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EFCHED
Programme background
- How do we explain our trademark big brains, feet made for walking, and nimble hands?
- Was climate change responsible for human evolution?
- Did it make us a global species, and if so, was that millions or just thousands of years ago?
The EFCHED programme sought to answer these questions, helping us understand the importance of our evolutionary legacy. What made us human and when did it happen?
The Environmental Factors in the Chronology of Human Evolution & Dispersal programme (EFCHED) brought together research into palaeoanthropology, archaeology and palaeoecology, emerging fields like evolutionary genetics and palaeoclimatic modelling, and allied disciplines such as evolutionary ecology. Investigating how the environment influenced evolutionary change was at the heart of EFCHED projects.
EFCHED aimed to provide:
- a new understanding of our position as a dominant global species, and the implications of this position for our future
- a better understanding of rates and scales of climate and landscape change, and how these affected human evolution and dispersal
- a more precise appreciation of how rates and scale of environmental change affect human evolution
- an evolutionary context that will help researchers interpret the results from techniques that explore what makes us human at the level of both genes and organism
- stronger co-operation between the disciplines within human evolution research.