Homomorphism complexes and k-cores

For any fixed graph $G$, we prove that the topological connectivity of the graph homomorphism complex Hom($G,K_m$) is at least $m?D\left(G\right)?2$, where $D\left(G\right)={max}_{H?G}\delta \left(H\right)$, for $\delta \left(H\right)$ the minimum degree of a vertex in a subgraph $H$. This generalizes a theorem of C?uki? and Kozlov, in which the maximum degree $\Delta \left(G\right)$ was used in place of $D\left(G\right)$, and provides a high-dimensional analogue of the graph theoretic bound for chromatic number, $\chi \left(G\right)\le D\left(G\right)+1$, as $\chi \left(G\right)=min\{m:\text{Hom}(G,K_m)\ne ?\}$. Furthermore, we use this result to examine homological phase transitions in the random polyhedral complexes Hom$(G(n,p),K_m)$ when $p=c∕n$ for a fixed constant $c>0$.