“We are the only living human species on Earth but it has not always been this way. As recently as fifty or sixty thousand years ago, the Earth was inhabited by several different hominid populations,” Prof. Małgorzata Kot from the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw and winner of the ERC Consolidator Grant, said. Within the framework of the grant awarded by the European Commission, the researcher will carry out the project entitled INASIA: Were They Modern Humans? The Problem of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic in West Central Asia.

On 3rd December, the European Research Council (ERC) announced the results of the Consolidator grant competition, of which Prof. Małgorzata Kot from the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw was the winner. This is the only Consolidator grant awarded to a Polish institution this year.

The subject of the research will be the relationship of hominids that inhabited the Earth as recently as fifty or sixty thousand years ago with modern human.

The research will be conducted in Central Asia, in the area of western Tian Shan and Pamir-Alay, which is  a mountainous region. Although the peaks reach four thousand metres there, it is the only available migration route for modern human from Africa to Northeast Asia.

In the area, scientists have found sites unprecedented in Asia that could indicate the presence of modern humans up to 70,000 years ago. This would be a breakthrough in science, as modern human is not thought to have settled there that early.

“We have found archaeological sites in Central Asia dating back 70,000 years, where we can see traces of a certain technological innovation in the way stone tools are produced, which we traditionally associate with modern human,” Prof. Małgorzata Kot said.

Scientists want to investigate whether the creators of this innovation were modern humans, who arrived in Central Asia as long as 70,000 years ago, or perhaps Neanderthals or Denisovans, who inhabited the region at the time. If the latter would be correct, this would indicate that it was from them that the innovation was later taken over by modern humans.

Hominid genes

Open sites have already been investigated in the mentioned area. For example, Prof. Karol Szymczak from the Stone Age Department at the UW’s Faculty of Archaeology has been conducting his research there for 30 years. So far, stone tools have been found, but there is no knowledge of who made them. For this purpose, there is a need of research on genetic material, which is not able to be preserved for millennia in the dry and warm climate of Central Asia. Researchers must look for sites with cooler and wetter conditions.

“In that region of the world, this means high mountain caves. The project is a big challenge. How do you look for caves that are not on any maps? How do you get to them through mountains where there are no trails or paths?” Prof. Małgorzata Kot said.

The first promising sites have already been found during the pilot study. This year prof. Małgorzata Kot’s expedition found a cave that contains Pleistocene ground layers with stone monuments and hearths accompanied by animal bones. Such a discovery offers the chance of finding human bones as well along with genetic material preserved in them, in future seasons.

“Even if we do not find human bones, we will look for human genetic material in the sediments. I hope that by harnessing all the laboratory methods available today, we will be able to answer the question of who is the creator of the stone monuments we find. Consequently, we will be able to say to what extent it was contact with other hominid species that shaped us as modern humans and to what extent we contributed to their extinction,” the researcher said.

Prof Małgorzata Kot’s project will run for five years  – until 2029. The project leader plans interdisciplinary cooperation with scientists from other centres, including the National Center of Archaeology at the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Institute of Geological Sciences at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Władysław Szafer Institute of Botany at the Polish Academy of Sciences. The work will be supported not only by palaeoanthropologists and palaeogeneticists, but also by geologists, palaeontologists and poleobotanists.

Prof. Małgorzata Kot is an archaeologist. Her scientific interests include the Palaeolithic, human evolution, changes in stone tool production methods and the functions of caves in prehistory. She has conducted research in, for example, Poland, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Montenegro and Tunisia. She studied archaeology at the University of Warsaw within the „Artes Liberales” Academy. She defended her doctoral thesis in archaeology in 2013 at the University of Warsaw within the Inter-University Programme of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies of the „Artes Liberales” Academy.