Dr. Andrea Price
Affiliated researcher
Dr. Andrea Price received her BSc and MSc in Earth and Ocean Sciences (2010, 2012) from the University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada). Her PhD dissertation in Physical Geography (2016) at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) developed organic-walled microfossils called dinoflagellate cysts as indicators of nutrient pollution in NW Atlantic coastal waters. With a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Price spent two years in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA, USA) to study the Gulf of Mexico. She is currently a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Marine Geosciences at the University of Haifa. At the University of Haifa Dr. Price is analyzing drill cuttings from an oil well in the Mediterranean Sea using palynomorphs such as pollen and dinoflagellate cysts to determine past climatic conditions during the Pliocene and XRF analysis to describe the chemical composition of the material.
Research at PetroLab
Late Pliocene-Early Pleistocene enhanced humidity in the Levantine corridor: insights from marine and lacustrine records
The Levantine corridor is the only connecting land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. This tectonic passage has served, not only as a major dispersal route for fauna and flora, but also for hominins during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene periods. The occurrence of optimal climatic windows fostering the prevalence of perennial water bodies (e.g. lakes) and associated ecotones, were probably the main environmental conditions facilitating hominin passage, their spread and further colonization.
Two main hypotheses have been proposed to explain the timing of hominin dispersals, focusing on either extrinsic or intrinsic factors. Extrinsic hypotheses have suggested that an expansion of grasslands into higher latitudes provided environmental means by which hominins, adapted to such habitats, would be encouraged to follow their preferred environment northwards. Alternatively, intrinsic hypotheses emphasize that migrations of hominins out of Africa occurred regardless of climate and environmental conditions. The main goal of this project is to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental history of the Levant during this key time period using a multiproxy approach. Marine and lacustrine records from selected sites will be analyzed to document changes recorded in these sedimentary archives, aiming to unravel the possible influence of southern sources of humidity (e.g. tropical storms and monsoons) and their variability at millennial time-scales.
