Quaternary Science Reviews

The precise timing and sequence of human arrival into the tropical South Pacific islands is contested and there is ongoing debate around the drivers of migration over the past three thousand years. Recent evidence supports the role of changing climate through palaeoclimate evidence that suggests that the South Pacific has experienced shifts between dry and wet periods throughout the human occupat…

Due to the insular location, farming emerged in Cyprus mostly through the introduction of plants and animals from nearby continent, throughout the 9th and 8th millennia BCE. These included wild cultivated einkorn and emmer during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and ungulates during the PPNB. However, large osteoarchaeological samples from Klimonas and Shillourokambos sites, revealed an interes…

Understanding long-term variability in storminess is essential for constraining future climate patterns in the eastern North Atlantic, a region shaped by complex ocean–atmosphere interactions. Here, we reconstruct storm, fire, and hydroclimate variability from grain size, inorganic geochemistry, plant macrofossil and molecular organic records since mid-Holocene at Glenties Bog, a coastal blanket …

The geological evidence of ancient activity of Neapolitan volcanic sources in southern Italy is often elusive and inaccessible in the proximal areas. In fact, these deposits are part of the thick pile of volcanic products alternating with alluvial/transitional/shallow marine sediments emplaced in the Campanian Plain over the last 2 Ma, which makes them often buried deep in the subsurface. Convers…

Late Quaternary loess-paleosol sequences in the Armenian highlands represent key terrestrial archives for reconstructing past climate variability. Related proxy data are essential both for understanding the environmental and cultural history of the Caucasus area - a global biodiversity hotspot and archaeological key region - and for benchmarking Earth system models. However, robust quantitative p…