The Department of Ocean and Environment at NORCE has a full-time postdoctoral researcher position in organic geochemistry of Palaeoenvironments available. The position is part of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant “PIONEER - Palaeoenvironments of Human Behavioural Evolution in Africa”, which fosters collaboration between specialists from the Centre for Early Sapiens behaviour (SapienCE) in Bergen and institutions across South Africa, Europe, South Korea and the United States. The PIONEER project addresses a critical question in palaeoanthropology: to what extent did climatic variability influence the emergence of behavioural complexity in early Homo sapiens during the African Middle Stone Age (~300,000–40,000 years ago)? Despite decades of research, behavioural-environmental hypotheses remain largely untestable due to the lack of stratigraphically and spatially integrated palaeoclimate and archaeological datasets. PIONEER overcomes this limitation by developing an innovative analytical framework that integrates high-resolution leaf wax biomarker records, directly derived from archaeological sediments, with advanced climate and agent-based modelling (ABM). The project focuses on key archaeological cave sites in North and South Africa to reconstruct site-specific vegetation and palaeohydrological histories. By linking palaeoenvironmental reconstructions to archaeological evidence of behavioural innovation, PIONEER enables rigorous testing of competing hypotheses concerning the role of climate in shaping human behavioural evolution.
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