Mission: The Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Geosciences (LHEG) at the University of California, Berkeley is dedicated to the application of the earth sciences in understanding human origins and evolution.
Geosciences play a pivotal role in investigating and revealing the timings and environmental contexts of human origins and evolution. Geological events and climate change have impacted human evolution and continue to affect the human present and future. The records of those events—and our evolution—are preserved in geological formations, and their timings are constrained by geo- and tephra-chronology. Two primary goals for the Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Geoscience are to:
1. Establish solid chronological control on the events, course, tempo, and direction of human evolution.
2. Apply the geosciences to help reveal the local, regional, and global geological and environmental contexts in which human evolution occurred during the last 20 million years.
Berkeley geosciences now stand ready to deliver previously unattainable clarity and accuracy to our understanding of the human past, and to help answer questions about how, where, why, and when we and our close relatives arose and evolved. Addressing such questions requires basic research into extracting and understanding the coupled records of Earth and human prehistory. To achieve those goals, LHEG supports students, postdocs, innovative field and laboratory research projects, and equipment and facilities to support Berkeley's “faculty expertise in the application of geosciences to human evolutionary studies.”