Zeljko Rezek

Zeljko Rezek is a researcher in the Department of Paleoanthropology. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. His research interest is the evolution of human behavior, adaptation and culture from the Middle Pleistocene to the early Holocene. He specializes in the analysis of stone artifact archives and has conducted fieldwork at a number of Paleolithic sites in Europe, North Africa and Southwest Asia. Currently, he leads the Ain Difla project in Jordan and surveys and excavates the Stone Age landscape in northern Butana, Sudan. The first project studies hominin adaptations to changes in the paleoenvironment of the Dead Sea region from 150,000 to 50,000 years ago, and the emergence of new technologies towards the end of this period. The second project explores the diversity of strategic and opportunistic landscape use by hominins in the wider Saharan Nile region, from the Late Early Stone Age to the Neolithic, principally by integrating behavioral ecology and experimental and agent-based modeling with the formation of the archaeological record. He is also involved in a new project for the renewed excavation of the Contrebandiers cave and the Dar es-Soltan 2 cave in Morocco.