Human Origins

The Human Origins group at Leiden University studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, from the earliest stone tools in East Africa, more than three million years old, to the origin of sedentary societies towards the end of the last ice age.

The study of the origin and development of the human niche is a pre-eminently interdisciplinary undertaking, and the University of Leiden accommodates prominent representatives of some of these disciplines. Combination of fieldwork and other types of study has taken members of our group all over the Old World, with our key fieldwork areas at the moment being situated in Les Cottés (France), at Trinil (Java, Indonesia)  and the Turkana Basin. Read more