Project description
Climate sparks human complexity
What triggered the leap in behavioural complexity that defines Homo sapiens? During the African Middle Stone Age (approximately 300 000 years ago), early humans began creating tools, symbols, and social networks – but the role of climate in this transformation remains hotly debated. Existing climate and archaeological data are too disconnected to test such hypotheses. The ERC-funded PIONEER project will combine advanced chemical analyses of ancient sediments with climate simulations and agent-based modelling. Specifically, it plans to link archaeological findings with past environmental conditions at key South African cave sites. Its framework allows for long-elusive tests of climate-behaviour links, and also reshapes how we study human evolution worldwide.
Objective
The emergence of Homo sapiens' behavioural complexity represents a fundamental milestone in the evolution of humankind. Still, the causes of this critical transformation remain debated. For the African Middle Stone Age (MSA, ~300 000–40 000 years) a key question is whether and how climate variability contributed to the increasing behavioural complexity in modern humans.
However, behavioural-environmental hypotheses remain untestable because the existing palaeoclimatic datasets are spatially, stratigraphically, and causally disconnected from the archaeological record.
PIONEER will overcome this impediment by developing a new analytical framework that allows testing of previously untestable hypotheses and thereby advances our understanding of human behavioural evolution. To achieve this, cutting-edge analytical (leaf wax isotope analyses) and computational approaches (climate- and agent-based modelling (ABM)) will be combined with African archaeology. Fundamental to my approach are high-resolution climate records from within the archaeology-bearing sediments, thus directly connecting environmental- and archaeological records.
PIONEER will test behavioural-environmental hypotheses by interlinking several activities:
1) establish unprecedented high-resolution datasets of past vegetation and palaeohydrology changes from five key cave sites, inhabited by early Homo sapiens, located along the South African coast
2) create a high-resolution spatial representation of the environments experienced by our ancestors from novel climate simulations
3) explore likelihoods for different behavioural-environmental scenarios via ABM
Although PIONEER focuses on the South African MSA, my approach is applicable to most archaeological timeframes and locations. Consequently, PIONEER will transform future studies of climate-human interactions, clarifying key aspects of early human behaviour.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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5838 BERGEN
Norway
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