Human Evolution at the CROSSROADS: Research in Greece and beyond. Proceedings of the Closing Symposium, February 2022

Abstract

South East Europe has long been hypothesized as a principal Pleistocene dispersal corridor for human migrations in and out of Europe. It also comprises one of the three main European Mediterranean refugia, where plant, animal, and human populations are thought to have persisted throughout glacial intervals when they disappeared from more inhospitable regions further north. Despite the biogeographic importance of the region in human evolution, paleoanthropological research has largely been neglected there until recently, resulting in a critical gap in the puzzle of Eurasian human evolutionary history. Recent research has sparked renewed interest in the paleoanthropology of Greece, with several new discoveries indicating the importance of the region for deep prehistory.

The ERC Consolidator project ‘Human Evolution at the Crossroads’ (CROSSROADS), awarded to Katerina Harvati in 2016 and running from 2017 to 2022, builds on earlier work conducted by Harvati and colleagues in the framework of her previous ERC Starting project ‘Paleoanthropology at the Gates of Europe’ (PaGE). CROSSROADS concentrated on the earlier parts of the Paleolithic, aiming to help address hypotheses about the earliest human settlement of Europe and the evolution and adaptations of early European hominins. Several research directions were pursued: new fieldwork aimed to locate new sites dating from the Lower and Middle Paleolithic and to identify traces of early human presence and activity; a dating program was initiated to develop a chronological framework for the Paleolithic in Greece; multi-proxy paleoenvironmental reconstruction was undertaken to provide insights on the adaptations of Pleistocene humans in the region; and existing hominin fossils were re-examined with state of the art methodological approaches to shed light on their taxonomic identity and their paleobiology.

This edited volume collects twenty-eight contributions presented at the closing symposium of the ERC Consolidator project ‘CROSSROADS’, which took place in Tübingen in February 2022, shortly before the conclusion of the project. As such, it represents a large part of the work conducted under the ‘CROSSROADS’ research umbrella, showcasing the activities and results of the project.