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TThe Roper Group is a cyclic, predominantly marine, siliciclastic succession of Calymmian (Early Mesoproterozoic) age. It has a distribution of at least 145 000 km2 and a maximum known thickness of ~5000 m. In the Roper River district the middle part of the Roper Group (~1300 m thick) is characterised by the cyclical alternation of mudstone and sandstone units, and can be divided into six third‐order depositional sequences. A typical sequence is broadly progradational in aspect, and comprises a lower, mudstone‐rich, storm‐dominated shelf succession (up to 330 m thick), and a sequence‐capping unit dominated by tidal‐platform cross‐bedded sandstone (up to 80 m thick); both are interpreted as highstand systems tracts. Transgressive strata are poorly represented but where present are characterised by paralic to fluvial redbed assemblages that include ooidal ironstone. Roper Group sequences lack a distinct condensed section and sequence boundaries are mostly conformable. Erosional contacts separate mud‐rich shelf facies from sequence‐capping sandstones. We infer that these erosion surfaces were generated by episodic flexural tectonism, which also generated the accommodation and sediment supply for Roper sequences.

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Vitric-rich volcaniclastic horizons are important for correlation of glacioeustatic sedimentary cycles, both within the well known shallow-marine record of Wanganui Basin, and other New Zealand terrestrial and deep marine records. They also record distal major rhyolitic eruptions from the Taupo (TVZ) and Coromandel (CVZ) Volcanic Zones that are lacking in proximal source areas. Twenty-eight volcaniclastic horizons are recognised in the Castlecliffian and late Nukumaruan strata of Wanganui Basin from glass shard major element geochemistry and stratigraphic position, and are dated using magnetostratigraphy, orbitally tuned cyclostratigraphy and isothermal plateau fission track (ITPFT) ages. The major named volcaniclastic horizons (with ITPFT and/or astronomical ages, respectively) are: Onepuhi (0.

Histomorphometric analysis of femoral and tibial diaphyseal fragments from seven Late Archaic and three Early Modern humans are compared with those of the Pecos, a pre-Columbian Native American population. The ten samples, from Broken Hill (EM-793), Shanidar 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, Tabun 1, and Skhul 3, 6, and 7, provide age-at death results consistent with earlier estimates for most individuals. The Pleistocene groups exhibit less bone turnover and smaller osteons than Recent populations. Resorption and formation were both coupled and balanced in these Pleistocene populations, but the overall vigor of individual cells from both the osteoclast and osteoblast cell lines was less than in Recent populations. Thus the greater bone mass in Later Pleistocene members of the genus Homo is not the result of higher levels of bone turnover, at least among adults.

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Earth's climatic history since 2.5 Ma has been controlled by Milankovitch variations in the planetary orbit, comprising alternate periods of glaciation and interglaciation with a dominant frequency of 41 000 yr. Concomitantly, eustatic sea level has fluctuated 70 to 130 m, causing rapid transgressions and regressions of the shoreline across the world's continental shelves. The resulting sedimentary record is cyclothemic, each cyclothem corresponding to a single climate and sea-level cycle. The Wanganui basin, New Zealand, contains a 2-km-thick, almost complete, composite record since isotope stage 100 (ca. 2.5 Ma) in the form of 47 superposed cyclothems of shelf origin. Each cyclothem corresponds to an unconformity-bound stratigraphic sequence, and typically contains a transgressive systems tract, sometimes a mid-cycle shell bed, a highstand systems tract, and sometimes a regressive systems tract. No advantage accrues from using transgressive-regressive units rather than cyclothems and/or sequences in description of the succession. Six basic sequence motifs represent deposition in locations between the shoreline and offshore shelf, i.e., the Hawera, Birdgrove, Turakina, Seafield, Castlecliff, and Rangitikei motifs. A seventh, the Nukumaru motif (which includes dominant coquina limestone), represents deposition in shallow-water areas of reduced terrigenous sediment on the flank of the basin. The sequence motifs represented in any section change systematically in sympathy with basin-scale changes in subsidence and sediment supply. In contrast with the 41000 year length of individual glacio-eustatic sequences, these basin-wide tectonic cycles have a periodicity of many hundreds of thousands to a few million years, i.e., that of third-or fourth-order sequences of the Exxon type. This, coupled with the restriction of strongly cyclothemic sediments to geological periods of known glacio-eustasy (Permian-Carboniferous, Pliocene-Pleistocene), suggests that tectonic subsidence cycles rather than glacio-eustasy are the driving forces behind the development of the third-and fourth-order unconformity-bound sequences that are reported to occur throughout the stratigraphic record.