Overview
EQuaTe's aims:
To establish a robust dating framework for human occupation of northern and central Europe from 2 Ma - 70 ka
• enabling a pan-European integration of this record for the first time
• providing key insights into the dynamics of human populations (and their response to changes in climate over glacial-interglacial cycles) across NW Eurasia
EQuaTe's approach:
Common fossils have the secret to time locked up in their crystals. The breakdown of protein trapped within their crystals, and a luminescence signal locked in upon their formation, can give us a time signal. We will therefore use two complementary dating techniques, intra-crystalline protein decomposition (IcPD) and thermoluminescence (TL) on these commonly-occurring fossils, abundant in archaeological horizons, and that have been collected for the last 2 centuries.
Why do we need two techniques? If you go back to the early days of seafaring, ships would use the sun and the stars alongside sandtimers to give them the vital information on time they needed to navigate. TL is our equivalent of the sundial; the enclosing sediments that we need to get the radioactivity measurements from will only be present at a small number of sites, but they will enable us to pin the chronology to an absolute timescale. The IcPD is like our sandtimer, able to be undertaken on material from the rich museum archive collected over the last 200 years, providing us with time information well beyond the narrower group of sites TL will be applicable at.
EQuaTe's study region:
The main study region is from Britain to the Black Sea, bounded by the Pyrenees, Alps, Caucasus and Urals. This is an area outside potential refugia, where human populations would have been dynamic and highly adaptive, and for which repopulation could have been from different regions.
Extensions to this include work we are undertaking in the Mediterranean.
1) Evaluate the earliest human occupation of Europe.
2) Enhance understanding of population and cultural dynamics into the Middle Pleistocene.
3) Refine the temporal relationships into the Middle Palaeolithic.
4) Advance IcPD & TL geochronology using a range of biominerals.
