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The fats, protein and carbohydrates afforded by tree nuts and fruits are key resources for communities from Southeast Asia, through Melanesia, Australia and across Oceania. They are important in long-distance marine trade networks, large-scale ceremonial gatherings, and are core resources in a wide range of subsistence economies, including foraging systems, horticulture and swidden agriculture. Recent archaeobotanical evidence has also shown their deep-time importance, being amongst the earliest foods used in the colonisation of novel environments in Australia and New Guinea, as well as the later colonisation of Near and Remote Oceania. The archaeobotanical methods used to identify fruit and nut-derived plant macrofossils have been largely limited to use of morphological characters of near whole or exceptionally preserved remains, most commonly endocarps, the hard, nutshell-like interior layer of the fruit protecting the seed. Here we detail how anatomical characteristics of endocarps, visible in light and scanning electron microscopy (SEM), can be used with surviving morphological features to identify confidently the use of key Asia-Pacific economic trees, in this case, Canarium, Pandanus and Terminalia. Systematic anatomical description allows the identification of these important economic taxa, and separation from the remains of others such as Aleurites and Cocos, when found in a range of archaeological assemblages. This includes the often highly fragmented charred assemblages that can be recovered routinely from most sites with appropriate fine-sieving and flotation methods. These methods provide the basis for a more representative and nuanced understanding of ancient plant use, economy and social systems operating in the region and, being particularly useful in tropical regions, will broaden the archaeobotanical database on ancient foods globally. Introduction Background - Definition of tree fruits and nuts - Structure and use of Canarium - Structure and use of Pandanus - Structure and use of Terminalia - Archaeological visibility Methods - Archaeobotanical analysis of modern comparative material - Archaeobotanical analysis of archaeological material Results - Canarium - Pandanus - Terminalia Discussion Conclusion

In recent years, new evidence for the early use of plant foods has challenged the stereotype of the meat-eating Paleolithic. Whilst often making up the smaller component of the diet, plant foods are key to hominin diets, carbohydrates especially providing an efficient energy resource. This paper reviews the current evidence for the role of plant foods in the evolution and dispersal of early modern humans and our closest ancestors, with a focus on new evidence for early diet from Island Southeast Asia, Australia and New Guinea. It demonstrates the importance of plant foods and their processing, to the dietary flexibility and adaptive capacity of our species.

This repository contains the data and code for our paper: Florin, A. et al. (2020). "Palaeoprecipitation data from Madjedbebe, northern Australia: A novel proxy from ancient pandanus". The main R code document can be found in analysis/paper/paper.Rmd. The paper was published on 25 Jan 2021.

Little is known about the Pleistocene climatic context of northern Australia at the time of early human settlement. Here we generate a palaeoprecipitation proxy using stable carbon isotope analysis of modern and archaeological pandanus nutshell from Madjedbebe, Australia’s oldest known archaeological site. We document fluctuations in precipitation over the last 65,000 years and identify periods of lower precipitation during the penultimate and last glacial stages, Marine Isotope Stages 4 and 2. However, the lowest effective annual precipitation is recorded at the present time. Periods of lower precipitation, including the earliest phase of occupation, correspond with peaks in exotic stone raw materials and artefact discard at the site. This pattern is interpreted as suggesting increased group mobility and intensified use of the region during drier periods. Discussion Methods - Charring experiment for modern P. spiralis. - Rainfall and environment for modern P. spiralis. - Modern climate. - Archaeological P. spiralis. - Stable carbon isotope analysis. - Soil analysis. - Adjustment of δ13C for changes in past δ13CO2ATM and pCO2 - Lithic analysis. - AMS radiocarbon dating. - Reporting Summary.

Based on the observation that environmental systems are complex, non-linear and subject to uncertainty and that classical modelling methods will not apply in this case, we present a new approach to computer simulation and control of environmental systems, centred on the mathematical-heuristic modelling. The mathematical-heuristic model of an environmental system is a hybrid model composed of several mathematical models and heuristic models. Suboptimality intervals within which the state variables of the environmental system must exist are defined. A hybrid algorithm for simulation and control of the environmental systems is presented. The architecture of the system for simulation and control of environmental systems, based on the new approach, is also presented. A simulation language, i.e. Mathcad under Windows, enables simulation while an expert system shell (written in TurboProlog) exerts the control. An application has been made in the case of a large scale hydrological complex of the Danube Delta system, composed of 10 large lakes, interconnected by canals and channels. The mathematical-heuristic model for simulation and control of dynamics of some populations of ichthyophagous birds, (i.e. cormorants and pelicans), are also given. A knowledge base including behavioural, control and decision heuristic rules was set-up. Simulation and control experiments have been carried out using our modelling, simulation, and control system and a 486 PC; the simulation results show a good conforming with the measurements. We emphasize that all these results have been used by experts (ecologists, hydrologists) in their decision making on the Danube Delta system. Finally, a model's library for environmental systems simulations and control has been created.

We derive sufficient conditions for ranking performance evaluation systems in multi-task agency models (using both optimal and linear contracts) in terms of a second-order stochastic dominance (SSD) condition on the likelihood ratios. The SSD condition can be replaced by a variance-covariance matrix of likelihood ratios (VCM) condition when the utility function is square-root, the performance measures are normally distributed, and for LEN models. We identify existing results derived under the LEN assumptions that rely on the VCM condition and, thus, also hold for optimal contracts.