Center of Excellence

Research Objectives

• Understanding the causal relationship between climate change and the natural environment, and their impact on the human population is a pressing issue of global importance

• Consultation at GBY.

  Prediction of the effects of future climate change has so far been based mostly on relatively short time spans, mainly the Last Glacial to Recent
• This program uses a multidisciplinary approach which includes biology, geochemistry, geochronology and archaeology in order to examine the continuous record of hominin habitat over a period of 100,000 years, with a calibration of the parameters with respect to present-day climate.
• The lakeside Acheulian site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov (GBY) in the Upper Jordan Valley has revealed sufficient evidence to define it as a benchmark suitable for this investigation
  
  

The Site of Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov

• contains a well-described continuous sedimentary record, which crosses the globally identifiable Matuyama/Brunhes chron boundary at 780Ka and has a long span of ca. 100Ka of a glacial cycle. This time span includes the well-defined climate variations recorded in coeval deep-sea sediments (OIS 18-20) and most recently also the high-resolution isotope records of the Antarctic EPICA ice core, showing a large amplitude climate change
• yielded very well preserved remains of rich and diverse lacustrine and terrestrial, floral and faunal assemblages and 13 horizons of human occupation
• its location on the out-of-Africa migration route is pivotal in both location and in timing in the history of human evolution
• The occurrence of edible species currently present in the region allows an understanding of the impact on food supply and hominin diet.