Zeljko Rezek is a researcher in Paleoanthropology. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. Broadly speaking, his research interest is human evolution in paleoenvironmental context from the Middle Pleistocene until the early Holocene. He has conducted fieldwork in a number of Paleolithic sites in Europe, northern Africa, and southwest Asia. He is either directing or collaborating in field projects in Morocco, southern Egypt, Jordan, and southeast Turkey.
Some of the broad research topics of these projects are evolution of technology and the ways it was adopted; diversity of human adaptation to stable and instable ecosystems, in particular ecotones of northern Africa and southwestern Asia; early human use of coastal and marginal landscapes; Homo sapiens biogeography and interregional dispersion; and mathematical modeling approaches to inferring past human behavior.
He and his project team members and collaborators are employing a wide array of analyses on recovered and sampled organic and inorganic materials, and generated data, from excavated sites, such as analysis of stone and bone tool technologies, isotope geochemistry on dental remains and cave stalagmites for reconstructing past animal behavior and paleoclimate, ancient human and environmental DNA, paleoproteomics, paleopathology, zooarchaeology, paleobotany, tephra (volcanic ash)- chronology, mathematical simulations, AI-aided modeling, and others.
An integrative part of these projects is training local students in archaeological field methods and techniques, and artifact and data analysis.
