Investigating population dynamics against paleoecological oscillations in the Southern Caucasus - Introduction to the special issue

This edited special issue of Quaternary Science Reviews summarizes papers presented at the workshop held at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Toledo, Spain (May 19 and 25, 2024). The initiative for organizing the workshop came from our ERC Project- TransCause, Investigating Pleistocene population dynamics in the Southern Caucasus (ERC – Starting Grant Agreement No. 948015). The papers in the volume mark the mid-term results of the project. The main aim of the volume was to expand the behavioral and environmental frameworks for the Armenian Highland and Southern Caucasus between MIS 7 to MIS 3 (250 – 29 ka). The ultimate ambitious goal of the project is to articulate the inferred behavioral patterns from the project within an intra-regional comparative database of Paleolithic occupations across southwestern Asia.