Dr. Hugues-Alexandre Blain has earned his PhD (2005) at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle de Paris from a background in Geology and Biology at the University of Basse-Normandie (Caen, France). He is currently Leader Group of “Human Paleoecology of the Plio-Pleistocene” at the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (Center of Excellence Maria de Maeztu). As a specialist in fossil amphibians and reptiles, his research applies on a taxonomic approach as his main primary-data paleoecological proxy to reconstruct the climate and landscapes of the Early and Middle Pleistocene (2.6 to 0.12 Ma). For that, he has adapted and developed a strong methodology, combining other proxies, to infer quantitative paleoclimate parameters from numerous archaeo-paleontological localities, participating in several field seasons at Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Serbia, Armenia, among others. With this track, Dr. Blain is currently testing and unifying the different methodologies based on small vertebrates, sharpening paleoclimate estimates based on continental records, in order to contrast climate changes on land, biodiversity loss and hominin dispersal models. As a collaborator of the TransCause project, he will co-supervise the PhD of Dominik Lukas Rogall, entitled: “Herpetofauna and microfauna analysis in Armenia as proxy for past human occupation”.

Research interests: Amphibians, Reptiles, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology, Ambiental Archeology, Modern Osteology, Biotic Responses to Past Climate change, Extinction.

Dr Selina Brace received her B.Sc. from University College London (UCL) in 2004 and her PhD from Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) in 2010. She was a postdoctoral researcher at RHUL until 2013, then a Wellcome funded postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum (NHM) London until 2017. Since 2017 she has been employed as Principal Researcher in ancient DNA at the NHM.

Dr Selina Brace is an ancient DNA specialist with >10 years of experience working with degraded DNA samples. She specialises in DNA recovery from museum and palaeontological specimens and is an expert in ancient DNA extraction and NGS sequencing coupled with downstream analyses. Her work addresses questions relating to taxonomy and evolutionary relationships, also responses to past events (climatic and human mediated) and colonisation and extinction events. She has used ancient DNA at the species and population levels to explore past histories and structure of various taxa including insects, extinct and endangered large and small mammals, and humans.

Dr. Paloma Vidal-Matutano received her BA (2011), MA (2012), and PhD (2016) from the University of Valencia, Spain. Since 2017, she has carried out several postdoctoral stays in Spain, France and Switzerland in the framework of different regional (APOSTD), national (Juan de la Cierva-Formación and Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación) and European (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions) postdoctoral fellowships.

Her research is focused on the analysis of plant macroremains (charcoal and wood) from arcaheological sites. She combines the analysis of firewood gathering strategies among hunter-gatherer groups from different geographic contexts (Spain, Italy, Montenegro, Armenia, Morocco) with archaeobotanical analyses (charcoal and desiccated wood) from Prehispanic contexts of the Canary Islands. My interest in obtaining meaningful data regarding wood acquisition strategies has guided my research towards implementing experimental methods and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Research interests: Palaeolithic Archaeology, Archaeobotany, Wood, Charcoal, Palaeoenvironment, Palaeoclimate, Palaeoeconomy, Experimentation, Taphonomy, Wood technology, GIS.