersals in Australasia

0403                         Lee-Thorp              Human biogeography in Pleistocene Africa

0404                         Schreve                    EuroMam 2004 excursion, UK

0504                         Hicks                        Pollen monitoring programme

0505                         Cooper                     Global megafaunal extinctions and biogeography

0506                         Goebel                     Human colonization of Arctic, Subarctic Siberia/Beringia

0601                         Jillani                       Palaeoenvironments during the first "Out of Africa"

0701                         Lejju                         African Great Lakes human-environment interactions

0702                         Mapila                      Integrating regional African climate change

0807                         Ono                           E. Asian OIS 3-2 human dispersals and paleoenvironments

0813                         Courty                      Integrating long archeostratigraphic records

0901                         Chauhan                   Hominid evolution in India

0902                         MacDonald            Earliest human occupations in northern Europe

0903                         Umer                        Palaeo-botany network in east Africa

0904                         Akaegbobi              West African palaeoecology and human responses

Welcome to this new Website

Click the links to the left