Description du projet
Aspects biogéographiques des premières migrations humaines
Que savons-nous des premiers hominidés fabricants d’outils? Au cours de la dernière décennie, les connaissances scientifiques se sont améliorées et on a découvert en Afrique et en Chine des sites d’hominidés dont l’origine serait antérieure d’un demi-million d’années à ce que l’on pensait auparavant. Une nouvelle approche de recherche basée sur la biogéographie et les comportements adaptatifs est nécessaire pour comprendre les processus complexes de colonisation humaine dans l’Ancien Monde. Le projet BICAEHFID, financé par l’UE, créera une synthèse globale de la dynamique des premiers mouvements humains, basée sur la comparaison de la plus longue chronologie au monde des premiers sites archéologiques. En utilisant des ensembles de données disponibles, le projet vise à comprendre le parcours évolutif alternatif suivi par les hominidés partageant un contexte biologique et culturel commun qui ont emprunté des routes aux conditions climatiques et biogéographiques différentes.
Objectif
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.
Champ scientifique
- 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
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitution d’accueil
28006 Madrid
Espagne