BICAEHFID Project
Biogeographic and cultural adaptations of early humans during the first intercontinental dispersals (BICAEHFID) – ERC Advanced Grant, 2019-2026 (Grant Agreement: 832980)
Our understanding of the emergence and dispersal of the earliest tool-making hominins has been revolutionised in the last decades, with sites in eastern Africa and China pushing records of both events several hundred thousand years earlier than previously thought.
In recent years, climate and environmental factors have been considered by many as primary drivers of these evolutionary events in human history. However, models linking Earth’s dynamics with biological speciation, cultural innovation and migration events with climatic require further testing, and recent discoveries suggest that the picture of the earliest human colonization across the Old World is far more complex, demanding new approaches to the biogeography and adaptive behaviours of early humans.
The BICAEHFID project, funded by the European Research Council, argues for a broader geographic approach to the study of earliest human occupation dynamics by comparing Africa and Asia, two of the world’s longest sequences of early archaeological sites.
This project thus reviews major research questions involved in the investigation of the earliest human migrations, and proposes a route map to better 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.
BICAEHFID advocates for new and unconventional approaches to decipher archaeological patterns, which should go beyond paleoanthropological considerations and evaluate the role of natural phenomena in shaping our understanding of Pleistocene data. New perspectives should also be adopted in the selection of units and scales of analysis, in order to embrace a myriad of temporal and geographical resolutions comprehending both metadata and primary sources, and analyses ranging from macro to micro scales.
This kind of approach should be based on international collaborations where new data sets are produced, compared and synthesised, and be grounded in multidisciplinary perspectives that combine standard archaeological approaches with expertise ranging from geochemistry to computational modelling. The application of new analytical techniques to both legacy data and primary sources and their consolidation into models linking archaeological and paleoclimatic data, alongside the consideration of archaeological patterns in their biotic and abiotic context, will enable validation of previous theories and formulation of novel hypotheses on the tempo and modo of earliest human occupation of the Old Word.
Hominin adaptations in the geochronological and paleoecological context of northeast Asia during the Pleistocene (Xu et al., 2023)
The magnitude of this project requires the collaboration of scientists from world´s class research institutions such as IVPP, CSIC, CENIEH, the Museum für Naturkunde- Berlin, Rovira i Virgili, Indiana and Harvard universities, which collaborate on ground-breaking, overarching research aims that address global questions about early human adaptations from a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective. This fosters the strategic advantages for scientists from several continents to advance in shared scientific goals on the biological and cultural evolution of our early ancestors, and contributes to build international bridges to attain a world-wide view of research questions with global significance.
