PACED
Palaeoinformatic Approach to the Context of Earliest Human Dispersals (PACED)
The PACED project formed part of the successful NERC funded EFCHED thematic program (Environmental factors in the chronology of human evolution and dispersal). Our team, based in the School of Biological and Earth Sciences at LJMU, was led by Professor Alan Turner, with Drs Laura Bishop, Hannah O’Regan, Angela Lamb* and Sarah Elton**. We examined the possible routes (see 'how did they get there? on right hand menu), and mechanisms of faunal dispersal out of Africa in the Plio-Pleistocene (~3.0-0.5 Million years ago (Ma)). This time period is important because it covers the period when our earliest ancestors began using archaeology and dispersing elsewhere into the Old World (Europe and Asia).
Human ancestors are first known in the African fossil record, but by approximately 1.8 million years ago they had ventured out as far as Dmanisi in Georgia in the form of Homo georgicus. This creature made stone tools and was fully bipedal. After 1.8 Ma H. erectus is found sporadically at sites in both Europe and Asia, although many claimed occurrences are highly controversial either because the dates of the sites are doubted (e.g. Java, Indonesia) or because the fossils themselves may not be hominid (e.g. Orce, Spain). After 1.0 Ma sites become more numerous, with the remains from Atapuerca in Spain proving particularly interesting as they have been named as a new species, Homo antecessor, and are dated to 0.8 Ma. The earliest fossil human remains in the UK are from Boxgrove in Sussex, where a piece of tibia (lower legbone) has been identified as H. heidelbergensis (yet another species!), and dated to 500,000 years ago, but archaeology which may be as old as 700,000 years ago were recently reported from Norfolk.
In order to make the information obtained in this study widely available we teamed up with the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems (ETE) group in Washington DC and the public access online Paleobiology Database (PBD) in Santa Barbara. The ETE group had already entered many of the Plio-Pleistocene African sites into PBD, and we concentrated on entering the Eurasian sites so that faunas from throughout the Old World could be looked at as a whole. At the end of the project we had entered 815 sites into PBD.
A summary of our scientific results of the project can be downloaded from here:
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/efched/results/turner.asp
The following publications have resulted from this project so far (more are on their way):
O’Regan, H.J. (in press) The Iberian peninsula – corridor or cul-de-sac? Mammalian faunal change and possible routes of dispersal in the last 2 million years. Quaternary Science Reviews.
Hughes, J., Elton, S.E. & O’Regan, H.J. (2008) Theropithecus and ‘Out of Africa’ dispersal in the Plio-Pleistocene. Journal of Human Evolution 54: 43-77.
Turner, A & O’Regan, H.J. (2007) Zoogeography - primate and early hominin distribution and migration patterns. In: Handbook of Palaeoanthropology Vol 1: Principles, Methods and Approaches. Henke, W. & Tattersall, I. (Eds) Springer, New York, pp. 271-290.
Turner, A. & O’Regan, H.J. (2007) Afro-Eurasian mammalian fauna and early hominin dispersals. In: The Evolution and History of Human Populations in South Asia. Petraglia, M.D. & Allchin, B. (Eds.) Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 23-39.
O’Regan, H.J., Bishop, L.C., Elton, S., Lamb, A. & Turner, A. (2006) Afro-Eurasian mammalian dispersal routes of the late Pliocene and early Pleistocene and their bearings on earliest hominin movements. Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg 256: 305-314.
O’Regan, H.J., Bishop, L.C., Lamb, A., Elton, S. & Turner, A. (2005) Large mammal turnover in Africa and the Levant between 1.0 and 0.5Ma. In: Early-Middle Pleistocene Transitions: The Land-Ocean Evidence. Head, M.J. & Gibbard, P.L. (Eds.) Geological Society Special Publications, vol 247, pp. 231-249.
* Dr Angela Lamb, NERC Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory (NIGL), Keyworth, Nottingham.
**Dr Sarah Elton, Anatomy, Hull York Medical School, The University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX.
