German University Awards SUNY Oneonta Prof’s Doctoral Thesis

By SARAH ROBERTS
ONEONTA

In February, SUNY Oneonta Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology Kaedan O’Brien was awarded the 2024 Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology Prize for his doctoral thesis on animal migration in prehistory. The award is given annually by the Institute of Prehistory and Medieval Archaeology at Universität Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany and is sponsored by EiszeitQuell, a mineral water brand. It comes with a cash prize of 7,500 euros, just over $8,000.00.

“It is such a huge honor, as only one person on the planet gets the prize each year, so I was shocked that I had received it,” said O’Brien. “I would love to not only continue pursuing this broader project—I have more papers coming out on the project soon—but also want to inspire others to do interdisciplinary research like this, combining anthropology, paleontology, and chemistry to answer fascinating questions that were previously unanswerable.”

“My research tracks the long-term migration and seasonal behaviors of large animals, like wildebeest and zebras, in Kenya,” O’Brien continued. “By studying the chemistry of fossil teeth, I demonstrate that animals behaved quite differently in the Last Ice Age than they do today.”

O’Brien’s research proved migration in two out of 18 studied animal species in the prehistory period—rusingoryx and megalotragus, both extinct relatives of wildebeest—by examining fossil records found in East Africa aged between 115,000 and 11,700 years old. Species studied included antelopes, buffalo, blue wildebeest and zebras—all of which currently display migration behaviors due to food shortages.

O’Brien’s research also showed that some species which show migratory behavior today did not in the Last Ice Age.

“For example, wildebeest did not migrate, but they had more variable diets,” O’Brien explained.

“One implication of his results is that Late Stone Age human groups’ subsistence was not dependent on a highly seasonal availability of their large mammal prey in contrast to the Middle Stone Age period. Moreover, the migratory pattern among large bovids and equids is suggested by his results to be a recent behavior in this region, likely influenced by the increasing competition with the livestock introduced by humans,” said Dorothée Drucker, from the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, on the Universität Tübingen website.

O’Brien is currently undertaking further research in southern Africa, using his previous studies as a model.

“I am sending two SUNY Oneonta students, Saranna Shevalier and Jonathan Saminski, to do a field school and research project for seven weeks in Kenya this summer—following in my footsteps as paleoanthropologists,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien, who lives in Oneonta, obtained his bachelor’s degree in anthropology and zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his master’s degree and doctorate in biological anthropology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He was simultaneously a Graduate Research Fellow of the National Science Foundation.