Dr. Glenn Berger is lead author in top-cited article in Journal of Human Evolution. The article "Luminescence chronology of cave sediments at the Atapuerca paleoanthropological site, Spain" was the top-cited article published in the Journal of Human Evolution for the period of 2008 to 2010.

The article analyzes the timing of the peopling of Europe, after the first out-of-Africa demographic expansion at the end of the Pliocene, which is of great interest to paleoanthropologists. The paper was published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 55, Issue 2 in 2008.

Dr. Berger collecting cave sediments at the Atapuerca sites
for luminescence dating.
Photo credit: Jordi Mestre/IPHES

Berger is one of the world's foremost scientists in luminescence dating. His distinguished career began before his arrival at DRI in 1994. His international reputation for research in geological and environmental sciences has continued to gain momentum thanks to his work in geochronology, geoarcheology, paleoenvironmental records, applied environmental studies and optical dating.

As a research professor in the Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, Berger's career spans two distinct research areas. In the 1970s, he was one of a handful of pioneers in argon-argon geochronology, an absolute-time dating technique in which the total accumulation of stable types of argon from the radioactive decay of potassium is measured directly and precisely by mass spectrometry. This research led to the development of the now globally used method of argon-argon thermochronology for determining ancient thermal histories of basement rock.

Berger then turned his attention to luminescence geochronology in the 1980s by conducting seminal experiments in thermoluminescence dating on unheated sediments and volcanic ash. This is a method that measures the total accumulation in crystals of natural ionizing-radiation effects by counting photons of extremely dim light released in the laboratory as luminescence. The intensity of this light is directly related to the length of time a crystal has been buried. Therefore, the older the specimen, the greater the luminescence level.