NILOMORPH sets out to explain how linguistic evolution took a highly unexpected turn in one family of languages spoken in East Africa. They have evolved a morphological system where multiple grammatical categories are expressed simultaneously within a single syllable, through subtle modulations of its phonological properties. For example, in the Dinka language the word tèm, meaning ‘to cut’, can be made to mean ‘she cuts it for someone’ by lengthening the vowel, changing the low tone to high, and pronouncing it with breathy voice quality: té̤ːm, and more than dozen other contrasts can be generated by similar means. A sin-gle monosyllabic word in language like Dinka attains a degree of information density unparalleled else-where in the languages of the world. Surprisingly, comparative evidence suggests that the West Nilotic lan-guages were once much more conventional, using suffixes to mark grammatical categories. As has hap-pened in many other languages, such as English, these suffixes were lost over time. But rather than simply disappearing, they were transformed into suprasegmental phonological properties pronounced concurrently with the word stem. The aim of NILOMORPH is to reconstruct this evolution. But because of the extreme rarity of this morphological type, we need to explain not just how it happened here, we also have to explain why it did not happen in other language families. It is therefore not enough just to retrace the history of linguistic forms. NILOMORPH proposes a transformative step in historical linguistics: the reconstruction not just of external features, but of the cognitive motivation behind them. This will be achieved through the synergy of three teams, DESCRIPTION, MORPHOLOGY and RECONSTRUCTION, employing a combination of field linguistics, acoustic analysis, experimental linguistics, computational simulation, typology, and the historical-comparative method.

The world is changing fast. Rapid urbanisation, large scale population movements, increasing pressure from climate change, natural and man-made disasters create enormous pressures on local and national governments to provide housing, water, sanitation, solid waste (rubbish) management and other critical services. In the UK there is also an ongoing challenge associated with aging infrastructure (many sewers for example are more than 100 years old) and at the same time, calls for new investment in housing, the construction of new towns, and an urgent need to reduce reliance on expensive fossil fuels, reduce pollution and increase the recovery of valuable resources. As economic conditions improve, people naturally demand better services; twenty-four hour water piped direct to the house and convenient safe private toilets have replaced public stand pipes and public toilets as the aspiration of many families in Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Latin America (the "global south"). All of this creates both a challenge and an opportunity. In coming decades there will be a huge demand for new infrastructure investments in the global south; more than 4.4 billion people worldwide do not have a sanitation system that effectively collects and treats all the waste produced by families, while 2.4 billion people urgently need new water supply services. The UK engineering industry is poised to play a significant role in meeting both this global demand and the need for new innovations at home. But therein lies the challenge; the new generation of services and infrastructure must, by very definition, be essentially different in nature from what has been traditionally provided. In an era of increasing uncertainty from, for example, the changing climate, the traditional approach to the design of piped water supplies and sewerage networks would result in such a major over design that the investment costs alone would be prohibitive. Similarly, it is no longer acceptable to just keep adding additional treatment processes on to waste water treatment systems to meet increasingly challenging conditions and higher discharge standards, nor is it acceptable to continue to pump valuable nutrients and carbon into our rivers and streams; new approaches are needed, which recover the nutrient and energy value of human and solid waste streams, in fact turning away from the idea of waste altogether and moving towards the idea of resource management and the so-called circular economy. What is needed to meet this demand is a new generation of research engineers and scientists trained not only in the fundamentals of 'what is known' but in the more challenging area of 'what can be re-imagined'. The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Water and Waste Infrastructure Services Engineered for Resilience (Water-WISER) will train five cohorts of researchers with the new skills needed to meet these enormous challenges. Students in the Centre will have the opportunity to study at one of three globally-leading Universities working on resilient infrastructure and development. They will take a one year Masters course and then move on to carry out tailored research, in partnership with engineering consultancy firms, universities or development agencies such as the World Bank, UNICEF or WaterAid; studying how to deliver innovative, effective and resilient infrastructure and services in rapidly growing poor cities. Water-WISER graduates will combine a solid training in the fundamental engineering and science of water and sanitation, solid waste management, water resources and drainage, with much broader training and development which will build the skills needed to collaborate with non-engineers and non-scientists, to work with sociologists and political scientists, city planners, digital designers, business development specialists and administrators, health specialists, professionals working in international development and finance.

The Turkana and Awash basins in the East African Rift, preserve an exceptional fossil and archaeological record and to a large extent, form the basis for our current understanding of early hominin environments. Ancient volcanic activity has left numerous ash deposits (tuffs) that can be dated using the radiometric dating method 40Ar/39Ar. Although precise, dates obtained by this method only provide broad envelopes with significant temporal gaps because volcanism is episodic, and tuffs do not always survive across the landscape. Furthermore, despite the abundance of archaeological finds and animal fossils in this region, datable tuffs are rare in the East African Rift. Consequently, age estimation often relies on imprecise relative methods, such as magnetostratigraphy and biostratigraphy. A method for obtaining absolute dates is urgently required in order to correlate all the sedimentary sequences within the eastern rift, as well as across Africa, and to help clarify the wider picture of early human biological and cultural events during the Plio-Pleistocene. Likewise, the South African sites also suffer from dating problems, albeit from different issues. In most of these cases they are karstic infills and only recently, have any absolute methods based on cosmogenic and uranium/lead isotope systems been applied. These techniques also leave huge gaps and/or do not precisely date the fossil or archaeological event of interest. For instance, U/Pb dates generally reflect the ages of over- or underlying flowstone and not that of a fossil. We propose to apply a novel luminescence-based method known as infrared-radiofluorescence (IR-RF), which the named researcher co-investigator on this proposal helped to develop, in order to determine the age (i.e. time of deposition) of fossil- and artefact-bearing sediments and/or volcanic tuffs in Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa and to fill in the time gaps omitted by radiometric techniques. The IR-RF method is widely applicable due to the ubiquitous occurrence of sand sized feldspar mineral grains required for dating and the technique targets potassium- (K-) rich feldspar, one of the most common types of mineral on earth. Recent studies suggest that this methodology has the potential to extend the age range of luminescence dating from 0.5 million years to 4 million years, thus encompassing the majority of the time range over which the human family evolved. Methods of recording and analyzing luminescence data have developed significantly over the last five years, including improved light detection and more advanced analytical and statistical techniques, all of which have led to new approaches and more flexible ways of processing and visualizing data. Recent technological advances including the development of single photon imaging systems based on electron multiplying charge coupled devices (EMCCD) also suggest that the time is right to bring together and apply some of these new cutting-edge innovations to help achieve more reliable chronologies for early hominin evolution. This research will dramatically increase the number of well-dated sequences in areas archiving key evidence for early human evolution and it will enable us to provide significant improvements in correlating human fossil records across Africa. A new and more refined chronological framework will greatly improve our understanding of the diversity of adaptive challenges faced by early hominins since the Pliocene and it will help to shed more light on the hotly debated question of the role of climatic and ecological changes in driving hominin evolution.