  Evolution of the elliptic flow of hadrons in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC
energies is studied within the microscopic quark-gluon string model. The
elliptic flow is shown to have a multi-component structure caused by (i)
rescattering and (ii) absorption processes in spatially asymmetric medium.
Together with different freeze-out dynamics of mesons and baryons, these
processes lead to the following trend in the flow formation: the later the
mesons are frozen, the weaker their elliptic flow, whereas baryon fraction
develops stronger elliptic flow during the late stages of the fireball
evolution. Comparison with the PHOBOS data demonstrates the model ability to
reproduce the v2(eta) signal in different centrality bins.
