CAREER: Understanding Animal Domestication and Human-Environmental Relationships

Domestic animals play a key role in adaptation to life in high latitude and cold environments where frigid and dry environments pose particularly significant challenges to human life. Beginning with the domestication of the dog, important animal domestication events have deeply impacted cultures and landscapes. Recent archaeological research points to a crucial geographic role in the dispersal of early modern humans, the initial spread of domestic horses and ruminant livestock, the innovation of mounted riding, and the formation of transcontinental networks of interaction, movement, and trade.

This project uses archaeological research and cutting-edge scientific investigation of rare and well-preserved animal remains to assess the role of early grassland cultures in animal domestication and dispersal, and evaluate their impact on the ancient and modern world. The research supports the education and training of students and the public.

Working with a large interdisciplinary team of scientific collaborators, the PI conducts archaeological excavation and survey at sites with exceptional organic preservation, including a dry cave and melting mountain snow and ice deposits identified through prior scholarship. Analyzing animal remains from these sites through stable isotopes, ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and archaeozoology, the project produces new datasets for reconstructing ancient ecological dynamics and human-animal interactions.

Team members generate new paleoenvironmental datasets from ice and lakes important for understanding the relationship of these key events to changing climate and ecology. Paired with new toolkits for understanding animal transport through osteology, these efforts produce a model for the domestication and spread of domestic animals in environmental context.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.