View MoreThe Pan-African Evolution Research dimension of my group consists of several projects.
The aWARE project (West Africa's role in Recent human Evolution) is a programme of data recovery and fieldwork across several West African countries. It builds on the work of the Senegal Prehistory Project, a pilot programme led by Prof. Eleanor Scerri and Dr Khady Niang (University of Cheikh Anta Diop) between 2013 and 2017. This programme has now expaneded to include work beyond Senegal, in Benin, the Ivory Coast, Guinea, Ghana, and Nigeria. We have published numerous papers on this, including reporting the earliest evidence of humans living in rainforests in the world.
A related emerging project concerns disease-culture co-evolution in Africa and its relationship with human evolution and niche expansion. Papers on this topic are currently in preparation/submitted.
Modelling Structure is a computational project looking at various different ways in which early human population structure and demography can be discerned. These include ecology based models as well as data free simulations. Finally, this project is also establishng a methods development programme, currently under constrution and focusing on machine learning approaches. Papers on this project are in press and in review.
The group currently consists of four postdoctoral researchers:
Dr Margherita Collucci, postdoctoral researcher in disease-culture co-evolution
Dr Alex Blackwood, postdoctoral researcher in West African archaeology
Dr Lucy Timbrell, postdoctoral researcher in environment and cultural modelling
Dr Emuobosa Akpo Orijemie, externally funded Humboldt Fellow in African palynology
Former postdoctoral researchers include:
Dr Khady Niang, externally funded Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow in archaeology
Dr James Blinkhorn, as director of fieldwork and geoarchaeologist
Dr Eslem Ben-Arous, geochronology
Mr Adrian Timpson, group modeller and data scientist
Dr Emily Hallett group zooarchaeologist/palaeontologist and ecological niche modeller
Former PhD students include:
Dr Jacopo Cerasoni, PhD in hominin behaviour and environments of West Africa
The group also has a network of close collaborators across Africa, Europe and North America.