Professor Małgorzata Kot from the University of Warsaw has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). With a grant amounting to €2.55 million, she will lead research in high-altitude caves in Central Asia, analyzing traces of migration of early modern humans.
The ERC announced on Tuesday that 328 researchers from 43 nationalities will receive grants totaling €678 million in this year’s edition. Prof. Kot’s project is the only one among the funded proposals to be conducted at a Polish institution.
Titled “Were They Modern Humans? The Problem of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic in West Central Asia,” the project focuses on archaeological sites in the western Tian Shan and Pamir-Alay mountain ranges. The five-year study aims to uncover insights into the migrations and interactions of early humans in this region.
“We are the only surviving human species on Earth, but it hasn’t always been that way. Just tens of thousands of years ago, several different hominid populations inhabited the planet,” said Professor Małgorzata Kot in a video shared by the University of Warsaw. “What happened to all the other hominids? Why are we the only ones left? This is the question I aim to explore with the ERC grant.”
The research set to run until 2029. Prof. Kot is planning an interdisciplinary collaboration involving scientists from other centres, including the National Archaeology Centre of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the W. Szafer Institute of Botany of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The project will be supported by experts from diverse fields such as palaeoanthropology, palaeogenetics, geology, palaeontology, and palaeobotany.
“We are embarking on years of great adventure. We hope to answer an important question: how much did contact with other species shape us as modern humans, and to what extent did we contribute to their extinction?” the researcher added.
Professor Małgorzata Kot from the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, Ph: Mirosław Kaźmierczak/UW
Source:
Nauka w Polsce
University of Warsaw
Narodowe Centrum Nauki
Narodowe Centrum Badań i Rozwoju
