Graeme Barker is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge; Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Since 2000, much of his...
Graeme Barker is a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge; Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Since 2000, much of his research has focused on two sites where the remains of early, anatomically “modern” humans have been found. These are the Niah Caves in Borneo, and Haua Fteah, in Libya.
In both cases, large teams of researchers from different disciplines have been using tiny fragments of evidence to piece together a picture of how occupation of the sites developed, and how the landscape and environment shifted over time. This deeper understanding of the interaction between humans and their environment is changing what we know about how humans emerged from Africa and spread across the world.
The migrations may date back to as long ago as 125,000 years before the present day, but the process itself was by no means as linear as we once thought. Relatively recent studies have shown that Homo sapiens found itself in competition with other species, including not just Neanderthals, but the likes of Homo floresiensis, the so-called “Hobbit” discovered in Indonesia in 2003. Remarkably, the dispersals themselves also occurred against a backdrop of rapid climate change. How our ancestors coped with this, and why they did so more successfully than other species, is becoming clearer as a result of work at sites such as the Niah Caves and Haua Fteah.
“We are beginning to realise that, instead of the idea that we somehow developed as a fully-rounded species and sprang out of Africa fully-formed, much of what we are and who we are developed as part of the journey,” Barker suggests in his talk. “People also tend to see this past as a record of success, but our work shows that people took choices – wise choices, and sometimes foolish choices – and there are cases of extinctions and abandonments in these caves as well as successes.”
Barker’s next project, commencing in a few weeks, will involve similarly extensive work at Shanidar Cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan – one of the few sites which, at different times, is known to have been occupied by both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
His presentation was part of a series of monthly talks, given by Fellows and College Research Associates at St John’s College, in which they provide an overview of their academic research.
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