York academics awarded prestigious ERC Synergy Grants

Posted on Thursday 6 November 2025

Professors Rob Marchant (Environment and Geography) and Oliver Craig (Archaeology) will head up two distinct, multi-million-pound projects:

• AFRI-CAN will examine how East African mountain ecosystems and the communities who rely on them can survive and thrive in the face of climate change. 
• FORAGER will explore how hunter-gatherers across the Northern Hemisphere achieved massive population growth and social complexity, long before farming became the global norm.

The ERC Synergy Grants support global teams tackling the most difficult and ambitious scientific questions.

AFRI-CAN project

Working across nine mountain regions, the AFRI-CAN project will analyse how communities interact with nature, how ecosystems evolve, and what pathways might support resilient and sustainable mountain futures.

Professor Marchant said: “Research across the project will showcase how important mountains are for people, for nature and for future sustainability. Insights from the project will help us to navigate through the multiple and linked challenges that lie ahead in the coming decades.

“I am particularly excited about developing the science in an East African context and applying our insights to other mountain systems around the world. I am sure we can make the most of this opportunity and build a much stronger research community that is embedded within African partners.”

FORAGER project

FORAGER aims to transform our understanding of human population dynamics during the Holocene, the current ecological period during the last 10,000 years. 

By engaging with Indigenous partners, combining archaeological science and climate research, the project will explore how hunter-gatherer communities across the Northern hemisphere achieved large population growth, social complexity and resilience long before agriculture was the dominating way of life.

Professor Craig said: “Despite living in similar environments, cross-cultural comparisons between temperate hunter-gatherers from North America, East Asia and Northern Europe are astonishingly rare. 

“Here we aim to unify an approach to this key phase in our history and shift the agenda away from agriculture as the main driver for social and cultural evolution that has prevailed in Western thought for centuries.” 

Big impact

Set up by the European Union in 2007, the ERC is the leading European funding organisation for big impact research. It funds researchers of any nationality and age to run projects based across Europe. Both the AFRI-CAN and the FORAGER project will also include collaboration with local communities. 

The ERC Synergy Grants foster collaboration between outstanding researchers, making it possible for them to combine their expertise, knowledge and resources in order to push the boundaries of scientific discovery. This funding is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council, said:
“Collaboration is at the heart of the ERC Synergy Grants. In our latest round, teams of researchers will join forces to address the most complex scientific problems together - this time, they are more international than ever. Such scientific endeavours are what Europe needs to be at the real forefront.”