The Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeology and Evolution of Human Behavior (ICArEHB) at the University of Algarve (UAlg) continues to make a significant impact in the international research community. The center has been awarded two new ERC Starting Grants, a prestigious recognition of excellence from the European Research Council (ERC). Dr. Elisa Bandini and Dr. Jonathan Reeves have each secured a grant for their groundbreaking projects, PRIMERS and OLAF, respectively.

Each ERC project brings with it a budget of €1.5 million, which will largely be allocated to new hires at UAlg and fieldwork directly related to these projects. This achievement marks the fourth and fifth ERC grants awarded to ICArEHB in just three years, establishing the center as a unique research hub within UAlg and a standout institution in Portugal for archaeology and human evolution.

These grants further solidify ICArEHB’s and UAlg’s reputation as one of the premier locations worldwide for studying human evolution. The center has attracted an exceptional concentration of leading researchers, many of whom contribute significantly to the Master’s and PhD programs at UAlg, elevating its educational capabilities to a level unmatched in the country.

The arrival of researchers from esteemed institutions like the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and the University of Zurich (Switzerland) to ICArEHB underscores the potential of Portugal and the Algarve to become a hub of knowledge-driven economic growth. However, realizing this potential will require continued investment and strategic decisions by local and national authorities. While the ERC-PT Careers program by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) is a positive step, further efforts are needed at the university and local administration levels to foster an environment where such world-class research can thrive.

Discover the projects:

Elisa Bandini: PRIMERS

A hallmark of human culture is our unsurpassed innovative ability, which allowed us to expand into almost all environments on the planet and build the cultural world we inhabit today. By identifying the conditions driving innovations across primates, we can provide new insight into when and how humans developed this unique culture. PRIMERS will address this need by adopting a systematic and holistic approach to testing the catalysts of a watershed behaviour in our evolutionary history: the ability to make and use sharp stone tools (flakes). The advent of intentional flakes in the human lineage marks the first clear divergence between animal and human technology. With tools to access high-value calories, our ancestors now had the physical and cognitive resources to lay the groundwork for our culture. PRIMERS will use a triangulation approach to follow the emergence of flaking in appropriate proxy models: wild and captive chimpanzees, capuchins, and macaques. Objective 1 will define the baseline stone manipulation propensities of these species using novel artificial intelligence coding methods. Objective 2 will test two other major drivers of innovations: exposure and experience. An experimental paradigm with in-built controls, large sample sizes (N =350), and long-term testing protocols (approx. 4 years) will be used to empirically evaluate the cognitive and developmental primers of innovations. Objective 3 will systematically compare primate assemblages to some of the oldest human stone tools, allowing for inferences to be made on when cognitive capacities diverged between humans and other primates. Structural Equation Models will then determine the relative contributions and interactions between the measured factors. By testing three species, combining and upscaling experimental paradigms and implementing powerful modelling tools, PRIMERS will radically enhance our understanding of the conditions required for innovations, and with it, the primers of human culture.

Jonathan Reeves: OLAF

Tool production is intrinsically tied to the evolution of our species as it allows us to occupy nearly every environment on the planet. The widespread production of sharp-edged tools known as the Oldowan, 2.6 million years ago, is regarded as a major adaptive leap as it may have fundamentally changed the ecology of our ancestors. This major adaptative shift resulted in a change in diet, enhanced ecological versatility for a range of environments, and, ultimately, the proliferation of the human lineage across the globe. However, it remains unclear if the emergence of Oldowan technologies resulted from a watershed innovation or if it represents a technological continuity of the tool repertoire of apes. The OLAF project aims to determine the adaptive significance of the appearance of the Oldowan by implementing a new set of theoretical tools while shifting the scale of archaeological analysis from the site to a broader landscape level. OLAF will use agent-based modeling to directly investigate the relationship between stone tool use, environmental factors, and site formation processes at the landscape scale and generate concurrent expectations for how hominin-environment interactions produce patterns in the archaeological record. In parallel, we will reconstruct the portions of the Ledi Geraru (Ethiopia) research area where sediments have preserved the 2.6-million-year-old artifact and fossil-rich paleolandscape, over an area of 33 square kilometers. Agent-based models that are tailored to local data, will validate, or reject predictions concerning mobility, diet, or space use. OLAF will thus provide a comprehensive understanding of the tool-mediated foraging behaviors of the earliest Oldowan tool makers, allowing us to examine the adaptive benefits of tool use at the dawn of humanity.