The European Research Council has published a list of 328 recipients of the Consolidator Grant 2024, including Prof. Małgorzata Kot, archaeologist from the University of Warsaw and former winner of NCN grants.
“We are the only living human species on Earth but it has not always been this way. As recently as fifty or sixty thousand years ago, the Earth was inhabited by several different hominid populations,” Prof. Małgorzata Kot says in a video released by the University of Warsaw. “What happened to the other hominids, why are we left alone?” These questions will be addressed by Prof. Kot owing to the ERC grant.
Prof. Małgorzata Kot is an archaeologist and recipient of two NCN grants. Her scientific interests include the Palaeolithic, human evolution, changes in stone tool production methods and the functions of caves in prehistory. With the ERC grant, she will pursue the project “INASIA: Were They Modern Humans? The Problem of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic in West Central Asia.” Research will continue through 2029. “Years of wonderful adventure are just beginning. We would like to be able to say to what extent it was contact with other hominid species that shaped us as modern humans and to what extent we contributed to their extinction,” she says.
Prof. Małgorzata Kot is an NCN grant winner. “My new project #INASIA would never be possible if not for those years of research that I spent in Central Asia owing to NCN grants. They laid the groundwork, allowed me to pursue pilot studies and gave me wings (the latter especially useful in the mountains). #NCNtotlen,” she said on X.