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.
About Katerina Douka
Katerina Douka is Associate Professor in Archaeological Science at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Vienna. She is also a member of the HEAS Research Network. Assoc. Prof. Douka joined the University of Vienna in 2021 as Tenure Track Professor. Prior to coming to Austria, she was the PI of FINDER Project and Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Germany (2017-2021), and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, UK (2011-2017). She holds a Masters and DPhil degree in Archaeological Science from the University of Oxford (2006 and 2011, respectively), and a Bachelor from the Technological University of Athens, Greece (2004).
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