Overview of Klipdrift Shelter when the University of Bergen rector Dag Rune Olsen and senior members of SapienCE, SapienCE Board and Scientific Advisory Committe visited in late January 2019.
STATEMENT FROM THE DIRECTOR Effectively 2019 was the second operational year for SapienCE. Over the year, we have moved out of the ‘toddler’ stages of 2018 and are now maturing into a strongly cohesive research group that is addressing cutting-edge scientific questions. The focus of our research continues to be the origins of early Homo sapiens behaviour in southern Africa between 120 000 – 50 000 years ago. Our key questions remain pertinent: When did humans first become behaviourally modern?; What cognitive skills did these people have?; How adaptable were they to climate and environmental change? To address these questions, the SapienCE team works in a diverse range of disciplines including archaeology, chronology, micromorphology, climate reconstruction and modelling, cognitive and social sciences. The detailed objectives and targets that we set in 2018 have paid dividends in 2019. SapienCE has made considerable progress in terms of attracting PhDs and post-docs, in our number of publications in leading peer-reviewed journals, presentations at conferences, public outreach initiatives, and exhibitions. We also had a highly successful excavation programme, and a number of world-class research groups have proposed collaborations with us in 2019-2020. I detail some of these achievements below.
