ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

One of the most exciting research questions within archaeology is that of the peopling of Australasia by at least c.50,000 years ago. This represents some of the earliest evidence of modern human colonization outside Africa, yet, even at the greatest sea-level lowstand, this migration would have involved seafaring. It is the maritime nature of this dispersal which makes it so important to questions of technological, cognitive and social human development. These issues have traditionally been the preserve of archaeologists, but with a multidisciplinary approach that embraces cutting-edge marine geophysical, hydrodynamic and archaeogenetic analyses, we now have the opportunity to examine the When, Where, Who and How of the earliest seafaring in world history. The voyage from Sunda (South East Asia) to Sahul (Australasia) provides evidence for the earliest ‘open water’ crossing in the world. A combination of the sparse number of early archaeological finds and the significant changes in the palaeolandscape and submergence of the broad north western Australian continental shelf, mean that little is known about the routes taken and what these crossings may have entailed. This project will combine research of the submerged palaeolandscape of the continental shelf to refine our knowledge of the onshore/offshore environment, identify potential submerged prehistoric sites and enhance our understanding of the palaeoshoreline and tidal regime. This will be combined with archaeogenetic research targeting mtDNA and Y-chromosome data to resolve questions of demography and dating. For the first time this project takes a truly multidisciplinary approach to address the colonization of Sahul, providing an unique opportunity to tackle some of the most important questions about human origins, the relationship between humans and the changing environment, population dynamics and migration, seafaring technology, social organisation and cognition.

1 134 928 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31

The brain evolves, develops, and operates in the context of animal movements. As a consequence, fundamental brain functions such as spatial perception and motor control critically depend on the precise knowledge of the ongoing body motion. An accurate internal estimate of self-movement is thought to emerge from sensorimotor integration; nonetheless, which circuits perform this internal estimation, and exactly how motor-sensory coordination is implemented within these circuits are basic questions that remain to be poorly understood. There is growing evidence suggesting that, during locomotion, motor-related and visual signals interact at early stages of visual processing. In mammals, however, it is not clear what the function of this interaction is. Recently, we have shown that a population of Drosophila optic-flow processing neurons —neurons that are sensitive to self-generated visual flow, receives convergent visual and walking-related signals to form a faithful representation of the fly’s walking movements. Leveraging from these results, and combining quantitative analysis of behavior with physiology, optogenetics, and modelling, we propose to investigate circuit mechanisms of self-movement estimation during walking. We will:1) use cell specific manipulations to identify what cells are necessary to generate the motor-related activity in the population of visual neurons, 2) record from the identified neurons and correlate their activity with specific locomotor parameters, and 3) perturb the activity of different cell-types within the identified circuits to test their role in the dynamics of the visual neurons, and on the fly’s walking behavior. These experiments will establish unprecedented causal relationships among neural activity, the formation of an internal representation, and locomotor control. The identified sensorimotor principles will establish a framework that can be tested in other scenarios or animal systems with implications both in health and disease.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

This proposal wishes to fundamentally improve our understanding of the role of tropical freshwater ecosystems in carbon (C) cycling on the catchment scale. It uses an unprecedented combination of state-of-the-art proxies such as stable isotope, 14C and biomarker signatures to characterize organic matter, radiogenic isotope signatures to determine particle residence times, as well as field measurements of relevant biogeochemical processes. We focus on tropical systems since there is a striking lack of data on such systems, even though riverine C transport is thought to be disproportionately high in tropical areas. Furthermore, the presence of landscape-scale contrasts in vegetation (in particular, C3 vs. C4 plants) are an important asset in the use of stable isotopes as natural tracers of C cycling processes on this scale. Freshwater ecosystems are an important component in the global C cycle, and the primary link between terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Recent estimates indicate that ~2 Pg C y-1 (Pg=Petagram) enter freshwater systems, i.e., about twice the estimated global terrestrial C sink. More than half of this is thought to be remineralized before it reaches the coastal zone, and for the Amazon basin this has even been suggested to be ~90% of the lateral C inputs. The question how general these patterns are is a matter of debate, and assessing the mechanisms determining the degree of processing versus transport of organic carbon in lakes and river systems is critical to further constrain their role in the global C cycle. This proposal provides an interdisciplinary approach to describe and quantify catchment-scale C transport and cycling in tropical river basins. Besides conceptual and methodological advances, and a significant expansion of our dataset on C processes in such systems, new data gathered in this project are likely to provide exciting and novel hypotheses on the functioning of freshwater systems and their linkage to the terrestrial C budget.

1 745 262 €

Start date: 2009-10-01, End date: 2014-09-30

AGEnTh is an interdisciplinary proposal which aims at theoretically investigating atomic many-body systems (cold atoms and trapped ions) in close connection to concepts from quantum information, condensed matter, and high energy physics. The main goals of this programme are to: I) Find to scalable schemes for the measurements of entanglement properties, and in particular entanglement spectra, by proposing a shifting paradigm to access entanglement focused on entanglement Hamiltonians and field theories instead of probing density matrices; II) Show how atomic gauge theories (including dynamical gauge fields) are ideal candidates for the realization of long-sought, highly-entangled states of matter, in particular topological superconductors supporting parafermion edge modes, and novel classes of quantum spin liquids emerging from clustering; III) Develop new implementation strategies for the realization of gauge symmetries of paramount importance, such as discrete and SU(N)xSU(2)xU(1) groups, and establish a theoretical framework for the understanding of atomic physics experiments within the light-from-chaos scenario pioneered in particle physics. These objectives are at the cutting-edge of fundamental science, and represent a coherent effort aimed at underpinning unprecedented regimes of strongly interacting quantum matter by addressing the basic aspects of probing, many-body physics, and implementations. The results are expected to (i) build up and establish qualitatively new synergies between the aforementioned communities, and (ii) stimulate an intense theoretical and experimental activity focused on both entanglement and atomic gauge theories. In order to achieve those, AGEnTh builds: (1) on my background working at the interface between atomic physics and quantum optics from one side, and many-body theory on the other, and (2) on exploratory studies which I carried out to mitigate the conceptual risks associated with its high-risk/high-gain goals.

1 055 317 €

Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30