Nationality: South African

Institution:  New York University / University of Johannesburg

Department:  Anthropology

PAST programme support: Technical training and capacity support

Project title: Participation of African students in HOMER field training at Boomplaas Cave, South Africa

FB: Justin Levy Aphiri Pargeter
X: @justin_pargeter
Instagram: @african_paleosciences_lab_nyu

Justin is a South African paleoanthropologist who uses archaeological approaches to answer questions about human biocultural evolution. He answer these questions by tracking the archaeological record’s relationships between stone tool technology, cognition, and environmental change.

Justin’s career focus has been on investigations of sub-Saharan Africa’s ancient hunter-gatherers through experimental archaeology, stone tool analyses, and the recovery of new field data from large interdisciplinary fieldwork projects. He asks the question, to what extent differences in individual hunter-gatherer behaviour can be explained as adaptive responses to specific cultural and ecological contexts. This question springs from a simple yet profound fact: of the myriad hominin species, ours alone has colonized the globe. Flexible and rapidly transmittable culture underwrites Homo sapiens’ wide ecological tolerance.

Archaeological research suggests that this tolerance stems from ecological and cultural selective pressures faced and surmounted by African hunter-gatherer societies across the climatically turbulent Quaternary period (the past ~2.6 million years).