Descripción del proyecto
Aspectos biográficos de las migraciones humanas
¿Qué sabemos sobre los primeros homínidos que fabricaban herramientas? Durante el pasado decenio se ha acumulado una gran cantidad de conocimiento científico y se han descubierto yacimientos de homínidos en África y China con medio millón de años más de antigüedad de lo que se creía posible. Es necesario, por tanto, contar con una investigación nueva basada en biogeografía y comportamientos adaptativos con la que conocer los procesos complejos de colonización humana del viejo mundo. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos BICAEHFID creará una síntesis general de las primeras dinámicas de los desplazamientos humanos en y la comparará con la cronología más larga de los primeros yacimientos arqueológicos. Mediante el empleo de los corpus disponibles, el proyecto desentrañará el curso evolutivo de los homínidos que comparten un pasado biológico y cultural común y que siguieron rutas con distintas condiciones climáticas y biogeográficas.
Objetivo
Our understanding of the emergence and dispersal of the earliest tool-making hominins has been revolutionised in the last decade, with sites in eastern Africa and China pushing both events more than half a million years earlier than previously thought. Traditional models linking biological speciation, cultural innovation and migration events with climatic pulses have remained theoretical, and recent discoveries suggest that the picture of the earliest human colonization across the Old World is far more complex, demanding heuristic approaches to understand the biogeography and adaptive behaviours of early humans.
This project will be the first substantive attempt to produce a global synthesis of earliest human occupation dynamics by comparing the world’s longest sequences of early archaeological sites, namely eastern Africa and China. Our objective is to understand the alternative evolutionary trajectories adopted by hominins that shared an overarching biological and cultural background, but who faced different climatic and biogeographic challenges and opportunities.
The ambition of our global-scale objectives is accompanied by the unmatched quality of our datasets and the ground-breaking perspective we will adopt in their study. Fieldwork in the two most renowned sequences in each region alongside a primary study of additional top-quality assemblages in both subcontinents, will be combined with extensive metadata sets to produce comprehensive views of temporal trends and paleoecological patterns. Our state-of-the-art methodological sets (which combine an exceptionally diverse range of disciplines from geochemistry to niche modelling) and ground-breaking analytical perspective (which considers data from micro-stratigraphy to satellite imaging) will enable us to develop new approaches to challenge established paradigms and produce a new picture of the biogeographic adaptations of early stone-tool makers.
Ámbito científico
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeochemistry
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeologyethnoarchaeology
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligenceheuristic programming
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesphysical geography
- social sciencessociologyanthropologyphysical anthropology
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
28006 Madrid
España