230Th/U Dating of Megafaunal Remains

230Th/U 巨型动物遗骸的年代测定

• 批准号: 2211894
• 负责人: Elizabeth Niespolo
• 金额: $ 20.03万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-09-01 至 2025-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2211894&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: 230Th; Dating; Megafaunal; Remains

While there has been longstanding interest in the role humans play in large-bodied animal extinctions across many continents, it is often challenging to settle without precisely dated evidence of both early human presence and the last appearances of large animals prior to extinction. Researchers will undertake to clarify the earliest arrival of humans and the timing of extinctions of large animals on one continent. Previous scholarship on the timing of human arrival has utilized other dating techniques that are either poorly suited for the time interval of interest, or they require difficult-to-verify assumptions. This topic of research also relates to the general question of human impact on the environment in the past: do animal extinctions correlate in time with natural climatic changes, or human-driven environmental changes, such as landscape modification? Researchers will further develop a promising new approach to uranium-thorium (U-Th) dating of large avian eggshells. Fossils and eggshells of large extinct flightless birds, are found in archaeological and paleontological sites. The proposed new dating approach is potentially applicable over the past 500 thousand years and will be especially useful to date archaeological sites representing the time when humans first arrived on the continent. Using U-Th dating the project aims to clarify the timing and tempo of both early human arrival and the extinction of a large flightless bird, which may have been impacted by human arrival via predation and environmental modifications leading to loss of food sources and/or habitats. In addition, the results of this work will anchor other previously published records of environmental changes in time, allowing a more rigorous assessment of the relationship of human arrival to environmental changes. These research goals will integrate training of undergraduate and graduate students.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.

尽管人们对人类在许多大陆的大型动物灭绝中所扮演的角色一直存在着兴趣，但在没有精确日期的早期人类存在和灭绝之前大型动物的最后出现的情况下定居通常是具有挑战性的。研究人员将承诺澄清人类的最早到来以及大型动物在一个大陆上的灭绝时间。先前关于人类到达时间的奖学金已经利用了其他约会技术，这些技术要么适合感兴趣的时间间隔，要么需要难以验证的假设。该研究主题还涉及过去对环境影响的总体问题：动物的灭绝与自然气候变化或人为驱动的环境变化有关，例如修改景观？研究人员将进一步开发出一种有希望的新方法，用于大鸟蛋壳的铀 - thorium（U-Th）。在考古和古生物学遗址发现了大型无飞行鸟类的化石和蛋壳。拟议的新约会方法可能在过去的50万年内适用，并且在代表人类第一次到达大陆的时间的考古遗址上特别有用。该项目使用U-th Dating旨在澄清早期人类到来的时机和节奏，以及一只大型无飞行鸟的灭绝，这可能会受到人类到达的影响，通过捕食和环境修改，导致食物来源和/或丧失。栖息地。此外，这项工作的结果将奠定其他先前发表的时间变化记录，从而更严格地评估人类到达与环境变化的关系。这些研究目标将整合本科和研究生的培训。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的评论标准来评估的。