Doctoral Dissertation Research: Skeletal morphology of early Homo sapiens

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The timing, location, and circumstances of the origin of modern humans has long been of interest among paleoanthropologists and the public. Ongoing studies continue to refine our understanding of early modern humans, and these studies necessarily rely on sparse fossil evidence. This doctoral dissertation project will contribute to the known fossil record for a critical time and place by describing newly-recovered early modern human fossil material near the time of modern human range expansion beyond Africa. The project will support mentoring and training of undergraduate students, including female and first-generation college students. It will also support the establishment of long-standing positive connections between young researchers and research institutions, and their continued participation in research and educational activities. The results of this project will be communicated to the public via a broadcasted radio interview and other media. This project includes the original description of the skeletal anatomy of an early modern human partial skeleton, as well as additional, more fragmentary human fossil material recovered from the same sedimentary package. These fossils were recovered from a Middle Stone Age archaeological context at Halibee, Middle Awash, preliminarily dated to ~100 kya. The skeletal anatomy of these fossils will be described with reference to anatomically modern human populations, and systematic comparisons of the Halibee fossils with their closest fossil relatives will be completed, including Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and chronologically intermediate groups. Understanding how Middle Pleistocene fossils relate to one another and to later modern humans has been hindered by the sparseness of the Pleistocene postcranial fossil record, and by the variable combinations of plesiomorphic and derived traits displayed by the known fossil specimens. The chronological and geographic position of the Halibee fossils makes them critical to understanding these relationships.