Teresa Steele 

I am a paleoanthropologist who studies the later phases of human evolution – the emergence of the earliest people who were behaviorally and anatomically modern. In particular, I want to know why these fully modern humans spread out of Africa about 50,000 years ago and were able to replace the Neandertals in Europe.

To address these issues, my research focuses on Middle and Late Pleistocene (780,000-10,000 years ago) archaeology – the Middle Paleolithic made by Neandertals in Europe and the Middle Stone Age and Mousterian made by their anatomically near modern contemporaries in Africa. I study the mode and tempo of human behavioral evolution during this time through zooarchaeology – reconstructing human subsistence and ecology through the patterns of variation found in vertebrate and molluscan faunal assemblages.

​Zooarchaeology offers a unique and critical window into modern human origins, because the migration of and replacement by modern humans involved significant demographic expansions with dietary correlates that should be detectable in the faunal record. Currently, I am leading an excavation in South Africa and am involved with other projects there, in Morocco and in France.
Picture
Geelbek, South Africa July 2003

204 Young Hall 
Department of Anthropology 
University of California, Davis 
One Shields Avenue
Davis , California 95616, USA, 
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Email: testeele@ucdavis.edu
Office Phone: (530) 754-0371