EAPSI: The Effects of Environment on the Evolution of Human Skeletal Variation in China

本项目旨在从人类进化、气候变化和骨骼健壮性之间的相互作用的更广泛的全球理解出发，对中国骨骼标本的颅后变异进行背景分析。在东亚，特别是在中国，对人类颅骨后的研究不足。欧洲和非洲的化石标本表明，在气候变化时期，由于生存和景观利用的必要变化，骨骼变得更加坚固。来自亚洲的少数被研究的标本并没有一致地显示出这种健壮性的增加。然而，这些分析大多缺乏来自中国的标本。对来自中国的标本的检查将提高目前对形态与环境相互作用的理解。研究来自中国的标本的颅后骨骼将通过检验亚洲其他古人类记录的假设，在更大范围内促进对气候变化与骨骼健壮性之间相互作用的理解。这项研究将与中国长春吉林大学边疆考古研究中心的张全超教授合作。这次合作提供了一个未被充分研究的横跨中国的骨骼收藏。该项目评估用于测量骨骼健壮性的指标。三维形状分析将对来自中国各地不同考古组合的标本进行分析，这些标本在时间上都来自全新世早期。这项研究将验证这样一个假设，即随着全球气候变得更冷、更干燥，中国北方地区的颅骨后骨骼变异将遵循一个更明显的健壮性趋势。该项目将使用颅骨后骨骼健壮性作为代理来了解几个骨骼收藏中解剖学，气候变化和环境之间的相互作用。该项目的发现有能力为全球人类进化模式提供信息，这些模式与气候、活动和生存有关。该奖项隶属于东亚和太平洋暑期研究所项目，由美国国家科学基金会和中国科技部共同资助，支持美国研究生的暑期研究。

This project aims to contextualize postcranial variation in skeletal specimens from China within the broader global understanding of the interaction between human evolution, climate change, and skeletal robusticity. Human postcrania are understudied in East Asia, and specifically in China. European and African fossil specimens indicate that during times of climatic change the skeleton becomes more robust due to necessary changes in subsistence and landscape use. The few studied specimens from Asia do not consistently demonstrate this increase in robusticity. However, most of these analyses lack specimens from China. The examination of specimens from China will improve the current understanding of the interaction between morphology and environment. Studying the postcranial skeleton in specimens from China will promote understanding of the interaction between climate change and skeletal robusticity on a broader scale by testing assumptions made from the rest of the paleoanthropological record in Asia. This research will be in collaboration with Professor Quanchao Zhang from the Research Center for Frontier Archaeology at Jilin University in Changchun, China. This collaboration provides access to an understudied skeletal collection that spans China. This project assesses metrics used to measure skeletal robusticity. 3-Dimensional shape analysis will be performed on specimens from different archaeological assemblages across China, all of which originate temporally from early Holocene. This research will test the hypothesis that postcranial skeletal variation in Northern China will follow a trajectory that tends toward more marked robusticity as global climate became colder and drier. This project will use postcranial skeletal robusticity as a proxy to understand the interaction between anatomy, climate change, and environment in several skeletal collections. The findings of this project have the ability to inform global patterns of human evolution relative to climate, activity, and subsistence. This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.