Displaying 30 projects
The ways Neanderthals treated their dead have been a key focus of long-standing debates about their capacities for compassion and symbolic thought, and their similarity to modern humans. These questions feed into broader questions concerning how similar Neanderthals were to ourselves, modern humans...
Anthropogenic Wetlands and the Long Transition to Agriculture in the Levant (Anthropogenic Wetlands)
The project will develop an innovative new model to examine the pivotal role of anthropogenic wetlands in the long transition to agriculture in the Levant. Remarkably, while this transition has been explored in some detail, we still do not have a good grasp on the long-term developments and causes...
Archaeological data is often biased and incomplete. This is a well-known issue for most archaeologists. Although studies of specific sites and small regions can have this into account, the effect of this problem increases exponentially as archaeologists expand their chronological and geographic...
EHSCAN is a Horizon-MSCA-2022-PF scheme Fellowship Funded by UKRI and hosted by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. The aim is to understand the cultural dynamics and transmission means of material culture in North Africa during the Early Holocene period (~...
Tracking the early emergence of derived Homo -like cerebral features in the hominin fossil record can be expected to contribute to an understanding of the timing (i.e., chronology) and mode (i.e., process) of critical brain changes. Because brain tissue is not preserved in the fossil record...
Our knowledge of human evolution is limited by several factors. One is tightly linked to the nature of the fossil record, as bones of our extinct human relatives and other primate species rarely appear in archaeological and paleontological sites, and when they do, they very commonly appear in an...
The last decades have witnessed marked achievements of STEM in understanding the remains of humans, animals, and plants from the past by analyzing different materials, both inorganic and organic. These developments have opened-up the great potential for increasing our understanding of cultural...
How did our ancestors walk? Perhaps the greatest challenge that this question has posed in the past, is the lack of methodological applications in which no study has previously reconstructed how our ancestors moved using biomechanical modelling techniques. We need to consider not just individual...
Despite recent progress in molecular analyses and the constant increase of the hominin remains in the fossil record, the chronological, geographical and evolutionary context of the emergence of the genus Homo remains largely debated. More importantly, the identity of our direct ancestors and...
The aim of H-E Interactions is to investigate how increasingly anthropogenic wetland landscapes, and the reliable resources within those environments, influenced the evolution of plant-food production and the origins of agriculture through the Final Pleistocene and into the Early Holocene (ca. 23-8...
Northern Bosnia is a key location in which to investigate human-environment interactions in the Late Pleistocene /Middle-Upper Palaeolithic. Our research aims to evaluate hominan resource networks and investigate palaeoenvironmental conditions during this period, and address the following...
Image: Ancient pastoralist settlement viewed from the air, Amboseli, Kenya. Photo: P. Lane. Mapping Africa's – Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (maeasam.org) project aims to identify and document endangered archaeological heritage sites across Africa using a combination of remote...
The Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project will document the endangered archaeology and cultural heritage of the Indus River Basin and the surrounding areas and publish this information in an Open Access Arches geospatial database. This database will be a collaborative output...
A project investigating Modern human dispersal into Eurasia and its relation to Neanderthal extinction during the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition.
Human evolution is a central research area in biology and anthropology and has a history of research going back more than 150 years. For most of that time, evidence has come from digging up fossils and archaeological remains. Research in human evolution has been transformed by the impact of...
How did the biomechanics and ergonomics of the human hand influence the use and production of Palaeolithic stone tools? Traditionally, stone tools have been analyzed for their morphological properties and technological characteristics to infer the cognitive and social evolution of early hominins...
Caractérisation du comportement et adaptation des Néandertals et les hommes modernes pendant la transition entre le Paléolithique moyen et supérieur.
Caracterización del comportamiento y adaptación de los neandertales y humanos modernos durante la transición entre el Paleolítico medio y superior.
Changing Paleoenvironments and Hunter-Gatherer Strategies in the Northern Adriatic Basin.
In the last decade we have learned that (at least) three human species existed across the African continent during the Pleistocene. After the paleoanthropological and archaeological discoveries and dating of Jebel Irhoud (Morocco), we know that Homo sapiens was present at around 300ka with a clear...
As part of the international campaign to salvage sites threatened by construction of the second Aswan High Dam in southern Egypt, coordinated by UNESCO, researchers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland collaborated on a series of archaeological campaigns between 1960 and 1964. Known as the...
Fordwich has been revealed to be the oldest directly-dated Acheulean occurrence in the United Kingdom, with artefacts dating from 560,000 to 620,000 years ago (MIS 15). This makes it the second oldest Acheulean site in north-west Europe, and the oldest to display a known handaxe assemblage...
The Rising from the Depths Network aims to identify ways in which the marine and maritime cultural heritage of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar can be used to benefit coastal communities in these countries. Many of these communities are among the poorest in the region and are especially...
Shanidar cave viewed from the south (Photograph: Graeme Barker) The Shanidar Cave Project Following an invitation to Professor Graeme Barker from the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, the Shanidar Cave Project was established as a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the...
Cambridge is home to world-leading researchers across archaeological science, technical art history and heritage science, based at Department of Archaeology, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the Hamilton Kerr Institute, among others. There are multiple synergies across these institutions in terms of...
The project aims to contribute to the understanding of weaving by focusing on the identification of plants used for the earliest textiles (ca 28,000 to 20,000 years ago).
Traumatic death affects our daily life, but how did traumatic mortality affect human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective? TRAUMOBITA aims to understand how traumatic mortality among prehistoric humans shaped our behaviour during the Late Pleistocene to the Middle Holocene. Confirming that...
The transition from Oldowan to Acheulean technologies are hypothesised to be concomitant with advances in cognition and behaviour. However, the nature of these shifts, and their cultural and evolutionary implications are poorly defined and understood. While extensive literature exists on these...
As the complex mosaic of Quaternary human lineages across and beyond Africa becomes increasingly apparent, an accurate chronology is critical to disentangle the patterns and process, particularly those that link human evolution to palaeoenvironmental and climatic change. “Wisdom Teeth” is a NERC-...
Характеристика поведения и адаптации неандертальцев и современных людей к условиям МИС 3, включая условия перехода от среднего к верхнему палеолиту.