This book chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical Turn unravels the breathtaking anthropogenic peregrinations of these familiar crops from their homelands in tropical and subtropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, showing the significant impact South Asia had on the ecologies, dietary habits, and cultural identities of peoples across the ancient world. In the process, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers a fresh narrative history of human connectivity across Afro-Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the late centuries BCE.

Ancient Supercontinents and the Paleogeography of Earth offers a systematic examination of Precambrian cratons and supercontinents. Through detailed maps of drift histories and paleogeography of each continent, this book examines topics related to Earth's tectonic evolution prior to Pangea, including plate kinematics, orogenic development, and paleoenvironments. Additionally, this book discusses the methodologies used, principally paleomagnetism and tectonostratigraphy, and addresses geophysical topics of mantle dynamics and geodynamo evolution over billions of years. Structured clearly with consistent coverage for Precambrian cratons, this book combines state-of-the-art paleomagnetic and geochronologic data to reconstruct the paleogeography of the Earth in the context of major climatic events such as global glaciations. It is an ideal, up-to-date reference for geoscientists and geographers looking for answers to questions surrounding the tectonic evolution of Earth.

Paleocological Research on Easter Island: Insights on Settlement, Climate Changes, Deforestation and Cultural Shifts examines the area's climatic and ecological history, a topic not usually addressed in other literature. The book provides a thorough and synthetic account of all paleoecological works developed to date, including the latest discoveries. Finally, it attempts to match paleoecological evidence with the results of other disciplines creating a multidisciplinary framework. This approach to the field is ideal for researchers, university professors and graduate students in a varied range of disciplines and subdisciplines, including ecology, paleoecology, paleoclimatology, biogeography, sedimentology, and paleontology. Users will find synthesized information on Easter Island from the last millennia that will help pave the way towards an integrated interdisciplinary vision of the island's environmental-ecological-cultural system as a complex functional unit. Human and environmental deterministic views are avoided and the Easter Island enigmas are analyzed under a holistic perspective of continuous feedbacks and synergies among the different components of the system.

Cognitive Archeology, Body Cognition, and the Evolution of Visuospatial Perception offers comprehensive perspective on the role of brain form and function, body cognition, and visuospatial integration in the evolution of ancient and modern human species. The book covers evolutionary neuroanatomy, cognitive sciences, and experimental archaeology, providing a bridge between anthropology and evolutionary studies to neurosciences. Written by international experts in paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology, as well as neurobiology and psychology, the book explores how body perception and spatial capacity may have evolved to enhance a "prosthetic capacity" able to integrate the brain, body and technological discoveries into a single functional system. Chapters discuss the anatomy, function and evolution of the parietal cortex in human and non-human primates. In addition, the book covers the evolution of visuospatial cognition and how modern brain imaging can trace these changes back millions of years.

The phylum Mollusca is the second largest group of animals and occur in virtually all habitats. Many non-marine molluscs are threatened with more recorded extinctions than all tetrapod vertebrates combined. This two-volume set will provide the first general account of molluscs in decades and will include hundreds of colour figures. General chapters bring together a diverse and extensive literature, while taxon chapters provide overviews of their evolution, phylogeny and classification as well as more specific and detailed coverage of their biology (reproduction, feeding and digestion, excretion, respiration etc.), their long fossil record, and their natural history.

This book focuses on British fossils and the story of life on our islands, including details of the great fossil collections of Britain.