Publications by authors named "Isaac Hart"
Amid global challenges like climate change, extinctions, and disease epidemics, science and society require nuanced, international solutions that are grounded in robust, interdisciplinary perspectives and datasets that span deep time. Natural history collections, from modern biological specimens to the archaeological and fossil records, are crucial tools for understanding cultural and biological processes that shape our modern world. At the same time, natural history collections in low and middle-income countries are at-risk and underresourced, imperiling efforts to build the infrastructure and scientific capacity necessary to tackle critical challenges.
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- Horses played a crucial role in Indigenous cultures in the American Southwest and Great Plains, but the timeline and methods of their integration remain debated.
- A study analyzing historic horse remains combined genomic, isotopic, and other evidence, revealing strong genetic ties to Iberian horses, with later British influences.
- By the early 17th century, horses were widely adopted in Indigenous societies, impacting herd management, ceremonies, and cultural practices before European observers arrived in the 18th century.
El Niño has profound influences on ecosystem dynamics. However, we know little about how it shapes vertebrate faunal community composition over centennial time scales, and this limits our ability to forecast change under projections of future El Niño events. On the basis of correlations between geological records of past El Niño frequency and the species composition of bird and fish remains from a Baja California bone deposit that spans the past 12,000 years, we documented marked faunal restructuring when major El Niño events occurred more than five times per century.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transition from hunting to herding transformed the cold, arid steppes of Mongolia and Eastern Eurasia into a key social and economic center of the ancient world, but a fragmentary archaeological record limits our understanding of the subsistence base for early pastoral societies in this key region. Organic material preserved in high mountain ice provides rare snapshots into the use of alpine and high altitude zones, which played a central role in the emergence of East Asian pastoralism. Here, we present the results of the first archaeological survey of melting ice margins in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia, revealing a near-continuous record of more than 3500 years of human activity.
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- Classic models depict mounted herders in Inner Asia during the Bronze Age, but the actual economic practices of these early pastoral societies remain unclear.
- This study uses collagen mass fingerprinting and ancient DNA to analyze early pastoral cultures in Mongolia, revealing evidence of livestock herding between the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BCE.
- Findings indicate horses weren't significantly exploited for diet until later, around 1200 BCE, after which they played a crucial role in pastoral life and mobility, connecting to broader changes in herding practices due to horseback riding innovations.