Convenors: Michael Petraglia (Australia), Mark Collard (Canada), Andy Herries (Australia), Rahab Kinyanjui (Germany), Sue O’Connor (Australia), Amy Roberts (Australia), Shixia Yang (China)
This theme will explore the evolutionary history of our species, Homo sapiens. The theme will cover the past ~300,000 years of our evolution, examining long-term interactions between human biological and cultural diversity and the Earth’s climatic and environmental transitions. Major gaps remain in understanding how our species evolved and diversified, how we responded to environmental and climatic changes, how we spread around the world and what this means to communities today.
The theme will concentrate on geographic areas extending around the Indian Ocean in Africa, Asia and Australia, addressing regions that have played a key, but understudied role in human origins. The theme promotes diverse perspectives on the human past and intends to feature co-designed research and engagement with Indigenous peoples and local communities in Africa, Asia and Australia, and exploring the place of the human story in a globally connected, yet unequal, world.
The theme will investigate how environmental change influenced our biological and cultural trajectories, how we in turn shaped ecosystems and the ways that ecosystem and climate dynamics have made us a resilient, yet vulnerable, species. The theme will gather environmental, biological and cultural information across a wide-ranging temporal and geographic scale, informed by a cross-cultural and collaborative research approach, resulting in new insights into the evolution and history of Homo sapiens.
Contacts:
Michael Petraglia
Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia
m.petraglia@griffith.edu.au
Mark Collard
Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
mcollard@sfu.ca
Andy Herries
Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
a.herries@latrobe.edu.au
Rahab Kinyanjui
National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya and Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Germany
rkinyanji@gmail.com
Sue O’Connor
Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
sue.oconnor@anu.edu.au
Amy Roberts
Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia
amy.roberts@flinders.edu.au
Shixia Yang
IVPP, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
yangshixia@ivpp.ac.cn
THEME 15 SESSIONS
T15/Session 01: Deep Time Heritage. Critical Perspectives, and Future Opportunities
T15/Session 02: Human Evolutionary History of Eastern Asia During the Past 300,000 Years
T15/Session 03: Human Origins and Evolving Cultures in Southern Asia Over the Last 300,000 Years
T15/Session 04: Human Origins and Dynamic Ecosystems in Africa over the last 300,000 Years