As an Old World prehistorian, Marshall’s research focuses on two issues: early hominid lifeways, and the origins and spread of pastoralism in Africa. She has explored these topics through survey and excavation, principally in the Loita-Mara area of southwestern Kenya, and through zooarchaeological studies of faunas excavated from archaeological sites. She has also undertaken ethnoarchaeological field work designed to investigate factors that affect body part representation in archaeological sites, and alternative pathways to food production among Okiek hunter-gatherers of the western Mau Escarpment, Kenya. Marshall has been involved in a major conservation project at Laetoli, and is currently conducting zooarchaeological research on the timing of the appearance of early domestic animals in Ethiopia.
Often viewed as wild, naturally pristine and endangered by human encroachment, some of the African savannah’s most fertile and biologically diverse wildlife hotspots owe their vitality to heaps of dung deposited there over thousands of years by the livestock of wandering herders, suggests new research in the journal Nature.
Four university scientists are among the 84 members and 21 foreign associates recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Long before the advent of agriculture, hunter gatherers began putting down roots in the Middle East, building more permanent homes and altering the ecological balance in ways that allowed the common house mouse to flourish, suggest new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Five-thousand years before it was immortalized in a British nursery rhyme, the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt was doing just fine living alongside farmers in the ancient Chinese village of Quanhucun, a forthcoming study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed.
