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

Dunn Tyler E, Champaign IL

Investigators

Abstract

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.