The record of east Africa is rich in the fossils of Middle Pleistocene hominids and the detritus that represents the material record of their behaviour. For archaeology and human palaeontology, as for any historical discipline, the order in which discoveries are made has a profound impact on the growth of knowledge and on the interpretation of new finds. This chapter therefore begins with a bri...

The distal half of a right human humerus (E.898), recovered ex situ in 1925 by Hrdlička at the Broken Hill Mine, Kabwe, Zambia, has figured prominently in assessments of Middle Pleistocene Homo postcranial variation and of the phylogenetic polarity and functional anatomy of Pleistocene Homo upper limb morphology. Reassessment of distal humeral features that distinguish modern human and some arc...

The gray wolf (Canis lupus) is one of the few large predators to survive the Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions [1]. Nevertheless, wolves disappeared from northern North America in the Late Pleistocene, suggesting they were affected by factors that eliminated other species. Using skeletal material collected from Pleistocene permafrost deposits of eastern Beringia, we present a comprehensiv...

Pampatheriidae are a group of cingulates native to South American that are known from the middle Miocene to the lower Holocene. Two genera have been recognized between the lower Pleistocene and the lower Holocene: Pampatherium Gervais and Ameghino (Ensenadan, Bonaerian and Lujanian, lower Pleistocene-lower Holocene) and Holmesina Simpson (Blancan, Irvingtonian, upper Pliocene-lower Holocene). T...

10 The complexity of the analysis is indicated by the probability that some tropical North American elements that had presumably colonized South America just prior to or during the establishment of the isthmus, were subsequently exterminated in North America as a result of the Pleistocene climatic deterioration, and recolonized Central America in the later Pleistocene and post-Pleistocene as pa...

Episodic sea level changes that repeatedly exposed and inundated the Sunda Shelf characterize the Pleistocene. Available evidence points to a more xeric central Sunda Shelf during periods of low sea levels, and despite the broad land connections that persisted during this time, some organisms are assumed to have faced barriers to dispersal between land-masses on the Sunda Shelf. Eutropis rugife...

6.15.8 PALEOTEMPERATURE STUDIES USING THE ALKENONE METHOD 413 6.15.8.1 Holocene High-resolution Studies 414 6.15.8.2 Millennial-scale Events of the Late Pleistocene and Last Glacial Termination 415 6.15.8.3 Marine Temperatures during the LGM 417 6.15.8.4 SST Records of the Late Pleistocene Ice Age Cycles 420 6.15.8.5 SST before the Late Pleistocene 421 6.15.8.6 Comparison with other Proxies: dO...

The end of the Pleistocene was marked by the extinction of almost all large land mammals worldwide except in Africa. Although the debate on Pleistocene extinctions has focused on the roles of climate change and humans, the impact of perturbations depends on properties of ecological communities, such as species composition and the organization of ecological interactions. Here, we combined palaeo...

Large mammalian terrestrial herbivores, such as elephants, have dramatic effects on the ecosystems they inhabit and at high population densities their environmental impacts can be devastating. Pleistocene terrestrial ecosystems included a much greater diversity of megaherbivores (e.g., mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths) and thus a greater potential for widespread habitat degradation if p...