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

类人猿、人类及其祖先一直是实质性研究的对象，但在原始人谱系和直立行走出现之前，关于它们共同的进化史，还有更多的东西需要了解。该项目旨在更准确地确定化石和活猿之间的关系，并利用这些信息更好地了解特征猿和人类运动行为的进化，包括我们最近的化石祖先的行为。该项目产生了更广泛的影响，包括生成一个供今后免费使用的大型解剖学数据集，以及促进生物人类学多样性的共同PI，她是一名女研究生，也是旨在吸引年轻女孩参与STEM领域的几个组织的活跃成员。这项研究的主要目标是建立一个健壮的茎和冠人科系统发育图，作为检验相互竞争的系统发育假说的基础，并利用祖先状态重建来探索关于运动和位置行为的极性、地理和进化时机的问题，这些问题是大猩猩和人类的特征。人物将从头骨和后颅骨中抽样，特别强调从后颅骨中包括新的数量和多态特征。简约和贝叶斯方法将被用来推断系统发育和衡量相互竞争的系统发生假说的相对支持率。该项目是迄今为止对中新世中晚期人类进行的最全面的系统发育分析，将为未来早期人和类人猿系统学和古生物学的研究提供必要的基础。

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.