Understanding human dispersal from Africa: paleoanthropological study at Anatolia

Project Gist

Searching for human fossils in Anatolia, Turkey

Keywords

human evolution, human fossil, Out of Africa, dispersal

Background and Purpose

Humans and apes have a long history of dispersal events from Africa. The fossil evidence from the cross-road of Africa and Eurasia is the key for understanding who dispersed from Africa and when the dispersal events occurred. In this research, we aim to find fossils of humans and apes at Anatolia, Turkey, which is one of the important places in Africa−Eurasia cross-road, and thus has a great potential to yield new fossil findings.

Project Achievements

A positive outcome is that we could establish a new network with Turkish researchers of the same generation, which lead to potential access to the fossil localities to further our research. The support of this project gave us invaluable experiences such as visiting the lithic site, which helps widen our perspective of our research. Thanks to the support of this project, we managed to obtain the grant, which could be an important cornerstone for our future research.

Future Prospects

We will do the field work and excavation at the sites we have targeted at during this project to find the new fossils. The outcome will be announced using museum exhibitions, web page, and press releases to let our findings to reach general readers.

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Principal Investigator