HEAS Member Katerina Douka Awarded Consolidator ERC Grant
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HEAS Team Leader Katerina Douka was recently awarded a Consolidator ERC grant.
ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to exceptional mid-career researchers who have established themselves as independent investigators and are ready to further solidify their role as research leaders. These grants support groundbreaking projects with the potential to significantly advance their field.
New fossils expected to reveal more about how humans evolved
Modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in Africa, dispersed into Eurasia, and by ~60,000 years ago they reached Sahul, the supercontinent that connected present-day Australia, Papua New Guinea and Tasmania. This remarkable human migration, from the East African Rift to the Pacific Rim, enabled the genetic admixture of Homo sapiens with other hominin species, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, who evolved and lived outside Africa for millennia. The genetic exchanges between archaic hominins and Homo sapiens contributed to the diversity, resilience, and adaptive capacities of modern humans today. However, our knowledge of the human groups that inhabited Africa 100,000 years ago, and those who migrated and subsequently reached Sahul, remains limited due to the lack of fossil and molecular data. RIFT-to-RIM, the new ERC CoG project led by Assoc. Prof. Douka, aims to fill this gap.
The project’s principal objective is the discovery and analysis of new early modern human fossils from under-researched parts of the world. State-of-the-art paleoproteomic and paleogenetic methods will be used to screen thousands of archaeological bones, and hundreds of sediment samples for molecular clues. The material will be collected from 21 archaeological sites in six countries (South Africa, Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea), dating to between 200,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Human evolution is a complex narrative, and RIFT-to-RIM will generate a wealth of new data to help decode the intricate mosaic that defines modern humans today.
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