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The 'Taung Child' was found in 1924 at the Buxton limestone quarry, Northwestern Province, South Africa. The 'Taung Child' was the first early hominid found in Africa and became the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus. Mining activities continued at the quarry and the geological context of the specimen was lost, hampering attempts to date the hominid and understand its ecological context. Because of this, current estimates for the age of the 'Taung Child' range from 3 million to 1 million years old. Such chronological uncertainty greatly hampers our understanding of early hominid evolution in Africa. We propose to take samples of calcite crystals attached to the endocast of the 'Taung Child' and other associated fossils for uranium-lead dating using state-of-the-art facilities at the NERC Isotope Geosciences Laboratory. Pilot evidence demonstrates the suitability of such calcite crystals for high-precision age determination, and permission to sample the calcites has been granted by the Hominid Access Committee. The proposed radiometric dates for the 'Taung Child' are likely to alter the current age-range for Australopithicus africanus, perhaps changing our understanding of ancestor-decendant relationships among early hominin species. The methods undertaken in this study can be applied to other early hominin specimens from the 'Cradle of Humankind' World Heritage Site, South Africa, thereby improving the chronology of human evolution in Africa, and the methods will be refined to maximize the scientific information obtained from the minimum use of valuable fossil material, thereby improving generic methods of analysis of rare and invaluable museum collections.

Globally, urban areas are viewed with great optimism and suspicion, as potential engines for development and destabilising vortexes of violence and degeneration. Both visions have traction in South Africa. Urban living has offered opportunities for some to better their economic standing, strengthen capabilities and expand freedoms. However, given the pace of urbanisation and problematic urban governance, urban areas remain spaces of inequality, degradation, crisis and conflict. This is particularly true for those on the margins, whose lives are profoundly shaped by the need to negotiate security and justice. The welfare of urban Others and their long-term prospects for socioeconomic development are intimately bound up in the outcomes of these negotiations, as recent waves of xenophobic violence demonstrate. Positive urban transformation requires understanding how multiple marginalities interact in urban areas. At present, this intersection has been neglected. This South Africa-UK Partnership forges an international academic network to build capacities to rigorously and innovatively address this issue. Our ambitious agenda focuses primarily on (internal and external) migrants and lesbian-gay-bi-trans-queer (LGBTQ) communities. Although the freedom to embrace diversity and difference is at the heart of a democratic city, these urban Others face the stresses of everyday prejudice and spectre of severe violence, like xenophobic riots or acts of 'corrective rape'. Security threats facing migrants and LGBTQ people are comparable, but the logics animating them are distinct, making them conducive to comparison. Our Partnership will strengthen capacities in South Africa to explore strategies individuals use to negotiate these varied marginalities, embedded in wider economic, social and political systems. It will also particularly build skills to explore roles that digital technologies play in this process, shaping flows of power, resources, and information in urban areas; and how policymakers and civil society groups are responding to complex challenges of urban wellbeing. The Partnership develops skills, knowledge, and networks, supporting cutting edge research that actively engages communities, civil society groups and government agencies. We will identify research synergies; provide methods training in Big Data, Social Network Analysis, Remote Event Mapping, and Visual Methods to push the boundaries of urban research; fund 'urban lab' pilot projects to encourage innovative methods and questions; organise visiting fellowships to provide time and space for meaningful collaboration; and provide impact training to ensure that our timely interdisciplinary research agenda has effective and wide-reaching influence. ODA statement: The primary purpose of this project is to promote the welfare and development of the partner country. It will do this in three primary ways. First, the topic of the collaborative research is crucially important for South Africa, where rapid urbanisation, entrenched inequities and uneven development risk positive urban transformation, especially in relation to vulnerable groups such as migrants or LGBTQ communities. Secondly, we will address these key concerns through drawing on the comparative and complementary strengths of our two partners, Wits University's strengths in detailed local historical, ethnographic and qualitative research and generating impact in South African policy networks and Edinburgh's strength in methods, especially interdisciplinary approaches. Thirdly, the project will draw on Edinburgh's expertise in quantitative methods and data science, and the project is designed to build the research capacity of Wits University researchers in new approaches and generate future collaborative research.

In Southern Africa, the predicted increase in aridity will increase uncertainty of resource availability in space and time (surface water and forage), as well as decrease primary production. The land use mosaic should evolve towards more pastoralism and the role of protected areas could be crucial as one of the land-use options. Understanding the responses of the key component of these savanna systems to the increasing variability of rainfall in time and space is of primary importance to anticipate biome shifts, and the loss of identity of the biodiversity based savanna socio-ecological systems. The project will thus address the management of protected areas and their adequacy to sustainably meet their original biodiversity conservation objectives in the face of climate change as well as the role of protected areas as ecosystem services providers for their broader socio-ecological system. Studying the effects of climate change on biotic interactions is necessary to understand the response of ecosystem functions and their associated services. Our general objective here is to predict possible trajectories of a biodiversity-based socio-ecological system (protected area and its periphery) through understanding the functional relationships between the key biotic drivers of semi-arid African savannas (plants, large herbivores and humans) in response to variability and uncertainty in rainfall and surface water. Although the decrease in resource and increase in uncertainty may lead to increase in conflict locally, we hypothesise that the new constraints imposed on the various production systems may create the conditions for promoting a new integrated land-use system based on sustainable wildlife utilisation and biodiversity valuation. The study will be carried out within the Hwange LTER (Zone Atelier Hwange), thus benefiting from existing long-term data, field experiment facilities, as well as strong collaborations between researchers, managers and the rural communities. The consortium gathered for this project is pluri-disciplinary and international, has common past research experience and a long working experience in African savanna. These attributes thus offer a good feasibility and a high international visibility for this project.