Investigating the Importance of Bone Marrow Consumption in Human Evolution

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济学博士后研究奖学金(SPRF)计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在科罗拉多州立大学人类学和地理系迈克尔·潘特博士的赞助下，这一博士后奖学金奖项支持一位早期职业科学家，他研究了骨髓对人类祖先进化和猎杀大型动物作为食物的兴起的重要性。新技术将被应用于分析与从现代动物断骨收藏中获取的骨髓相关的骨折模式，以及几个对我们理解人类起源很重要的动物考古收藏。生存是人类经济的基础，引入大型动物作为食物资源和狩猎都代表了生存的戏剧性变化，对人类的合作、冲突和认知等社会行为产生了深远的影响，从而对我们的进化史产生了重大影响。该项目的目标是测试骨髓作为早期人类开始使用大型动物食物资源的途径的作用及其对人类捕食性模式兴起的影响。在灵长类动物中，人类捕食模式(HPP)是身体大小相等或更大的狩猎动物的独特人类行为。HPP的演变涉及两个关键创新：积极狩猎和开发大型动物食物资源(LAFR)。在人类饮食和HPP中加入LAFR可能已经为人类成为超级捕食者奠定了基础，甚至促成了我们人类属的起源。然而，这种行为模式演变的机制尚不清楚。该项目将利用3D扫描、数字表征和机器学习方面的新技术进步，与传统方法相结合，分析骨骼断裂模式，并测试最近提出的假设，即HPP来自于从大型动物中寻找骨内营养。这一假说预测，早期人类在进行其他形式的屠宰之前，是为了获取骨髓而折断骨头。这一假说将通过比较早期人类的骨骼修改签名的历时方法来检验。如果证据证实，随着时间的推移，人类对LAFR的利用发生了转变，这将支持这一假说，表明人属的崛起必须通过寻找骨内营养的透镜来解释，作为HPP的前驱。这个项目包含了大量的智力价值，不仅在考古科学中，而且在更广泛的任何领域，在研究中使用3D物体形状。首先，它将通过检验与现代人类行为集合相关的一个主要假说来推进我们对人类进化的理解。其次，它将促进对3.6 Ma(上新世晚期)、1.8 Ma和0.9 Ma(更新世)之间人与食肉动物相互作用的认识，而更早的时间段在这方面几乎没有受到关注。第三，该项目将开发使用3D模型提取数据的方法，这些方法对于机器学习应用程序是有效的，并广泛适用于许多其他考古和古生物组合。第四，这项工作扩展了数学家、计算机和数据科学家以及古人类学家之间的合作，以创造创新的技术工具，使研究人员(人类学内外)能够轻松地将他们的专业知识与可靠和可复制的数学方法结合起来，对物体进行研究。最后，该项目将创建一个广泛的开放访问数据库，其中包括研究质量的3D模型和数据集，这将促进未来的研究项目。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Michael Pante at the Department of Anthropology and Geography of Colorado State University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the importance of bone marrow to the evolution of our human ancestors and the rise of hunting large animals for food. New technology will be applied to analyze bone breakage patterns related to marrow procurement from modern collections of broken animal bones as well as several zooarchaeological collections that are important for our understanding of human origins. Subsistence underpins human economics, and both the introduction of large animals as a food resource and hunting represent dramatic shifts in subsistence that had profound implications for human social behavior such as cooperation, conflict, and cognition, and thus, major impacts on our evolutionary history.The goal of this project is to test the role of bone marrow as the avenue by which early humans began using large animal food resources and its influence on the rise of the Human Predatory Pattern. Among primates, the Human Predatory Pattern (HPP) is the uniquely human behavior of hunting animals that are of equal or larger body size. Evolution of the HPP involves two key innovations: active hunting and exploitation of large animal food resources (LAFRs). The inclusion of LAFRs in the human diet and the HPP may have set the stage for humans to become super-predators, and even precipitated the origin of our genus, Homo. Yet, the mechanism through which this behavioral pattern evolved is unclear. This project will leverage new technological advances in 3D scanning, digital characterization, and machine learning, combined with traditional methods, to analyze bone breakage patterns and test the recently proposed hypothesis that the HPP derived from scavenging large animals for in-bone nutrients. This hypothesis predicts that early humans were breaking bones for marrow prior to other forms of butchery. This hypothesis will be tested by taking a diachronic approach that compares signatures of bone modifications made by early humans. Should the evidence confirm a transition in human exploitation of LAFRs through time, this would support the hypothesis, indicating that the rise of the genus Homo must be interpreted through the lens of scavenging for in-bone nutrients as the precursor to the HPP. This project comprises substantial intellectual merit, both within archaeological sciences but also more broadly in any field where 3D object shape is used in research. First, it will advance our understanding of human evolution by testing a major hypothesis associated with the assembly of modern human behaviors. Second, it will advance knowledge of human-carnivore interactions between 3.6 Ma (Late Pliocene), 1.8 Ma and 0.9 Ma (Pleistocene), the earlier time period having received little attention in this regard. Third, this project will develop methods of data extraction using 3D models that are effective for machine learning applications and broadly applicable to many other archaeological and paleontological assemblages. Fourth, this work extends collaborations among mathematicians, computer and data scientists, and paleoanthropologists to create innovative technological tools to enable researchers (within and beyond anthropology) to easily integrate their expertise with reliable and replicable mathematical approaches to research on objects. Finally, this project will create an extensive open-access database of research-quality 3D models and datasets that will facilitate future research projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.