The Palaeoscape III workshop took place in Mossel Bay from the 27-29th June 2017, and was a huge success for the 27 researchers and postgraduate students who attended.
The conference room overlooked the ocean, but most eyes were glued to the presenters as they discussed how their research contributed to the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience and the SACP4’s overarching goal – to reconstruct the ecological setting that nurtured the beginnings of modern human cognition and behaviour during the last ~150 thousand years of our evolutionary history.
From large-scale models of past climate and vegetation of the Cape South coast, down to differences in the rewards reaped by men, women and children foraging for mussels in the intertidal zone or corms in the fynbos, the ACCP and SACP4 seeks to understand exactly how the first people to think like us experienced the world. The botanists, archaeologists, ecologists, climate specialists, zoologists, geologists, palaeontologists and even an IT specialist brought their unique sets of skills to the table – often resulting in the kinds of “Aha!” moments that make a workshop so successful.
The goal of the meeting was to tie up the Palaeoscape Project and report back on the findings of each of its research nodes – but there’s no doubt that the new ideas and angles surfacing from this unique collaboration will ensure its continuation for a while to come. What a fitting tribute to the “hyper-prosocial” humans who the researchers seek to understand.
