RICERCA ITALIANA     

TRACING HOMO ERECTUS ALONG THE WESTERN COAST OF THE RED SEA FROM ERITREA TO SUDAN: ENVIRONMENTS AND PEOPLING DURING THE PLEISTOCENE

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Abstract

Homo erectus was a highly successful species. From his African homeland he found favourable pathways to disperse during Pleistocene times, possibly in more than one phase, across Eurasia to the Far East. The clues of these dispersals, although clear within the origin region in the East Arican Rift, fade away between East Africa and the Middle East. The northernmost finding in East Africa is the cranium of Homo erectus from Buia in the Eritrean Dankalia, dating back to 1My.
The applicants for this research program plan to start with an in-depth analysis of the features of this cranium (by means of advanced techniques, such as a portable High resolution CT scanner devised on purpose) in order to clarify his morphological, paleoneurological, physiological placement within the evolutionary pattern towards Homo sapiens.
The Buia Homo cranium, as well as other dental and postcranial remains, were found thanks to the identification, within the Buia sedimentary succession, of fossiliferous key-beds depositionally connected with swampy or fluvio-lacustrine environments. Search for similarly characterised successions in nearby areas will be expanded with the aim of locating new hominid remains that, similar to Buia, will be possibly associated with abundant vertebrate remains and Paleolithic artefacts.
New fossiliferous/archaeological sites will be put into a chronostraigraphic context by magnetostratigraphy and radiometric dating on volcanic ashes >>>

Principal Investigator

Ernesto ABBATE Università degli Studi di FIRENZE

Research Objectives

FOREWORD
The search for hominid remains is one of the objective of several international research teams. Such kind of research activities are plenty of difficulties and seldom result in new findings, the latter being precious due to their intrinsic rarity.
On the basis of relatively few remains, in most cases extremely fragmentary, the available modern technologies allow to derive crucial information for reconstructing phases and patterns of human evolution.
The reconstruction of paleo-environments and the study of Paleolithic artefacts (in most cases associated to fossil remains) both give us important information to evaluate the cultural placement of hominids and to understand factor that drove their dispersal across the African continent and over, in Eurasia. The research member of the units proposing the present research project are working on the above lines. They compose the only Italian group, active in East Africa, who has on his credit paleoanthropological findings: the Homo erectus cranium (with associated teeth and pelvis) published in Nature (Abbate et al., 1998) and a second finding in 2003 (a pubic symphysis of a male individual). Thanks to these results this Italian team can be aligned to other teams (from United States, United Kingdom and France) having a long tradition in researches on paleoanthropological sites and their geological context.
Our team includes specific expertises on the study of physical and (paleo-) biological >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

East Africa is the region where started and developed most studies on early hominization, on Plio-Pleistocene peopling and early bio- and cultural human evolution. It is from this region that main phases of the so called "out-of-Africa" dispersal of our ancestors (Anton & Swisher 2004) started, and possibly were repeated during time (Aguirre & Carbonell 2001).
The latest Pliocene to Early Pleistocene interval represents a time span when crucial evolutionary phases in human evolution occurred, but the paleoanthopological record of this time span still is relatively scarce (cfr. Wood 1991).
The last few years have seen remarkable new findings across Europe (Italy, Spain) or at the gates of Europe (Georgia) yielding new clear evidences of a human dispersal out of the African continent since the latest Pliocene, at about 1,8 Ma (Gabunia et alii 1999; Oms et alii 1997; Ascenzi et alii 1996). Remarkable in this respect are the Early Pleistocene Paleolithic artefacts found in the Guadix-Baza basin (Spagna; Oms et alii 2002). Even more important are the 1,8 Ma human remains and Paleolithic artefacts from Dmanisi (Georgia) (Gabounia et alii 1999; Lordkipanidze et alii 2005; Vekua et alii 2002).
These new data allow the drawing of a new scenario for the understanding of early human dispersal(s) out of Africa towards the Eurasia, in a wider context of vertebrate fauna dispersal (and also paleoecological and paleoclimatological evolution).
The 1995-2003 >>>