Researchers running an archaeological field school in northern Kenya received two grants totaling $1.2 million to expand the program’s research, according to a release from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences last week.

David Braun, an anthropology professor and a co-director of the Koobi Fora field school – an archaeological dig site in Kenya – said researchers will use the funds to fuel studies comparing how climate change affected ancient and modern human populations in East Africa. Paleobiology experts said focusing on how ecological shifts have influenced human and environmental development will help researchers predict how humans will react to climate change in the present, which could help determine climate change solutions.

Braun said the program will now emphasize the effects of climate change, like water scarcity, on the Daasanach – an ethnic group that inhabits East Africa – while continuing to analyze human fossil remains present in Kenya.

“A lot of students want to know how this will impact the major pressing questions that our society deals with today,” Braun said. “And that includes climate change modifications of environments, the impact on rural populations – we know that climate change will impact cities but that the people who will be affected first are those in rural communities.”

He said the expanded focus on the interactions between humans and the environment in the past and present won’t provide definitive answers on how to combat climate change. But Braun said studying the phenomenon will provide researchers with knowledge about how ecological disruptions, like irregular weather patterns and water level changes, will affect humankind in the future.

“Understanding that timeframe gives us a good insight into sort of what kind of ecosystem parameters may change in the future and what we need to do to prepare for it,” Braun said.

Braun said he and his co-investigators applied for grants from the National Science Foundation a few times before being awarded the funding. He said he needed to modify the field school program to emphasize how living human populations interact with a changing environment to prove the team was contributing new knowledge to the anthropology field.

“We actually had to show that we were really investigating new questions,” Braun said.

Braun said one of the grants the program received will fund fellowships and provide financial assistance to prospective student participants to eliminate “economic barriers” to gaining anthropological field experience. He said officials in the program will use the grant to increase the diversity of the programs’ participants.

He said program leaders will reach out to anthropology professors at historically black colleges and universities to encourage their students to apply for the program and promote the field school’s activities on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Paleobiology experts said expanding the program will open up a new field of anthropological research that may eventually provide insight on how climate change will affect human health.

Melanie Beasley, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, said the research team’s study of how humans adapted to changing climatic and environmental circumstances in the past will cultivate an understanding of how to prepare humankind for similar natural phenomena, like increasing water scarcity.

“Anthropology can be at this intersection of helping through a holistic anthropological perspective for viewing the world and how we can then help address these modern problems with modern populations and work with them in partnership to help make communities thrive and survive and whatever meaningful ways that they want things addressed,” Beasley said.

John Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University, said the grant funding will allow researchers at the site to use more complex data analysis technology to understand the effects of the environment on human evolution in the past and present.

“Any site that produces new information about the history of our species is important, and certainly, the best way to get the best information is to use the latest technology,” he said.

Rachel Annex and Ed Prestera contributed reporting.