NSF Award
2219239
In this Mid-Career Advancement (MCA) project, the principal investigator develops new methods to reconstruct past climates and environments, thus contributing to ongoing research and debates about the links between climate, environmental change, and human population dynamics. The project develops high resolution paleoenvironmental proxies using dental shape analysis or ecometrics, which measures the number, size, and shape of teeth cusps and has been shown to reflect diet and environment in many groups of animals. Research outcomes from this project can then be integrated into research to reconstruct paleoenvironments in critical areas of hominin occupation across three time periods dating from 2 million years ago to 15,000 years ago. This project fosters creative synergies between researchers in anthropology, biological sciences, and geosciences, and develops a publicly available interactive model which will help critically address questions in human evolution with direct implications for the climate crisis. The project also advances the training and research program of the PI as well as undergraduate students. <br/><br/>The investigator partners with other paleoanthropological experts to acquire foundational skills to study the tooth shape-diet-ecology of small mammals in focal areas for studying human evolution across a wide range of climates, including: 1) micro-CT and laser 3-dimensional (3D) scanning, 2) image and tooth shape analysis; 3) Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analyses; and 4) computational statistical analyses and coding. The investigator measures dental ecometric variables (dental occlusal topology, topometry, and topography) on 3D digital scans of small mammal teeth of modern species. Using Geographic Information Systems, ecometric values are correlated with climatic and ecological parameters building a novel, quantitative and robust technique to reconstruct past environments. Dental ecometric variables measured on fossil teeth allow the investigator to produce a high-quality map of habitats and climate distributions across different prehistoric time frames. Applying spatial statistical analyses enables quantitatively testing the link between climate change and human evolution at three specific time junctures: 1. The dispersal of early Homo from Africa into Eurasia (2.5 – 0.7 million years ago); 2. The extinction of Neanderthal (160,000 – 40,000 years ago); and 3. The adaptation of modern humans to the last ice age (26,000- 15,000 years ago). <br/><br/>This project is jointly funded by Biological Anthropology (SBE) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).<br/><br/>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.
