Climate, Biodiversity, and Human Dispersal: Reconstructing Late Pleistocene Hydroclimate in the Southern Caucasus

The Southern Caucasus is a biodiversity hotspot, a key route for past human migrations, and a region highly vulnerable to future climate change. Its steep topography and position between major air masses make it especially sensitive to shifts in temperature and rainfall. Yet the region’s climate history is still poorly understood. Most existing studies focus on individual sites or single types of evidence, limiting our ability to see broader patterns and to understand how environmental change shaped ecosystems and human occupation.

This project will integrate different forms of  proxyevidenceo reconstruct hydroclimate change during the Late Pleistocene (c. 130,000–12,000 years ago). The first stage will establish reliable timelines for key sites using radiometric dating combined with Bayesian age-modelling approaches. Modern biodiversity and climate datasets (e.g. GBIF, WorldClim, CHELSA) will then be used to build ecological niche models. These will estimate the climate tolerances of species, which can be applied to fossil records to reconstruct past temperature, rainfall, and aridity. A regional Bayesian statistical framework will then be developed to integrate the data, identify spatio-temporal patterns, and compare these against archaeological records to explore how hydroclimatic change may have influenced past human activity.

The project will provide the first probabilistic reconstructions of Late Pleistocene hydroclimate for the Southern Caucasus. It would suit a student interested in linking palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records with quantitative methods, particularly those keen to develop skills in Bayesian modelling and interdisciplinary climate research.