PAST takes this opportunity to congratulate the winners of the inaugural Andrea Leenen Memorial All From One Research Grant for 2022!
This special grant is awarded for African-based field, laboratory or museum collections research in all fields of African palaeontology, including palaeoanthropology and Stone Age archaeology, that are innovative and show exceptional promise in providing new information directly relevant to the three core themes of PAST’s All from One movement:
- The shared African origins of humankind, extending from our Late Miocene ape antecedents to the emergence of modern human behaviour, and their relevance to an improved understanding of humanity unity.
- Palaeo-climatic and palaeo-ecological change and its relevance to an improved understanding of the modern climatic and environmental crises.
- Prehistoric extinctions and their relevance to an improved understanding of the modern biodiversity crisis.
PAST’s vision is to build African Leadership in this field on the continent. Project leaders eligible to apply are to senior researchers being based in or closely affiliated with an African institution. A key criterion in selecting awardees was the project’s contribution to African undergraduate or postgraduate student training and/or to sustainable infrastructural or technical capacity development.
PAST allocated $50,000 to the programme and we are proud to announce the winners of one full and two partial grants this year. The grants were awarded to:
Jonah Choiniere and Mike Zondo, Wits University & National Museums of Zimbabwe, for their work on the End-Triassic mass extinction and the dawn of dinosaurs in Zimbabwe.
Travis Pickering, University of Wisconsin and Wits University, for his team’s palaeoanthropological research at Swartkrans.
Marion Bamford, Wits University, for her teams’ work on fossil woods and palaeoclimates of southern Africa and their relevance to future climate change.
PAST extends our congratulations and wishes our grant recipients success with the important work they are doing in further documenting the shared origins of life and the shared origins of humankind in Africa.