Conclusions

According to the Out-of-Africa-Hypothesis, the geographic origin of anatomically modern humans is located in Africa. But, hominin fossils discovered by archaeol­ogists do not provide sufficient evidence regarding the actual route hominins have taken on their way from Africa to Eurasia.

When modeling actors being part of the Out-of-Africa-Hypothesis as intelligent software agents, processes of deliberation regarding different environmental factors can be recreated and analyzed by researchers. Furthermore, different artificial sce­narios can be set up and dispersal processes can be simulated individually.

The approach proposed within this article is meant to be understood as a first conception of how to simulate hominin dispersal processes in order to provide a simulation platform for researchers from multiple disciplines. For this purpose five challenges in terms of scaling issues has been identified. However, we are aware that further research is required considering the formalization of hypotheses and assump­tions as well as the integration of diverse domain models into a holistic simulation system in order to implement an operative simulation platform. Nevertheless, our workgroup aims at contributing significant aspects.

Acknowledgments Parts of the concepts presented here, i.e., applying potential fields to dispersal simulation, have been developed together with Tjorben Bogon and Jorg Dallmeyer.