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The ‘EQuaTe’ project, funded by the European Research Council, will apply two independent, but complementary, dating techniques to commonly-occurring Pleistocene fossils from sites across Europe from the last 2 million years.
The aim is to provide a secure dating framework for the first appearance of human populations throughout Europe, and their repeated expansions and contractions in response to climate change over the last two million years.
During the Quaternary (the last 2.6 million years) we have dramatic global climate change, and Europe would have seen periodic ice sheet expansion and contraction, impacting on plant and animal communities, likely driving technological adaptations and the evolution and migration of human populations.
Setting the archaeological record at the centre of this chronology, EQuaTe will use recent advances in two dating techniques: amino acid geochronology (developed at York) and thermoluminescence dating of biogenic calcite (developed at Aberystwyth). This multidisciplinary and international team will establish a dating framework for the European Palaeolithic, a European Quaternary Timescale, EQuaTe. This will provide the foundations for a pan-European integration of this record, providing key insights into the dynamics of human populations, and their response to changes in climate.
For additional information and general enquiries contact - kirsty.penkman@york.ac.uk
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