Distribution modeling of paleofauna in the Western Mediterranean between the Heinrich events H5 and H4

Abstract

This master’s thesis deals with species distribution modeling (SDM) for eight selected prey animals of the Neanderthals and the anatomically modern human within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center 806 ("Our way to Europe"). This research was realized for three methods in three climatically different time slices during the Late Pleistocene. One profile method, one regression method and one machine learning method were used. A model was developed that performs these three methods in order to obtain a potential distribution of the paleofauna in the Late Pleistocene and to link it to the dispersal of humans in this region. The results show that all three methods predict conditions for the presence of the species which may have hunted from both Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. However, there are differences in the predicted regions between the individual methods for each species. Another task was to determine the best performing method. Based on this work, MaxEnt, a machine learning method, emerged as the best performing method among the applied methods.

Resources

• Holthausen_MA_SDM_FINAL.pdf

Bibliography

Holthausen, M. (2019): Distribution modeling of paleofauna in the Western Mediterranean between the Heinrich events H5 and H4. CRC 806 Database, University of Cologne, Collaborative Research Centre 806, DOI: 10.5880/SFB806.45