Descrizione del progetto
Aspetti biogeografici delle prime migrazioni dell’uomo
Cosa sappiamo dei primissimi ominini che costruivano utensili? Nell’ultimo decennio, le conoscenze scientifiche sono aumentate e sono stati trovati insediamenti di ominini in Africa e in Cina, risalenti a mezzo milione di anni prima di quanto si credesse in precedenza. Per comprendere i complessi processi di colonizzazione umana nel Vecchio Mondo è necessario un nuovo approccio di ricerca basato sulla biogeografia e sui comportamenti adattativi. Il progetto BICAEHFID, finanziato dall’UE, creerà una sintesi globale delle dinamiche dei primi movimenti dell’uomo basata sul confronto della più lunga linea temporale al mondo dei primi siti archeologici. Utilizzando i set di dati disponibili, il progetto si propone di comprendere il percorso evolutivo alternativo seguito dagli ominini che condividono un comune background biologico e culturale e che hanno intrapreso percorsi con condizioni climatiche e biogeografiche diverse.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- 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
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantIstituzione ospitante
28006 Madrid
Spagna