Evolutionary Responses of Coexisting Early Humans in Africa

Objectif

Once seen as a unilinear progression, human evolution is now considered to have been a branching process, with growing evidence demonstrating that separate early hominin taxa overlapped temporally and geographically. ERCEHA will compare the palaeobiology, technological behaviour and subsistence strategies of human species inhabiting Africa between 1.8 and 0.5 million years ago, in order to disentangle taxonomic diversity and related behavioural differences during the Early Stone Age.

Based on ground-breaking new discoveries, this project will produce an overarching picture of the biological, ecological and cultural features that differentiated early Homo from the contemporary genus Paranthropus in eastern Africa. Establishing if there was niche partitioning or competition between species, how long was coexistence and between how many hominin taxa, and who were the makers of the early Pleistocene technologies, are all themes that have remained elusive to research in the archaeology of human origins. Thanks to the exceptional new evidence available, these challenging subjects can now be addressed.

The ambitious scale of the research questions and an unparalleled fossil record will be approached by adopting a truly multidisciplinary perspective (which ranges from actualistic studies to computerised tomography, and from sedimentology to archaeological excavation) and by applying cutting-edge methods (which include from novel dating techniques to ground-breaking palaeoecological proxies), in order to achieve a far-reaching view of the fundamental but still poorly understood topic of early human coexistence dynamics.