Abstracted/indexed

The presented doctoral dissertation uses luminescence dating techniques to reconstruct the past environmental and climatic conditions in the middle and lower Danube basin during the period of Homo sapiens' emergence in Europe. The methodological approach focused on optically stimulated luminescence dating of loess deposits, but for some the sections the geochronological methods were combined with physical, biological and geochemical proxy data to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental conditions.

The Black Forest was covered by a 1000 km² large ice cap during the last glaciation. Glacial landforms in the area north-west of the highest summit of the Black Forest, the Feldberg (1493 m above sea level), were investigated to select suitable sampling sites for dating glacial landforms in future studies. Some of the terminal moraines described in this study are mapped for the first time. The application of dating methods will provide insights into the chronology of the last glaciation.

Late Pleistocene Yedoma deposits of Siberia and Alaska are prone to degradation with warming temperatures. Multimodal grain-size distributions of >700 samples indicate varieties of sediment production, transport, and deposition. These processes were disentangled using robust endmember modeling analysis. Nine robust grain-size endmembers characterize these deposits. The data set was finally classified using cluster analysis. The polygenetic Yedoma origin is proved.