Simon Haberle

Australian National University | ANU · Department of Archaeology & natural history

In the highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), tephras are key chronostratigraphic markers for archaeological and palaeoenvironmental studies. Here, mid-Late-Holocene tephras are geochemically fingerprinted and correlated across seventeen sites in PNG. This enables the first regional scale assessment of the distribution of these tephras, with implicat...

The establishment of Tasmanian Palawa/Pakana communities ~40 thousand years ago (ka) was achieved by the earliest and farthest human migrations from Africa and necessitated migration into high-latitude Southern Hemisphere environments. The scarcity of high-resolution paleoecological records during this period, however, limits our understanding of t...

The Indo–Pacific Pollen Database (IPPD) is the brainchild of the late professor Geoffrey Hope, who gathered pollen records from across the region to ensure their preservation for future generations of palaeoecologists. This noble aim is now being fulfilled by integrating the IPPD into the online Neotoma Paleoecology Database, making this compilatio...

Wildfires in forests globally have become more frequent and intense because of changes in climate and human management. Shrub layer fuels allow fire to spread vertically to forest canopy, creating high-intensity fires. Our research provides a deep-time perspective on shrub fuel loads in fire-prone southeastern Australia. Comparing 2833 records for...

It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch in which humans are having a dominant impact on the Earth system. While some geologists have sought to formalize the Anthropocene as beginning in the mid-twentieth century, its social, geophysical, and environmental roots undoubtedly lie deeper in the past. In this revie...

The dynamics of our species’ dispersal into the Pacific remains intensely debated. The authors present archaeological investigations in the Raja Ampat Islands, north-west of New Guinea, that provide the earliest known evidence for humans arriving in the Pacific more than 55 000–50 000 years ago. Seafaring simulations demonstrate that a northern equ...

Controversies exist regarding the extent of past human influence on terrestrial ecosystems and the relative importance of human versus climatic factors in shaping Holocene vegetation. However, there has been no systematic examination of these issues at a global scale. Here we integrate palaeoecological, archaeological, and palaeoclimate data to ass...

The Indo-Pacific Pollen Database (IPPD) is the brainchild of the late Professor Geoffrey Hope, who gathered pollen records from across the region to ensure their preservation for future generations of palaeoecologists. This noble aim is now being fulfilled by integrating the IPPD into the online Neotoma Palaeoecology Database, making this compilati...

Large uncertainties still exist about the long-term mechanisms influencing the hydroclimate variability of southeast Africa where proxy data and model simulations indicate rainfall dipoles between subtropical and tropical areas. The topography of Madagascar, located off the southeastern coast of Africa, modulates these dipoles while its climate is...

Aboriginal manufacture and use of pottery was unknown in Australia prior to European settlement, despite well-known ceramic-making traditions in southern Papua New Guinea, eastern Indonesia, and the western Pacific. The absence of ancient pottery manufacture in mainland Australia has long puzzled researchers given other documented deep time Aborigi...

Remote islands harbour many endemic species and unique ecosystems. They are also some of the world's most human-impacted systems. It is essential to understand how island species and ecosystems behaved prior to major anthropogenic disruption as a basis for their conservation. This research aims to reconstruct the original, pre-colonial biodiversity...

The largest ever primate and one of the largest of the southeast Asian megafauna, Gigantopithecus blacki¹, persisted in China from about 2.0 million years until the late middle Pleistocene when it became extinct2–4. Its demise is enigmatic considering that it was one of the few Asian great apes to go extinct in the last 2.6 million years, whereas o...

The timing and cause of megafaunal extinctions are an enduring focus of research interest and debate. Despite the developments in the analysis of coprophilous fungal spores (CFS), the proxy for reconstructing past megaherbivore changes, the environmental consequences of this fauna loss remain understudied. This is partly due to the general obscurit...

Context The primary factors(s) responsible for the maintenance of Alternative biome states (ABS) in world forest biomes remains unclear and debatable, partly due to insufficient long-term ecological data from suitable ecosystem sites. The occurrence of moorland in southern and western Tasmanian wet temperate forest presents a suitable setting to te...

Recent catastrophic fires across the globe have highlighted the brutal effect on unique tropical ecologies and their human populations. Although these natural events have a million-year-old history, the higher frequency and magnitude of recent fires are signs of increasingly drier conditions due to anthropogenic induced climate change. Identifying...

Understanding the long-term interactions between people and the ecosystem in which they live is vital for informing present-day ecosystem management plans. The use of pollen data for palaeoecological reconstructions is often limited by the low taxonomic resolution of pollen, which often reduces the detail of reconstructions of human influence on pa...

Premise: Pollen collected by honey bees from different plant species often differs in color, and this has been used as a basis for plant identification. The objective of this study was to develop a new, low-cost protocol to sort pollen pellets by color using high-energy violet light and visible light to determine whether pollen pellet color is ass...

Human‐mediated changes in island vegetation are, among others, largely caused by the introduction and establishment of non‐native species. However, data on past changes in non‐native plant species abundance that predate historical documentation and censuses are scarce. Islands are among the few places where we can track human arrival in natural sys...

Plant communities are largely reshaped by climate and the environment over millennia, providing a powerful tool for understanding their response to future climates. Using a globally applicable functional palaeocological approach, we provide a deeper understanding of fossil pollen-inferred long-term response of vegetation to past climatic disturbanc...

Ongoing European suppression of Aboriginal cultural land management since early-nineteenth century colonisation is widely thought to have caused major transformations across all Australian landscapes, including vegetation thickening, severe fires and biodiversity declines. However, these effects are often confounded in the densely settled southern...

When providing pollen forecasts to the community, there is a need to verify the accuracy of curated forecasts, but evaluation is not routinely reported. This study of the AusPollen Partnership compared multi-category grass pollen forecasts for up to six days ahead with daily airborne grass pollen concentrations measured in Brisbane, Canberra, Melbo...

Background: Allergic rhinitis affects half a billion people globally, including a fifth of the Australian population. As the foremost outdoor allergen source, ambient grass pollen exposure is likely to be altered by climate change. The AusPollen Partnership aimed to standardize pollen monitoring and examine broad-scale biogeographical and meteorol...

The initial peopling of the remote Pacific islands was one of the greatest migrations in human history, beginning three millennia ago by Lapita cultural groups. The spread of Lapita out of an ancestral Asian homeland is a dominant narrative in the origins of Pacific peoples, and although Island New Guinea has long been recognized as a springboard f...

The Pilbara region in Western Australia (WA) is of high biological and archaeological significance, though our understanding of its environmental history is limited. Potentially valuable palaeoenvironmental archives exist throughout the Central Pilbara in caves and rockshelters in the form of amberat middens (crystallised animal urine), which are k...

Aim Owing to its diverse bioclimatic zones, long human history and intense anthropogenic impacts, Africa provides a model system for studying how global terrestrial ecosystems might respond to accelerated socio‐environmental stress. Africa is particularly vulnerable to climate change and human impact, and insufficient baseline data hamper current e...

Using a paleoecological approach, we reveal that recent human activities, rather than natural variations in climate, have caused the greatest changes to Nigerian forests in the last 7000 years. Savanna has shown an even higher climate sensitivity in the past and will likely experience significant changes based on projections of future climate chang...

Flower visitors use different parts of the landscape through the plants they visit, however these connections vary within and among land uses. Identifying which flower‐visiting insects are carrying pollen, and from where in the landscape, can elucidate key pollen–insect interactions and identify the most important sites for maintaining community‐le...

The authors regret that the printed version of the above article contained a transcription error in the m/z 1048 peak area column for the branched GDGTs (Table S2). This error affected the GDGT-inferred summer air temperature presented in Figs. 3, 4 and 5, and some of the calibrations presented Fig. S2. The GDGT-inferred temperatures have been reca...

Recent catastrophic fires in Australia and North America have raised broad‐scale questions about how the cessation of Indigenous burning practices has impacted fuel accumulation and structure. For sustainable coexistence with fire, a better understanding of the ancient nexus between humans and flammable landscapes is needed. We used novel palaeoeco...

The above article, published online on 29 January 2022 in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal’s Editor in Chief Steve Long, and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed because of an error the authors of the paper detected in the R code they used in running t...

Significance Wetland environments are increasingly threatened by climate change, population expansion, resource extraction, forest clearance, and pollution. The Ramsar Convention aims to monitor internationally important wetlands to ensure their ongoing maintenance and survival through wise use and management. However, many wetlands have undergone...

Understanding long-term ecological development of wetlands is critical to effective management. The islands of Bass Strait, southeast Australia, have several biologically diverse natural wetlands, including Ramsar sites, yet little is known about their ecology. Here, through a multi-proxy palaeoecological approach, we seek to understand how wetland...

The rapid increase in severe wildfires in many parts of the world, especially in temperate systems, requires urgent attention to reduce fires’ catastrophic impacts on human lives, livelihoods, health and economy. Of particular concern is southeast Australia, which harbours one of the most flammable vegetation types on Earth. While previous studies...

Aim The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) remains an enigmatic period in southeast Australia due to the limited spatial and temporal resolution of its palaeoclimatic records. A major feature of the LGM landscape was the existence of the Bassian Land Bridge, joining Tasmania with the mainland of Australia during periods of low sea level, and potentially fa...

The alpine area of the Australian mainland is highly sensitive to climate and environmental change, and potentially vulnerable to ecosystem tipping points. Over the next two decades the Australian alpine region is predicted to experience temperature increases of at least 1 °C, coupled with a substantial decrease in snow cover. Extending the short i...

Recently expanded estimates for when humans arrived on Madagascar (up to approximately 10 000 years ago) highlight questions about the causes of the island's relatively late megafaunal extinctions (approximately 2000-500 years ago). Introduced domesticated animals could have contributed to extinctions, but the arrival times and past diets of exotic...

Understanding long-term (centennial–millennial scale) ecosystem stability and dynamics are key to sustainable management and conservation of ecosystem processes under the currently changing climate. Fossil pollen records offer the possibility to investigate long-term changes in vegetation composition and diversity on regional and continental scales...

Introduced predators currently threaten endemic animals on Madagascar through predation, facilitation of human-led hunts, competition, and disease transmission, but the antiquity and past consequences of these introductions are poorly known. We use directly radiocarbon dated bones of introduced dogs (Canis familiaris) to test whether dogs could hav...

Despite Australia's high reliance on coal for electricity generation, no study has addressed the extent to which mercury (Hg) deposition has increased since the commissioning of coal-fired power plants. We present stratigraphic data from lake sediments in the Hunter Valley (New South Wales) and Latrobe Valley (Victoria), where a significant proport...

The pace of Holocene vegetation change Although much is known about the rapid environmental changes that have occurred since the Industrial Revolution, the patterns of change over the preceding millennia have been only patchily understood. Using a global set of >1100 fossil pollen records, Mottl et al. explored the rates of vegetation change over t...

Accelerating ecosystem disruption Oceanic islands are among the most recent areas on Earth to have been colonized by humans, in many cases in just the past few thousand years. Therefore, they are important laboratories for the study of human impacts on natural vegetation and biodiversity. Nogué et al. provide a quantitative palaeoecological study o...

The peopling of Sahul (the combined continent of Australia and New Guinea) represents the earliest continental migration and settlement event of solely anatomically modern humans, but its patterns and ecological drivers remain largely conceptual in the current literature. We present an advanced stochastic-ecological model to test the relative suppo...

Indigenous land use and climate have shaped fire regimes in southeast Australia during the Holocene, although their relative influence remains unclear. The archaeologically attested mid-Holocene decline in land-use intensity on the Furneaux Group islands (FGI) relative to mainland Tasmanian and SE Australia presents a natural experiment to identify...

A palynological record spanning the last glacial–interglacial period was derived from high-resolution, deep-sea core MD03-2607, located near Kangaroo Island in South Australia. The core site lies opposite the mouth of the River Murray that, together with the Darling River, drains the extensive (∼1.6 × 10⁶ km²) Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). The record...

Significance Coexposure to airborne pollen enhances susceptibility to respiratory viral infections, regardless of the allergy status. We hypothesized this could be also true for SARS-CoV-2 infections. To investigate this, we tested for relationships between SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and pollen concentrations, along with humidity, temperature, popu...

We reconstruct long-term vegetation development in a temperate Australian oceanic setting using wetland sediments, pollen and charcoal records from truwana/Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait to reconstruct vegetation and fire history. Magnetic susceptibility and organic content were also derived for two of the four sites considered as proxies for lo...

Aim Understanding long‐term heathland development is key in mitigating their current attrition globally. However, such knowledge is limited in Australia and the wider Southern Hemisphere. We aim to identify potential climatic and environmental drivers of Holocene heathland development in temperate‐oceanic Australia (Bass Strait), and also assess th...

Rapid environmental change is a catalyst for human evolution, driving dietary innovations, habitat diversification, and dispersal. However, there is a dearth of information to assess hominin adaptions to changing physiography during key evolutionary stages such as the early Pleistocene. Here we report a multiproxy dataset from Ewass Oldupa, in the...

Knowledge of the drivers of ecosystem changes in the past is key to understanding present ecosystem responses to changes in climate, fire regimes and anthropogenic impacts. Northern Hemisphere‐focussed studies suggest that climate and human activities drove turnover during the Holocene in temperate ecosystems. Various drivers have been invoked to e...

Mining has been a major contributor to economic development in Australia since British arrival in the late 1700s, with little to no thought regarding the long-term environmental consequences. This study assesses the metal pollution legacy caused by different smelting methods and mining activities during the British colonialism in western Tasmania....

Waterways in the Southern Hemisphere, including on the Australian continent, are facing increasing levels of mercury contamination due to industrialization, agricultural intensification, energy production, urbanization, and mining. Mercury contamination undermines the use of waterways as a source of potable water and also has a deleterious effect o...

Late Pleistocene records of island settlement can shed light on how modern humans (Homo sapiens) adapted their behaviour to live on ecologically marginal landscapes. When people reached Sahul (Pleistocene New Guinea-Australia), between 65 and 50 ka, the only islands they would have encountered were in the tropical north. This unique geographic situ...

Mercury (Hg) contamination is an environmental concern as a by-product of legacy mining in Australia. Here we investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of Hg in the Molonglo River system in New South Wales, Australia, and assess the physical and chemical factors influencing that distribution. Mercury concentrations in sediment cores were me...

Environmental change is key for human evolution, especially at times of anatomical and behavioral change in life histories, such as the origin of meat consumption, economic diversification, and dispersal. However, for the earliest phase of human evolution featuring the technology-dependent hominins that shaped our lineage since 2.6 Ma, the Oldowan,...

A comprehensive image collection and measurement dataset of Myrtaceae reference pollen for the Furneaux Group, Tasmania to aid in the identification of Myrtaceae pollen types in fossil pollen records. A collection of over 3000 images of Myrtaceae reference pollen grains for the Furneaux Group, Tasmania along with a corresponding measurement dataset...

The identification of Myrtaceae pollen to species level in fossil records has challenged palynologists due to the similarity of pollen grains produced by species in this family. Here, we present a pollen morphological study of the Myrtaceae species found in a specific region of southeastern Australia, the islands of the Furneaux Group in Bass Strai...

High-resolution pollen and charcoal records from Dianchi in central Yunnan Province, southwestern China are presented in this study and reveal variations in vegetation, fire, lake environments, and climate over the last 20,000 years (20 ka). The results show that the climate during the period 20.0–18.0 ka was relatively cold, and rainfall in winter...

We present a high-resolution record of Late Glacial and Early Holocene mercury (Hg) accumulation within the sediments of Laguna de Los Anteojos, a small headwater alpine lake in Venezuela. Our sediment core spans the Older Dryas (OD) and Younger Dryas (YD) climate reversals, providing new insight into the effects of abrupt climatic transitions on a...