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Course: American Museum of Natural History > Unit 3
Lesson 2: Human evolution: the evidence (American Museum of Natural History)- Dr. Ian Tattersall pieces together the human past
- Glossary
- Seven million years of human evolution
- Understanding our past: DNA
- What is the evidence for human evolution
- Searching for Human Ancestors in East Africa
- Expedition Rusinga—uncovering our adaptive origins
- Quiz: Human evolution
- Exploration Questions: Human evolution
- Answers to Exploration Questions: Human evolution
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Searching for Human Ancestors in East Africa
Travel to Turkana, Kenya, on a search for hominin fossils with paleoanthropologist Ashley Hammond, assistant curator in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. Discover the techniques Hammond uses to find fossils in the field, how 3D scanning lets scientists study specimens from anywhere in the world, and what studying the pelvis can tell us about the evolution of humans and our relatives. Learn more about Dr. Hammond's research: https://www.amnh.org/research/staff-directory/ashley-hammond
This video and all media incorporated herein (including text, images, and audio) are the property of the American Museum of Natural History or its licensors, all rights reserved. The Museum has made this video available for your personal, educational use. You may not use this video, or any part of it, for commercial purposes, nor may you reproduce, distribute, publish, prepare derivative works from, or publicly display it without the prior written consent of the Museum. © American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY. Created by American Museum of Natural History.
This video and all media incorporated herein (including text, images, and audio) are the property of the American Museum of Natural History or its licensors, all rights reserved. The Museum has made this video available for your personal, educational use. You may not use this video, or any part of it, for commercial purposes, nor may you reproduce, distribute, publish, prepare derivative works from, or publicly display it without the prior written consent of the Museum. © American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY. Created by American Museum of Natural History.
Video transcript
ASHLEY HAMMOND: Fieldwork sometimes is not as glamourous as
it might seem from movies. Fieldwork is often in a very remote place–in
East Africa, for instance, it is very hot and dry. But it’s a really magical environment. There’s an element of discovery everywhere
you go. You know that every time you cross that next
little ridge or go down into the next gully, you might find a fossil. My name is Dr. Ashely Hammond and I am the
Assistant Curator of Biological Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. I am a paleoanthropologist, which means that
I am a paleontologist who works on the fossil record for humans and our relatives. Everyone wants to find a hominin, a human
ancestor. So this involves fieldwork, trying to get
out to field sites that are at the very early time periods during which hominins would have
evolved. My fieldwork over the last five years or so
has really been focused in Kenya. The East African Rift Valley passes right
through Kenya, and this allows a lot of old ancient sediments to be uplifted and available
for us to find new fossils. And the region that I work in in Turkana is
especially great for this. It’s really, in my mind, the most important
place in the world for studying ape and human evolution. We have sediments that span the entire range
during which apes and humans have evolved. The best way to look for fossils at our sites
is…essentially walking across the landscape and looking for locations where fossils are
coming out of the ground. So when we find something and we recognize
that it’s a hominin, typically the first thing I do is I tell everyone to stop and
slowly back away. Maybe even, depending on the state of the
fossil, take off their shoes, and then we can work the surface more delicately. And we walk around, or crawl around, and flag
all of the different pieces of bone on the surface. And then we go through and very carefully
document and collect the fossil finds. After we leave the field, we go back to the
National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi where the fossils are deposited for future generations
to come and study. But I want to continue to work on hominins
year-round. So what we often do at the museum is laser
scan different fossils and then turn them into 3D models that we can work on here in
the United States. So right now I am demonstrating our 3D scanner. It’s scanning actually a monkey bone. And we can turn this monkey bone into a 3D
rendering, and use that as comparative data with some of our fossils. When you’re working with fossils, often
they are very fragmentary. So you have to tailor your analyses based
on what you have to work with. You have to be more creative. So I developed some really advanced shape
analysis techniques, things like fitting a sphere to a very fragmentary joint surface
to estimate joint size. And this allows us to really compare shapes
across different species or specimens in a much more advanced way than possible in the
past. I’m really focused on trying to piece together
the evolutionary history of the ape and hominin pelvis. The pelvis is really informative about the
biology of an animal. It can tell you about what species you’re
looking at. It can tell you about whether or not you’re
looking at a male or a female. Sometimes you can even tell if an individual
has given birth. And you can even get information about where
an individual is from. I still think it’s a really big question
about what the starting point for the human lineage looked like. What kind of behaviors we were using, how
we became bipedal and so forth. So the only way to really get at that question
is to get out and do more fieldwork. I’m very excited to get out with me and
my crew and see what kind of fossils we can find.