I’ m interested in exploring and underscoring hominin behaviours in relation to food procurement strategies in the past, stone tools manufacture and the synergetic links between hominin-environmental interactions, cognition abilities and subsistence systems. Specifically, I uses phytolith analysis in combination with archaeological and plant micro-remains data in order to reflect the nature and type of environments that were occupied by early humans and the plant environments surrounding their habitats during the Pleistocene-Holocene epochs.

Research themes: Late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies in Africa. I am interested in the organization of hunter-gatherer lithic technology, especially stone procurement. My research explores how technological organization can be studied to understand the major evolutionary and demographic changes of the last hundred-thousand years in Africa.

Christine Adongo is currently an early stage researcher doing PhD at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS – Paris), and a member of Institut Interdisciplinaire d’Anthropologie du Contemporaire (IIAC). She attained both her bachelors and Masters degrees in Environmental science at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya. Broadly, her research interests encompass environment, natural resources, local landscapes, pastoral socio-ecological transition and livelihoods. More specifically, she has worked on natural resources conservation and livelihoods, focusing on the Kenya coastal sacred Kaya forests, and pastoral futures in northern Kenya in so far as climate change adaptation and WASH management at the local level in concerned. Her most work focuses on ‘green’ projects’ implementation (geothermal energy project in Kenya) and their socio-ecological and livelihood implications on the resilience of local pastoral landscape. Christine will use the mobility funds from GDR as a post-doctoral undertaking, to advance her fieldwork and facilitate the dissemination of her work on the contested futures of geothermal in the greater Olkaria geothermal area in Kenya’s rift valley.

My PhD research is about finding and dating cryptotephras in marine sediment cores around the Horn of Africa, over the last million years. The aims are : to provide a tephrostratigraphic framework, and to correlate these tephras with tuffs from the East African Rift (e.g. Silver Tuff from Konso, Ethiopia) using glass shard geochemistry. The outcomes are : the age of hominin fossils, palaeoclimatology of the area, and volcanic history of the East African Rift System.

Currently working as curator at the National Museum of Ethiopia in paleoanthropology, in Addis Ababa, and PhD student in PACEA lab in Bordeaux for African hominin fossils study, especially dental material.

Currently, I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Poitiers. My research interest focuses in exploring the relationships between morphology and dietary behavior of megaherbivores (proboscidean; elephants, and their relatives) revealed from hominid bearing sites of the Afar Rift Valley (e.g., Middle Awash and Hadar) and the Turkana Depression in Ethiopia (Shungura Formation) and Kenya. For the study, I will use multiproxy approaches such as dental wear analyses (dental microwear texture analysis and mesowear) as well as stable isotope study for a better understanding of their responses to various environmental contexts and changes.

This research will contribute to understand the impact of Late Miocene to Middle Pleistocene environments on the habitats of megafauna, which were shared with many other animals including hominins.

I study functional anatomy of plio-pleistocene hominins’ shoulder with biomecanical modeling methods. Notably, I work with Omo Group Research Expedition from the lower Omo Valley.

I am a limnogeologist based at the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Preventives (National Institute of Preventative Archaeological Research, or INRAP) in Lyon, France. Prior to joining the WTAP in 2010 and refocusing my work on the East African Rift System (EARS) I worked at Lake Baikal in central Asia.

Limnogeology is the study of sediments formed by inland waters (e.g. lakes, ponds, rivers, wetlands), and in West Turkana my specific research interest is the sedimentary cyclicity and temporal evolution of lake deposits, which I use to reconstruct past climatic, tectonic, and environmental changes and how they influenced hominin evolution during the Plio-Pleistocene. My approach involves identifying sequences of ancient lake sediments where they are exposed in the Nachukui Formation and performing detailed sediment analyses to determine the processes and contexts (deep, shallow, endorheic etc) that led to their deposition. As the largest endorheic water body in a desert on earth, Lake Turkana has undergone remarkable changes in size, shape, and hydrology over time, and has played a key role in affecting the environments and locations that were available for hominins to exploit.