This project aims to understand when modern humans first arrived in Europe, the origins of modern behaviour and the associated fate of our closest human relatives, the Neandertals. Indeed, modern humans radiated out of Africa into the rest of the world around 60,000-50,000 years ago, and new evidence suggests arrivals of modern humans in Southeast Asia and Australia at least 50,000 years ago. In Europe, however, the timing and the pattern of the biological and cultural shifts that occurred around 50,000 to 35,000 years ago, which resulted in the demise of the Neandertals and their replacement by modern humans, are hotly debated and are considered to be among the most important questions in paleoanthropology.
The results of this project will be of pivotal importance to understanding a key period in European prehistory and, more generally, the biocultural, adaptive and ecological characteristics that make our species successful and unique, ultimately giving rise to the first major global replacement of populations and the establishment of humankind today.
This project has the following interrelated primary objectives:
1) To track the migratory routes and to reconstruct the climatic and environmental conditions linked to the earliest modern human migrations in order to establish when they reached Southern Europe, and in particular Italy.
2) To understand the biocultural adaptations of modern human in Italy, namely the cultural/technological behaviours, subsistence strategies and mobility patterns employed by modern humans that led them to successfully adapt to different eco-geographic contexts, and how these strategies differ from those used by Neandertals. Ultimately, to assess the socio-cultural impact of the first European modern humans with respect to Neandertals, and the potential interaction between the two groups.
3) To trace the last evidence of Neandertals and to disentangle the roles played by the climate, the eco-system and the physical geography in the process that ultimately led to the demise of Neandertals.
