Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research Consortium Poster Symposium" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Human Origins Migration and Evolution Research (HOMER) Project is a collaborative effort that seeks to understand the emergence of human uniqueness. The last 100,000 years have witnessed the extinction of many species in the genus *Homo, while *Homo sapiens have undergone an unprecedented and successful global expansion. The biological, social, cognitive, and environmental factors behind this event has been the focus of archaeological and paleoanthropological research. To understand the origins of these behaviors, the HOMER Project built a large-scale research model, one that can compare *Homo sapiens and sister species through a multiproject, transcontinental research collaboration. All project members share a standardized field and lab methodology to generate a highly effective comparative analysis. HOMER uses data collected at archaeological sites in Italy, Malawi, and South Africa to examine the questions of when and how *Homo sapiens’ unique adaptations arose. In this symposium, HOMER students will present research conducted at these sites, involving archaeoinformatics, zooarchaeology, biological archaeology, and lithic analysis.