Dr. Silas Dean
Affiliated Postdoctoral researcher
Dr. Silas Dean is interested in examining records of past environmental change and discovering their tangible effects on humanity. He completed his PhD at the University of Pisa Department of Earth Sciences in 2019, where he studied palaeoenvironmental changes in the Eastern Adriatic and their impacts on prehistoric populations in the local karst landscapes. His M.A. was from the University of Haifa Department of Maritime Civilizations, also within the Charney School of Marine Sciences, where he researched sea-level change. His other research interests include underwater archaeology, coastal processes, and geomorphology. Silas is a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholar at the Department of Marine Geosciences, the University of Haifa. His current research concerns Pleistocene-Pliocene palaeoenvironmental reconstruction using cores and outcrops from the Erk-el-Ahmar formation in Israel. He assesses environmental changes with geochemical and other proxies to better understand this important period leading up to hominin migrations out of Africa through the Levantine Corridor.
Current Research
Reconstructing the Early Pleistocene Paleoenvironment of the Levantine Corridor during the Late Pliocene
This project aims to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental conditions in the Levantine Corridor during the Late Pliocene utilizing continuous core sequences from Erk el Ahmar, a ~120 m long lacustrine sequence outcropping south of Lake Kineret (Sea of Galilee). The site is dated by cosmogenic isotopes to ~3.5 Ma and provides a unique opportunity to study optimal climatic windows for enhance humidity in the region during a time period of enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere, and as an analogue to the Holocene climate warming. The local environment will be identified by high resolution geochemical, sedimentological, and microfaunal analyses of continuous sediment samples that are measured on the core sections. A comparison of the new data with regional and global climate records will show the large-scale impacts of climate on the local environment and clarify whether these fluctuations have facilitated the later migration and dispersal of hominins in the region.
