Transforming Human Origins Research

The International Initiative, Transforming Human Origins Research will establish a pioneering national and international consortium of researchers and communities from Western scientific institutions, Indigenous organisations and Global South partners to trace the evolutionary history of our species, Homo sapiens. The Initiative will address the past ~300,000 years of our evolution, examining long-term interactions between human biological and cultural diversity and the Earth’s climatic and environmental transitions. Despite more than 150 years of dedicated research, major gaps remain in understanding how our species evolved and diversified, how we responded to environmental and climatic changes, how we spread around the world and what this means to communities today. The Initiative will forge highly transformational research to address these knowledge gaps through innovative field and laboratory studies centring on the southern arc, extending around the Indian Ocean in Africa, Asia and Australia, addressing regions that have played a key, but understudied role in human origins.

Critically, our groundbreaking program will also promote diverse perspectives on the human past, featuring co-designed research and engagement with local communities across the southern arc, and exploring the place of the human story in a globally connected yet unequal world. The Centre will prompt discoveries about how environmental change influenced our biological and cultural trajectories, how we in turn shaped ecosystems and the ways that ecosystem and climate dynamics have made us a resilient, yet vulnerable, species. Our collaborative, transdisciplinary research program will gather environmental, biological and cultural information on an unprecedented temporal and geographic scale, informed by a cross-cultural, globalised and collaborative research approach, resulting in new and profound insights into the evolution and history of Homo sapiens.