Margit Simon Receives Prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant

"This grant enables me to apply cutting-edge techniques to one of the most fundamental questions in human history: How did the environment shape who we are today?" says Dr. Margit Simon, leading climate researcher at the Norwegian Research Centre (NORCE), Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, and SapienCE Centre of Excellence.

Exploring Climate's Role in Human Evolution with PIONEER

Simon is very much looking forward to leading the five-year project, Palaeoenvironments of Human Behavioural Evolution in Africa (PIONEER), which aims to connect environmental and archaeological data on a regional scale, to uncover how climate change influenced human cultural evolution.

“PIONEER will change our understanding of whether climate variation triggered localized cultural changes or broader, large-scale shifts in our species”, Simon says

In Africa, between 125,000 and 50,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens first began demonstrating behaviours that we think of as typical of our species, such as the use of symbols, personal ornamentation, and advanced toolmaking. However, the reasons behind these transformations remain a topic of debate. PIONEER seeks to determine whether climate variability in North and South Africa drove these cultural innovations.

Redefining the connection between climate and cultural innovation

Dr. Simon notes that understanding how climate influenced the emergence of cultural complexity has long been a challenge. The theories linking early Homo sapiens' innovations to climate change are diverse and frequently conflicting, reflecting the complexity of this relationship. For example, much of what we know about past climates comes from analysis of sediments from the deep oceans, but our archaeological evidence is found in caves on land. How do we match these records?

“The problem lies in using non-co-located climate archives to correlate climatic evidence with archaeological findings, resulting in stratigraphic, spatial, and causal mismatches,” she explains. Furthermore, hypotheses have rarely been tested dynamically, leaving key questions unresolved.

PIONEER builds on the strong foundation established through her work as a researcher in two Centres of Excellence at UiB, namely Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research (BBCR) and Center for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE).  Dr. Simon says that both centres have provided both intellectual inspiration and financial support for her pilot studies.

“My work in the Centres allowed me to develop and test innovative methodologies, such as using leaf wax biomarkers at archaeological sites, which has laid the groundwork for PIONEER’s ambitious research goals”, says Margit Simon.  

A great achievement: ERC grant to key SapienCE scientist

Eystein Jansen, professor in Earth Sciences /Paleoclimatology at the University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for climate Research and a Principal Investigator in SapienCE is happy and proud that Simon's groundbreaking work has been acknowledged with the ERC grant.

“This is really great news! The PIONEER project will give us a fantastic opportunity to further develop the capacity of SapienCE to deliver groundbreaking results. Margit is a key scientist in SapienCE, who integrates paleoclimate knowledge with the archaeological record” says Jansen.

He is pleased that the ERC grant provides Simon with the opportunity to pursue her ideas and deliver pioneering results to solve a key objective of SapienCE, namely how and whether environmental change influenced the development of modern behaviour of humans in the distant past.

“This ERC- project brings new and powerful methods into use and also provides a wider geographical perspective of how the environments changed in periods of marked changes in human behaviour that have been documented from southern Africa”, Jansen says.