PI Dr Aurélien Mounier (CNRS)
Funding: IRP INEE-CNRS (LIA1262) - French Foreign Office - Fyssen Foundation
The archaeological research project Trans-Evol is a collaboration between the UMR 7194 Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme Préhistorique (A. Mounier, PI, CNRS), the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES, M. Mirazón Lahr, University of Cambridge) and the Earth Sciences Department (F. Kyalo Manthi, National Museums of Kenya - NMK). The project is being supported logistically by the Turkana Basin Institute (i.e. TBI), the French Embassy in Nairobi and the IFRA in Nairobi. The project is funded by a five-year International Research Project CNRS/INEE grant (65 k€, 2020-2024), a four-year MEAE grant from the French Foreign Office (38 k€, 2021-2024) and a Research Grant from the Fyssen Foundation (21 k€, 2021-2022).
The project is built around several archaeological sites (10 new sites have been identified since 2017) in the South Turkana Basin in Kenya in West Turkana (Kenya) and aims at documenting the morphological and cultural diversity of hominin fossil populations during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition (i.e. EMPT, 1250-750 ka). This period is characterised by major environmental changes along with morphological (encephalisation) and behavioural (specialisation/expansion of Acheulean, new modes of hunting) innovations within the genus Homo. Unfortunately, to date, the African fossil record only counts with three well-preserved hominin remains from this period (Daka, Buia, Olorgaseilie).
During archaeological surveys lead in 2017, 2021 and 2022 10 archaeological sites of interest have been identified. One of them, Kanyimangin, has been mostly characterised. Preliminary geochronological and biochronological results indicates an age estimate between 0.90 and 1.19 million years ago, which is fully compatible with the focused time period of the project: the EMPT. The site has yielded substantial lithic (n=344) and faunal (n=2155) assemblages in part from buried contexts. The latter comprises 212 individual specimens (NISP) distributed across 20 taxa.
20 researchers from different international institutions are currently collaborating to the project, and archaeological exploration and excavations are on going.
The evolutionary landscape of modern human origins in Africa
Our understanding of the origins of our species, Homo sapiens, has undergone a major shift. New fossils, dates and genomic studies have consolidated our African origin. Yet, they also indicate a deeper past, involving multiple events. These events stretch to nearly three quarters of a million years ago (Ma), and take the problem of modern human origins into an entirely different climatic and ecological context. From 1.4 Ma, climate dynamics changed, initiating a 1 million-year period known as the Early-Middle Pleistocene Transition, or EMPT, during which, besides greater climatic variability, there was a prolonged arid phase, profoundly affecting African environments. By the end of the EMPT, the structure of the large mammal community in East Africa had changed significantly. The first modern humans are part of this change. The recognition of this older, drier context for the evolution of our species drives NG’IPALAJEM. Our aim is that NG’IPALAJEM will bring a new understanding of how the evolution of our species is part of a broader and longer African evolutionary landscape
In Africa was a five-year research program funded by the European Research Council (2012-2017) which aimed at discovering and studying fossil and archaeological evidence for modern human evolution in the Kenyan Rift Valley.
The project directed by Prof. M. Mirazón Lahr (LCHES, University of Cambridge) led extensive archaeological surveys and excavations in West Turkana throughout six fieldwork campaigns, during which 18 archaeological sites were identified allowing for the discovery of several thousand human remains. Among those sites, Nataruk, has been described as the first evidence of inter-group violence in human history (Mirazón Lahr et al. 2016).