Doctoral Dissertation Research: Phylogenetic relationships of Mid-Late Miocene hominoids: implications for understanding great ape and human evolution

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Great apes, humans, and their ancestors have been the subject of substantial research, but there is much more to be learned about their shared evolutionary history leading up to the advent of the hominin lineage and upright walking. This project aims to more accurately determine relationships among fossil and living apes, and to use this information to better understand the evolution of characteristic ape and human locomotor behaviors, including those of our recent fossil ancestors. The project has broader impacts that include the generation of a large anatomical dataset that will be made freely accessible for future use, and the promotion of diversity in biological anthropology by the co-PI, a female graduate student and active member of several organizations aimed at engaging young girls in STEM fields. The primary objective of this study is to generate a robust phylogeny of stem and crown Hominidae to be used as a basis for testing competing phylogenetic hypotheses, and exploring questions about the polarity, geography, and evolutionary timing of the locomotor and positional behaviors characterizing great apes and humans using ancestral state reconstruction. Characters will be sampled from the skull and postcranium, with particular emphasis on the inclusion of novel quantitative and polymorphic characters from the postcranial skeleton. Parsimony and Bayesian methods will be used to infer phylogeny and to measure the relative support for competing phylogenetic hypotheses. This project represents the most comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of Mid-Late Miocene hominoids carried out to date and will provide a necessary foundation for future research in early hominin and ape systematics and paleobiology.