Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ontogenetic changes in primate manual and pedal trabecular architecture

American Museum Natural History, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Humans are unique among primates in many ways, including that we are bipedal (walk upright) and our bodies take a long time to reach adult size and shape. Our hominin ancestors are categorized as such based on evidence for bipedality, but relatively little is known about hominin bipedalism with respect to growth and development. This doctoral dissertation project will use comparative primate skeletal material to assess how hand and foot bones change during growth in response to changes in locomotor (movement) behaviors. The research will advance knowledge about how growth impacts adult bone, with application to the hominin fossil record and the potential to inform clinical research on bone and growth. The project will also train future scientists, provide K-12 science curriculum content to a diverse range of local students, and contribute 3D digital data to online databases. The researchers will use micro-computed tomography and comparative analyses of trabecular bone measurements (as a proxy for locomotion) for multiple elements in the hands and feet of five modern primates in dentally-defined age groups, in order to accomplish the following: 1) describe ontogenetic trajectories of trabecular change in a phylogenetic context as it relates to known behavioral changes in primates representing several locomotor modes; 2) investigate the unexplored relationship of phylogenetic signal and age in trabecular bone; 3) improve understanding of the evolutionary pattern and adaptive significance of primate locomotor ontogeny, including modern humans; and 4) reconstruct hominin locomotor behavior over ontogeny based on comparisons to modern taxa. The results of this project will help address longstanding debates about hominin evolution and better inform future studies of primate ontogeny, form, function, systematics, and locomotion. 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.