Paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa

Collaborators: S. Carvalho (Oxford U) and R. Bobe (Oxford U), M. Bamford (ESI and U Witwatersrand), D.R. Braun (George Washington U) and others.
 

As a research affiliate at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford, T. Lüdecke is the leading geochemist of the Paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa (PPPG), Mozambique. The Gorongosa National Park is uniquely positioned in a large geographical gap between the well-studied hominin-yielding sites of the East African Rift in the north and the South African cave localities in the south. The overarching goal of the PPPG is the reconstruction of the ecological and evolutionary history of the Gorongosa National Park region from the deep past to the present. Furthermore, the project focuses on primate adaptations to the complex environments of Gorongosa, both past and present. In the first few years of fieldwork, we discovered and started to excavate several fossil sites, which are some of the richest and well-preserved ones in the southern part of the East African Rift.