#NCNGeneration – Małgorzata Kot: We were never alone

NCN Generation comprises researchers making a significant contribution to the advancement of science. The guest of the third episode is Małgorzata Kot — an archaeologist specialising in the Palaeolithic, lithic technologies and early human migrations. She conducts fieldwork in caves in Poland and Central Asia, combining excavations with advanced laboratory analyses. Her research is funded by NCN and the European Research Council. The interview is conducted by Anna Korzekwa-Józefowicz.

When did we stop being alone?

For decades, human evolution was presented as a sequence of species that appeared one after another. That changed with palaeogenetics — the ability to read DNA from remains tens of thousands of years old. In 2022, Svante Pääbo was awarded the Nobel Prize, among other things for the discovery of Denisovans and for sequencing the Neanderthal genome. It turned out that both of these species and modern humans coexisted for a long time and interbred.

“At that point, we realised that our way of thinking about human evolution had to change, because we were never alone. Until now, evolution was understood in a way that had us searching for links in a chain, one after another. And it turns out that we are no longer looking for missing links. I do not think there was ever a moment in human evolution when we were alone as just one human population. There was always another one — genetically different and following a completely different evolutionary path. Only today — for roughly the past 40,000 years — have we been alone as a single species on Earth. This is the first time in the history of our evolution,” says Małgorzata Kot in the recording.

The researcher is looking for an answer to the question of what these encounters meant for modern humans. To what extent did contact with Neanderthals and Denisovans — and perhaps the adoption of some of their knowledge of the environment — make it possible to settle Europe and Asia, continents evolutionarily foreign to a species originating in Africa? She conducts fieldwork in high-mountain caves in Uzbekistan, reaching places several days’ walk from the nearest settlements. She identifies sites on the basis of Soviet speleological publications, information from local shepherds and hunters, and sometimes photographs from Uzbek climbers’ blogs.

In parallel, she conducts research in Poland. In the caves of the Sąspowska Valley in Ojców National Park, she discovered, among other things, the oldest traces of human presence in what is now Poland — dating back 450,000–600,000 years and attributed to Homo heidelbergensis.

Selected quotes

Fieldwork:

We have undertaken a three-day expedition to find a cave I had spotted in three photographs on the internet. I was genuinely delighted when I found it after those three days, because there was a very real chance it simply would not be where I had plotted it on the map.

I met a shepherd in the mountains and began telling him what I was researching — that people had been here, that they had walked these paths. He sat there, looking out at those mountains, and said: "I thought there had never been anything here."

The Role of NCN

I would not have received the ERC grant had I not previously done NCN grants. Thanks to the perspective of those eight years of fieldwork through the OPUS grants we had a full picture of the situation and could formulate our research questions very clearly. We knew what was missing. And when ERC evaluation forms ask whether a given researcher is the right person to carry out that particular grant, we were able to knock down all the counterarguments straight away, because we were already there, we have been doing research for years.

Just as MINIATURA is a pilot study for an NCN grant, one might say that an NCN grant is a pilot study towards writing an ERC grant.

Revising applications

How many times should one revise a grant application?

- I think twice.

- But you did far more than that.

- I believe I received only the thirteenth grant I applied for. The earlier ones were not selected for funding. (…) I was simply changing ideas. We write an application, we have a concept, and then we come up against the reviewers. If we do not receive the grant, that is genuinely the moment to reflect, to refine the application, to perhaps adjust it slightly, perhaps to conduct some pilot studies. Upon a second rejection, that is the moment to take stock. If we truly believe in the project, then I believe it is worth submitting once more. But no more than that, probably.