Quaternary Environments and Humans

Quaternary Environments and Humans (QEH), the full Open Access INQUA/Elsevier Journal, publishes peer-reviewed papers under the auspices of the leading Quaternary association, focusing on recent advances in Quaternary sciences that appeal to a wide audience and combine approaches from several disciplines.

QEH will encompass a full spectrum of joint specialists from the physical and natural sciences, archaeology and the humanities, representing the four pillars, including geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology, material culture and modelling studies.

The policy is to publish interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions reporting and promote debates on the long-term and multifaceted relationship among changing climates, environments and the hominins in the Quaternary.

QEH aims to promote the Quaternary Sciences through a rigorous scientific approach that is combined with diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Editor-in-Chief

Andrea Zerboni, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy

Editors

Silvia Bello, Fumie Iizuka and Jan Kolář

Quaternary Environments and Humans

News

These days, we celebrate the two-year anniversary of the journal’s official launch, which took place in July 2023 during the INQUA Congress held in Rome. Since then, the journal has published dozens of Open-Access articles, including several thematic special issues dedicated to different aspects of the interaction between humans and the environment throughout the Quaternary. We expect the journal to be soon included in major scientific databases, which will make it even more attractive to the entire community. The success of the journal is due to a formidable team of Editors, a multidisciplinary Editorial Board, and the continuous support of the INQUA ExComm and Elsevier’s officers. But above all, the journal’s success is thanks to the INQUA Community, which continues to submit contributions and accept invitations to review articles.

Editor’s choice

This time, instead of selecting the three most significant articles, I would like to suggest reading an article collection recently published in QEH and dedicated to a new site in Indonesia where fossil fragments of Homo erectus have been identified: the Madura Strait.

The 4 articles published by Berghuis et al. explore various aspects of this highly interdisciplinary research, presenting the anthropological and paleontological findings, the environmental context of H. erectus occupation in the area, the formation processes of the archaeological deposit, and the broader significance of this discovery at both a regional and global scale. The articles and an editorial are available at the links below:

The late Middle Pleistocene Homo erectus of the Madura Strait, first hominin fossils from submerged Sundaland

A late Middle Pleistocene lowstand valley of the Solo River on the Madura Strait seabed, geology and age of the first hominin locality of submerged Sundaland

The taphonomy of the Madura Strait fossil assemblage, a record of selective hunting and marrow processing by late Middle Pleistocene Sundaland hominins

First vertebrate faunal record from submerged Sundaland: The late Middle Pleistocene, hominin-bearing fauna of the Madura Strait

The newly uncovered Madura Strait fossil assemblage and its role in Pleistocene hominin dispersals in Southeast Asia