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

这个项目的目的是在更广泛的全球理解人类进化、气候变化和骨骼粗壮之间的相互作用的范围内，对中国的骨骼标本进行颅后变化的背景分析。在东亚，尤其是在中国身上，对人类的后脑症研究不足。欧洲和非洲的化石标本表明，在气候变化时期，由于生存和景观用途的必要变化，骨骼变得更加坚固。来自亚洲的少数几个被研究的标本并没有一致地证明这种粗壮程度的增加。然而，这些分析大多缺乏中国的标本。对中国标本的研究将提高目前对形态与环境相互作用的理解。通过研究中国标本中的颅后骨骼，将通过检验亚洲其他古人类学记录所做出的假设，在更广泛的范围内促进对气候变化和骨骼粗壮之间相互作用的理解。这项研究将与长春吉林大学边疆考古研究中心的张全超教授合作，中国。这一合作提供了对跨越中国的未被研究的骨骼收藏的访问。这个项目评估了用来衡量骨骼健壮程度的指标。将对中国地区不同考古组合的标本进行三维形状分析，这些标本在时间上都起源于全新世早期。这项研究将检验这一假说，即随着全球气候变得更加寒冷和干燥，中国北部的颅后骨骼变化将遵循一种更明显的粗壮变化的轨迹。这个项目将使用后颅骨的粗壮程度作为代理，以了解几个骨骼集合中解剖学、气候变化和环境之间的相互作用。该项目的发现有能力向全球提供与气候、活动和生存相关的人类进化模式。该奖项由东亚和太平洋暑期学院项目资助一名美国研究生进行暑期研究，由美国国家科学基金会和中国科技部联合资助。

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.