Multidisciplinary Integrative Georelational Database for Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Expansion Dynamics of Early Humans

There is increasing evidence that the biological evolution of humans started in Africa, from where they dispersed in at least two waves to other continents. However, only our own species Homo sapiens managed to colonise the entire globe thereby successively replacing other contemporaneous hominin species. Within a few tens of thousands of years, modern humans successfully inhabited the globe, settling in Australia, the Americas and even the polar regions. The project “The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans” (ROCEEH) is funded by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and is projected to run for 20 years. The new research center’s aim is to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of the expansions of hominins between three million and 20,000 years ago in Africa and Eurasia. The main goal of the project is to explain the biotic and abiotic reasons for different hominin expansions. Implicit in the current working hypothesis is the assumption that the influence of changing environmental conditions decreased as the importance of cultural and technological innovations grew. To achieve these general objectives a relational spatial archaeological and physiographical information system was developed and implemented. In this paper we focus on the technical issues of this database, its functionalities and preliminary implementation in order to assess early human expansions.