Benjamin Schoville

Dr. Benjamin Schoville is a research fellow in the Centre for Heritage + Culture at the University of Southern Queensland, and previously was a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Queensland. He held a Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cape Town, South Africa after receiving his PhD from Arizona State University. Through field excavations and rigorous experimental studies, his research led to major discoveries of stone-tipped spears from 500,000 years ago and complex stone tool technologies 72,000 years ago. His current project is exploring the southern Kalahari Basin for early modern human archaeological and palaeoanthropological remains, including excavations at Middle Stone Age sites at Ga-Mohana Hill and on the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. This work is directed at developing palaeoenvironmental archives of past climate coupled with high-resolution archaeological data that will be used to understand what drove humans to develop new technologies, how complex cultural information spread, and how humans adapted to changes in environment throughout the course of human evolution.