Dispersals, resilience, and innovation in Late Pleistocene SE Africa

Introduction

Genetic evidence suggests that successful modern human migration out of Africa is believed to have started c. 70,000 years ago, populating the whole world at different rates and times. This incredible voyage took place because of human’s unique resilience, versatility, and innovation, both biological and cultural, to external stimuli, including ecological and environmental changes.

Project Objective

The main objective of DISPERSALS is to investigate the migration and dispersal dynamics of early Homo sapiens in Africa and archaeologically evaluate the genetic model that southern African human populations were the genesis of the successful out-of-Africa migration some 70,000 years ago.

Research Focus

This will be accomplished by investigating:

1. Cultural and biological continuity/discontinuity issues
2. Human population movements in the last c. 100,000 years in the poorly studied Limpopo and Save river basins in central Mozambique

This area mediates the two key regions of human development, i.e., southern and eastern Africa.

Methodology

DISPERSALS will compare the human occupation and ecology between central Mozambique and eastern and southern Africa using a multi-scale approach based on the study of regional diachronic cultural traits.

The project will:

• Reconstruct regional population patterns
• Conduct comparative quantitative population genetics
• Utilize GIS computational network analyses

The results will then be integrated through Agent-based modeling, based on the incremental creation, elimination, or reorientation of network links to simulate a quantitative framework to study the evolution of population dispersal across southern-eastern Africa.

Significance

The project will be crucial in providing ground-breaking high-resolution archaeological, chronological, and paleoenvironmental data. DISPERSALS will deliver a fundamental perspective on the key processes that triggered migrations and dispersals within Africa and out-of-Africa, which ultimately resulted in the human diaspora over the entire planet.