Short Bio

Erich received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2010. Before joining ICArEHB in 2021, he was a researcher at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. He is also an Honorary Researcher at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand and an Associate Member in the Centre for Coastal Palaeosciences at Nelson Mandela University. In 2011, Erich started the P5 Project (www.p5project.org), which has now grown into an international and multidisciplinary collaboration of researchers studying hunter-gatherer adaptations to coastal environments across glacial and interglacial phases. This project, like much of Erich’s research, is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary, drawing upon all four fields of Anthropology, natural sciences, mathematics, and technologies. Locally, Erich’s work is filling gaps in our understanding about human adaptations to glacial periods in Africa and, specifically, how past people utilized coastal resources to survive periods of climatic variability. Globally, his research provides evidence that contributes to our understanding about how Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers moved out of Africa quickly and adapted to each of the new habitats they encountered. His work, therefore, traces a continuum that began in Africa and ended with the peopling of the world.