2015 INQUA Symposium on Asian Paleoenvironments

Dear colleagues, 

We would like to draw your attention to the following interdisciplinary session to be held at INQUA 2015 in Nagoya, Japan:

H21: From the shores of the Caspian to the Tian Shan foothills: paleoenvironments and human behavioral adaptations in Central Asia 

Conveners:
Radu Iovita (Monrepos Archaeological Research Centre and Museum, RGZM)
Kathryn Fitzsimmons (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

Link: http://convention.jtbcom.co.jp/inqua2015/session/h21.html

The progressively more extreme continental climate and landscape of Central Asia is characterized by the convergence of tectonic uplift, glaciations, loess generation and aridification into and throughout the Quaternary. Concurrently, as recent paleogenetic discoveries have shown, Central Asia is emerging as both a crossroads and an origin point for the dispersal of multiple hominin populations. Therefore, the history of human settlement of this region is likely to be inseparable from major Quaternary changes in landscape and climate. The role of landscape evolution in this process was likely twofold: on the one hand, desertification, tectonic instability, mountain uplift and fluvial incision, as well as the transgression and regression of the major inland seas (Caspian and Aral), probably contributed to the creation of new ecological niches and corresponding human behavioral adaptations. On the other hand, these significant landscape changes may have presented major environmental barriers to hominin migration and settlement over time. For these reasons, progress in reconstructing human population dynamics in Pleistocene Eurasia cannot be made without the integration of paleoenvironmental and paleoanthropological data. This session aims to bring together paleoanthropologists and geoscientists interested in an interdisciplinary dialogue linking Quaternary paleoenvironmental change and its impact on hominin populations across Central Asia.  

The deadline for abstract submission is 20 December, 2014, 23:59 UTC, with details at:

http://convention.jtbcom.co.jp/inqua2015/call_for_abstracts.html

You can browse through all the Sessions at:

http://convention.jtbcom.co.jp/inqua2015/session/index.html

We invite you to consider submitting an abstract to our session, either as a talk (15 minutes) or poster presentation. All presentations and posters must be in English. 

We would like to use this session to showcase exciting new research in the region, to open up interdisciplinary, international dialogue, and to facilitate future collaborations.

We hope to see you there as you contribute to our session! Please forward this invitation to other researchers who may be interested in joining the dialogue. 

Please don't hesitate to contact either of us if you have any queries.

Kathryn Fitzsimmons and Radu Iovita