  The implications of parton recombination processes on the dynamics of
ultrarelativistic heavy-ion reactions are investigated. To do so, the
quark-gluon string transport model has been extended for partonic recombination
and fusion processes. Parton recombination leads to short equilibration times
and improves significantly on the theoretical description of measured directed
and elliptic flow, i.e., v_1 and v_2, distributions in Au+Au collisions at
sqrt(s) = 200 GeV, in particular what concerns their pseudorapidity dependence.
The shape of v_2(eta) is found to be closely related to fast thermalization.
