Human variation in the Holocene
The aim of my morphological and metrical examination of human skeletal material research is to examine how the skeleton has changed over a known time period in response to environmental adaptation and genetic admixture. This research is focused on Iron and Bronze Age human skeletal remains from southern Africa (2000 BP, South Africa and Zambia), North Africa (3500-3000 BP, northern Sudan) and northern China (3000-1600 BP, near Beijing). Using statistics I compare measurements obtained from the archaeological samples with those from a related contemporary population. My initial results show that until very recently there was a greater amount of skeletal variation within these populations than previously thought. In addition to a better understanding on the amount of variation within the Holocene, this research can be used for cross regional and cultural (Iron vs Bronze Age) comparisons. The data was collected while she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand (2009) and at Purdue University (2010-2011) and is now being prepared for publication.
As this is my current line of research I am actively working on producing results here so stay tuned for updates
