SapienCE focuses on the emergence of cultural innovation in Homo sapiens populations of southern Africa between 120,000-50,000 years ago. Homo populations started acquiring modern anatomical traits by ~300 000 years ago in Africa, but there is no evidence indicating that their behavior was modern at the time. Current archaeological evidence, although limited, highlights the 120-50 ka interval as a period of accelerated human cognitive, technological and social development. The fundamental causes of this critical transformation remain, however, debated. One often-proposed mechanism is the need to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Reconstructing and modelling the environment of the early human populations and their behavior during the times of strong cultural innovations therefore is a critical aspect of SapienCE. This Postdoctoral research fellow will apply trace organic biomarker techniques to a variety of archives (including, but not limited to, terrestrial deposits from the archeological sites, speleothems, and marine sediment cores) in order to reconstruct environmental conditions in South Africa and their variability over time. The results will be ultimately contrasted with archaeological evidence, for early human behaviour. The project will be supervised by Assoc. Prof. Eoghan Reeves and conducted in close collaboration with other SapienCE scientists (Prof. Nele Meckler, Dr. Margit Simon, Dr. Jenny Maccali). We are looking for someone with strong hands-on experience in organic geochemistry, specifically in GC-MS/chromatography applications of trace biomarkers.
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