Fiona Marshall, the James W. and Jean L. Davis Professor in Arts & Sciences, is a professor emerita of archaeology at WashU. Her research focuses on African archaeology, animal domestication and pastoralism.
Her investigation of early food production, climatic shifts and movement of early herders have positioned her as an international expert on human influences on African savannas and on animal domestication. She is currently conducting research on how animals with less social behavior on the wild — donkeys and cats — became domesticates.
Her long-term field work in Kenya has revealed that ancient mobile herders had positive influences on African savannas through creation of high nutrient settlement patches that persist to this day.
Marshall’s projects and those of her graduate students contribute to understanding human-animal relations; interactions among ancient pastoral and hunter-gatherer societies; the history and resilience of livestock and herding ways of life; and the role of people in the long-term creation and maintenance of African landscapes.
Animal milk was essential to east African herders at least 5,000 years ago, according to a new study that uncovers the consumption habits in what is now Kenya and Tanzania — and sheds a light on human evolution, according to new research from anthropologists from Washington University in St. Louis.
Often viewed as wild, naturally pristine and endangered by human encroachment, some of the African savannah’s most fertile and biologically diverse wildlife hotspots owe their vitality to heaps of dung deposited there over thousands of years by the livestock of wandering herders, suggests new research in the journal Nature.
Four university scientists are among the 84 members and 21 foreign associates recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Long before the advent of agriculture, hunter gatherers began putting down roots in the Middle East, building more permanent homes and altering the ecological balance in ways that allowed the common house mouse to flourish, suggest new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Five-thousand years before it was immortalized in a British nursery rhyme, the cat that caught the rat that ate the malt was doing just fine living alongside farmers in the ancient Chinese village of Quanhucun, a forthcoming study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has confirmed.
