The identification of a human skull recovered from an eBay sale.

A human skull seized by the State of Louisiana from an eBay sale is analyzed. Bioarchaeological analyses of age-at-death, sex, and population affinity suggest the individual represented by the skull was a middle-aged Native American female. The presence of intentional cranial modification independently supports the population affinity assessment while confounding the metric analyses. However, no further specificity as to population affinity could be inferred using existing methods and comparative databases. Sedimentological and palynological analyses were attempted to redress this impasse. The presence of fine-grained charcoal, abundant fungal remains, and small angular quartz grains suggestive of burial in loess, as well as the lack of pollen, pteridophyte spores, and microscopic algae, suggest a likely upland burial location from somewhere in the lower Mississippi Valley. The sedimentological and palynological analyses, while not conclusive, show promise for use in future affiliation analyses of human remains recovered during the course of forensic investigations. The results are reviewed within the broader context of the legal debate over the repatriation of human remains.

A warm thermal enclave in the late Pleistocene of the south-eastern United States.

Physical and biological evidence supports the probable existence of an enclave of relatively warm climate located between the Southern Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean in the United States during the Last Glacial Maximum. The region supported a mosaic of forest and prairie habitats inhabited by a "Floridian" ice-age biota. Plant and vertebrate remains suggest an ecological gradient towards Cape Hatteras (35 degreesN) wherein forests tended to replace prairies, and browsing proboscideans tended to replace grazing proboscideans. Beyond 35 degreesN, warm waters of the Gulf Stream were deflected towards the central Atlantic, and a cold-facies biota replaced "Floridian" biota on the Atlantic coastal plain. Because of niche diversity and relatively benign climate, biodiversity may have been greater in the south-eastern thermal enclave than in other unglaciated areas of North America. However, the impact of terminal Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions may also have been shorter and more severe in the enclave than further north. A comparison with biotic changes that occurred in North America approximately 55 million years (ma) ago at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum suggests that similar processes of change took place under both ice-house and greenhouse climates.