Research Interests:
(1) Pleistocene
human hunting of large mammals, especially mammoths and mastodonts;
(2) The peopling of the New World;
(3) Paleoenvironments of southern Africa and North
America;
(4) Conservation and native peoples.
Financial
support for research has come from the National
Geographic Society, the Leakey Foundation, the National
Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the
U.S. National Research Council (U.S. Academy of
Sciences), the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Polish
Academy of Sciences, the International Research and
Exchanges Board, the Fulbright Sub-Saharan Africa Senior
Researcher Program, and the Zimbabwe National Parks
Authority.
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Current Research
Activities:
As
President of INQUA's Commission on Palaeoecology and
Human Evolution, I am developing international
cross-disciplinary research projects to study long-distance
dispersal by the genus Homo. Specifically I am interested
in the discontinuous cycles
of colonization, abandonment, and recolonization in Africa and
Asia that eventually led to the settlement of Australia and the
Americas. The following projects are currently underway:
INQUA
project 0402: The great arc of human dispersal: the
Australasian node (PI: John Dodson, Brunel University)
INQUA
project 0403: Towards understanding human biogeography in
Pleistocene Africa (PIs: Julia Lee-Thorp, Bradford
University, & Margaret Avery, Iziko South African Museum)
INQUA
Project 0505: Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions:
climate change and human impact (PIs: Alan Cooper, Adelaide
University, & Dan
Rubenstein, Princeton University)
INQUA
Project 0506: Pleistocene human colonization of Arctic and
Subarctic Siberia and Beringia (PI: Ted Goebel, University
of Nevada, Reno)
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My
primary fieldwork continues annually in southern Africa, where I
have been
carrying
out actualistic studie s
of elephants for a quarter century. I am also closely collaborating with African
scientists to learn more about the changing Pleistocene-Holocene paleoenvironments of northwestern Zimbabwe and the complexities
of human prehistory in that part of the continent.
Iron
points from Zimbabwe
Hyperlinks to Hwange
handaxe measurements (Excel file of
metrics and Word file of
metric codes)
Equally
stimulating fieldwork and analytical projects are
 ongoing
in North America, where I have been involved for nearly 30 years
in studies of Clovis-era megafauna, the enigmatic
end-Pleistocene extinctions, the wide variability to be found in
archeological assemblages, and the complex paleoenvironmental
changes of the Late Glacial interval.
Alaskan
fluted point from the Putu site.
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