Late Pleistocene mammalian assemblages of Southeast Asia: New dating, mortality profiles and evolution of the predator-prey relationships in an environmental context

Karstic sites have great potential for yielding data regarding changes in faunal communities in the Pleistocene of Southeast Asia. In this region, the majority of fossil-bearing deposits are karstic breccias, which generally demonstrate a complicated sedimentary history. While most of the mammalian assemblages recovered in these deposits are only composed of isolated teeth, their study remains essential for reconstructing paleoecology and paleoclimatology of the region. We analyzed the assemblages recovered in three mainland and two insular karstic sites: Tam Hang South and Nam Lot in northern Laos, Duoi U'Oi in northern Vietnam, Punung in central Java and Sibrambang in western Sumatra and obtained new chronologies for three of these sites so that their significance could be discussed within their correct chronological context. The resulting age ranges place the sites in MIS5 and M1S4. The comparative analysis of the faunas, in terms of taphonomy, taxonomic diversity and abundance, and mortality profiles (Cervus unicolor, Sus scrofa, Sus vittatus, rhinocerotids and Tapirus indicus), reveals marked differences in prey-predators (carnivores and/or humans) relationships in relation to habitat. The study of homininesbearing sites (Punung, Nam Lot, Duoi U'Oi) allows us to emphasize different interactions with large carnivores (felids, hyaenids, canids). (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Translational Research on Sustained Attention and Attentional Control in Rats, Healthy Humans and Patients with Schizophrenia.

Attentional deficits are often studied in schizophrenia, yet treatments to alleviate these impairments remain undeveloped. In part, this gap between basic and clinical research stems from a lack of tasks validated for translational research. The current work develops the distractor condition sustained attention task (dSAT), an attentional control paradigm traditionally used in rats to investigate the cholinergic system’s role in attention, for cross-species, translational research by adapting it for use in humans. In the basic sustained attention task (SAT), subjects report the presence or absence of a brief, centrally-presented signal of varying duration. In the distractor condition (dSAT), a visual distractor evokes top-down control mechanisms in order to stabilize performance. The current work demonstrates that rats and healthy, young human adults have qualitatively similar patterns of performance on the SAT and dSAT, including decreased attentional performance during distraction. Neuroimaging in young human adults shows that this decreased attentional performance is correlated with increased activation of right middle frontal gyrus (MFG). The sensitivity of right MFG to the attentional effort demands in the dSAT is of interest because this region is implicated as a site of disruption in patients with schizophrenia (Minzenberg et al., 2009). To investigate the dSAT’s sensitivity to attentional deficits in schizophrenia, stable, medicated schizophrenic outpatients and healthy controls were tested on the dSAT. Healthy children were also tested to compare the patients to a group with similar overall accuracy levels. While patients are only minimally impaired on the task in the absence of distraction, their attentional performance levels decline dramatically during distraction, exceeding the declines seen in healthy adult controls or children. Children also show time-on-task declines in SAT performance, suggesting that impairments on the SAT and dSAT may be dissociable in different populations. The ability to implement the dSAT in both rat psychopharmacological and neurochemical experiments and human neuroimaging research, as well as the dSAT’s sensitivity to the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia, makes the dSAT a useful instrument for translational research on attention systems in animal models of cognitive disorders, healthy human subjects, and patients with neuropsychiatric disorders.Ph.D.NeuroscienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84503/1/elisemd_1.pd

Tam Hang Rockshelter: Preliminary Study of a Prehistoric Site in Northern Laos

In February 1934, Jacques Fromaget, from the Geological Service of Indochina, discovered the Tam Hang site in northern Laos. The site is a rockshelter, located on the southeastern slope of the Annamitic Chain on the edge of the P’a Hang cliff. The geologist’s excavation revealed considerable faunal remains from the middle Pleistocene as well as human biological and cultural remains from the pre-Holocene period. One of the human skeletons discovered by Fromaget buried beneath the shelter has recently been radiocarbon-dated to 15,740G80 b.p. After being relocated by Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, an international team carried out new excavations in April 2003. Undisturbed cultural layers from the late Pleistocene and the early Holocene have been identified. The presence of pottery and a lithic industry suggests the use of the site from at least the late Pleistocene into the Holocene. This particularity confers on the site a character rarely found in mainland Southeast Asia. This preliminary study describes the 2003 excavation, the cultural elements found, and presents the historical and archaeological significance of the site in the international context of the quest for human origins that prevailed in the 1930s

Les sites fossilifères du Pléistocène, pages 62-79

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Les sites fossilifères du Pléistocène

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Pà Hang, la montagne habitée

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